Niklas Frank, son of the Nazi criminal Hans Frank: My family and their executioner

Niklas Frank, 82 years old, author and journalist, lives with a monstrous legacy: he is the son of Hans Michael Frank, the former National Socialist Governor General of Poland.

This ice-cold lawyer helped organize the genocide in the east and was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.

He was called the "butcher of Poland" - and his wife Brigitte "Queen of Poland" because the couple resided splendidly at the Krakow Wawel Castle, ancestral seat of the Polish kings, and plundered Poles and Jews with shameless greed.

Enlarge image

Niklas Frank

Photo: Mario Chavarria

How do you deal with it, how can you live with the fact that your own father is one of the most terrible Nazi criminals?

Niklas Frank, only six years old at the end of World War II, decided to take a head-on approach.

His first book was published as early as 1987: »The Father.

A settlement".

He dealt with all the severity of Hans Frank and his horrific crimes, and in other books with the guilt of his family and the Germans as a whole - sarcastically, bitterly, often to the limits of what is bearable.

Is that how you can talk about your father?

He has to, says Niklas Frank.

"Anger is better than shame": This is how he summed up what drives him in a SPIEGEL interview in 2021.

Now he has published a new book: "My Family and Their Executioners" contains the correspondence between the imprisoned mass murderer and his family during the Nuremberg trials of the main war criminals up to Hans Frank's execution on the gallows in October 1946.

But he is not only going to court hard with his family, also with his own furor: Niklas Frank reviewed himself for SPIEGEL - an ironic reckoning of the son with the son.

He writes about himself: “Otherwise he always makes noises that he is against the death penalty.

But he would grant his father her.

What a freaky brain! "

Niklas Frank has also included letters from his mother and brother Norman in the collection - depressing evidence of delusion and mendacity. Frank comments on them in his own way: angry and extremely sharp-tongued. Here he writes about the correspondence between his family and the imprisoned father, an excerpt from his new book:

“My cell is relatively large and light.

Bavarian homeland air comes down from the skylight window that I keep half open day and night.

When I got my first breakfast (malt coffee) yesterday through the peephole, I was downright happy.

In the air of our homeland, there was finally once again the black bread of our country with the popular sausage that matched our taste.

I kissed this first piece of bread yesterday with deep emotion as my first greeting from home. "

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Frank, Niklas

My family and their executioner: The Butcher of Poland, his Nuremberg Trial and the trauma of displacement

Published by Dietz, JH

Number of pages: 288

Published by Dietz, JH

Number of pages: 288

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So there he sits in cell 15: Hans Frank, 46, doctor of law, until the end of the war, Reich Minister who remained in the empty office without a portfolio, and in the bloody office of the Governor General of Poland.

He has lost weight.

His left hand is shaking as a result of his two suicide attempts after his arrest in May 1945.

The chewing lover of Bavarian bread now knows that what he mockingly prophesied to his childhood friend two years earlier can become reality: "You will be a professor and I'll be hanged."

Our father has to fight for his head.

Little remains of palaces, castles, villas and armored Mercedes bodies, paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine", the two Rembrandts, Raphael's "Portrait of an Unknown Youth", his meticulously compiled Bavarica library:

“All my belongings are going to go under in a little box.

Being able to wash and dry my shirt jackets, handkerchiefs, socks and pants over and over again is a real question. "

It was fate, not him

He is watched day and night by an American guard through the hatch.

All to himself he is only in his toilet, the same to the right of the entrance.

He has to sleep on his back with his hands above the blanket.

The light is only dimmed at night, never switched off completely.

He is allowed an hour's walk in the prison yard once a day, a bath once a week, and a cold shower every morning.

Hans Frank continues:

»Now in Nuremberg we are a much smaller group under difficult external living conditions.

The lifestyle is that of a prison with the variations given by the special nature of the inmates and their military custodians. "

Bitterness sounds through the text: How can one treat high-ranking personalities of an empire like that.

Irony follows:

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Faces of Evil: Adolf Hitler and Hans Frank

Photo: Niklas Frank private archive

“My iron bed frame has a mattress, and 5 blankets were carefully placed on it for me.

A table and a chair complete the furnishings, which if I, as the Bavarian Minister of Justice, to whom all prisons in the country were subordinate in 1933-38, I could have guessed that it would one day serve me, I would have made it much more comfortable. "

He does not remember the fact that he only became Bavarian Minister of Justice through the undemocratic takeover of government by his Nazis on March 10, 1933.

Not even that, instead of revamping the cells, one of his first acts was to forbid Jewish lawyers from appearing in court.

“I've been in captivity for over three months.

No longer master of my life, but a matter for the planning of others.

Fate will do it that way. "

This is where the word

destiny

appears for the first time

.

It will accompany him and his wife Brigitte through the whole process: It was fate alone that brought him to prison and his family to poverty and contempt.

Both cannot help it.

Not he, although as Hitler's deputy he was politically responsible for every murder in the Generalgouvernement;

she did not, although she was relentlessly relishing a life of luxury.

In the nearly 15 months since his arrest, the couple has stocked up on lying letters as has his five children.

Everything stolen in Poland

The usual reverence for the top Nazi family was suddenly no longer in. So the neighboring farmer below our Schoberhof on Schliersee let her new democratic anger on me, six-year-old, dressed me down as a lying, tiny, big-headed man who was now nothing at all.

That hurt.

As a revenge, I led an American soldier to their egg hiding place in the hay.

For my betrayal he gave me a chocolate that we children coveted.

My sister Gitti had a ten-year-old best friend named Inge, whom she often went to play with.

A neighbor came up and said to her friend's father: "But that's not the right way for your daughter to get along!" He would have been totally jealous by the end of the war.

My eight-year-old brother was not spared in the children's home either, as mother writes to Hans in the Nuremberg cell:

“Michel is always hungry, and when he wrote me a letter and complained about it, the relevant nurse tore him up and said: Oh, you're used to something better?

I think so after your father stole everything in Poland! "

Our stolen property from Poland had again been stolen from us, so that at the end of 1945 my mother wrote Hans in the cell:

“I didn't know what to do today and had sent the children begging for bread and meat, wrote a letter to go with it, and very happy Gitti came with some blood and liver sausage and a pound of minced meat.

She even brought bones and dog food, and Michel brought 1 three-pound bread, 1 pound flour and onions.

It was a great pleasure for all of us. "

My name is missing.

Rightly.

I brought nothing home.

My totally wacky way of holding up Mutti's little notes on front doors and on farms and stuttering something about "hunger" was my most terrible childhood experience.

This cowardly ducking away

My 18 year old brother Norman complained in the cell:

“It's gotten pretty lonely around me.

Most of my "friends" have said goodbye.

Everyone had a different reason. "

This cowardly ducking away from his friends!

Norman saw in our father the "most precious" of his life.

So he writes to him accordingly:

»We now follow the reports on the process flow on a daily basis.

I can't tell you how happy I was about your attitude.

Let me tell you how proud I am of my father! "

What is Norman proud of?

Is it because our father confessed to the judges as "not guilty" at the beginning of the trial?

On November 29, 1945, the defendants see the film about a concentration camp.

Gustave M. Gilbert, US prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Trial, observes: »Frank mumbles› Horrible! ‹« And: »Frank is biting your nails ...« If it wasn't a disgusting self-presentation.

"A wonderful time, my dear Hansimuckerl!"

At Easter 1946, his mother, our grandmother, pestered him about the trial:

»The earth has probably never experienced so much hatred and human devaluation, where will it lead?

I also remember the past time, how you looked forward to Easter.

True, that was a wonderful time, my dear Hansimuckerl! "

Her mass murderous Hansimuckerl writes to his wife that it was someone else:

“The trial is a horrible revelation for me, how much Adolf Hitler lied to and betrayed us, our people and the whole world.

It is terrible what an incredible misery has come over the world and our poor people in this way. "

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"We didn't deserve that": Letter from Hans to Brigitte Frank (October 22, 1945)

Photo: Niklas Frank private archive

My mother, on the other hand, briefly reveals the truth in her letter to Hans on January 17, 1946

:

“A trip like this to Munich is very exhausting today.

The day before yesterday I left the house ¼ to 6, very dark, only the deep snow shone a little, and in the distance the light of the truck, which one then has to climb up with sackcloth and baggage.

As close as the kippers you stand in the dark, no one seeing the other, on one leg and have to be happy when there is nothing strange on the other, all in a stooped position, otherwise you will hit the roof.

Oh, Hans, these repetitions: just as the Poles were promoted. "

Father must have cleared his throat angrily: I only wanted the best for the Poles!

Even during transport!

“My dear dad!

We are looking forward to the time of your defense.

We know that you want to and will acquit the German people of the guilt that has been assigned to them, if possible.

You don't need any words of comfort from your son.

You are a soldier and we are a soldier family! "

I find it unabashed that Norman puts me, his youngest sibling, with the soldiers too.

What I grant him: At that time he did not know anything about the crimes that our German Wehrmacht had committed everywhere between 1939 and 1945.

Accordingly, father wrote back to him like a soldier:

"I'm doing well.

We defend the last bunker of our ancient heroic empire! "

No pity at Hansimuckerl

On April 15, 1946, Rudolf Höß performed in room 600.

The statements made by the Auschwitz commandant are so terrible that it must have been difficult for my father, too.

Nothing there!

Psychologist Gilbert notes: “It was overheard in a conversation with the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, former Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and later also sentenced to death in Nuremberg, using the typical defense evidence of the Nazis: 'What about them 30,000 people who were killed in the bombing of Hamburg within a few hours?

Most of them were women and children.

And what about the 80,000 deaths from the atomic bombs in Japan? ‹«

No pity at Hansimuckerl!

Instead, the popular body count.

What he never discusses with the family in a letter, he goes over again

with Gilbert on June 17, 1946:

"My God!

How could such a thing happen?

Downplaying murder to mass production!

Gold teeth and rings to the Reichsbank;

Hair packed for mattresses!

Almighty God! "

If he had at least discussed these details of the Shoah with Brigitte, Sigrid and Norman!

When describing his cell, he could have added: Oh, by the way, as far as my bed is concerned: Did you know that we used the hair of murdered Jews to make mattresses?

Isn't that terrible?

And I am complicit ...

Even his horror shown to Gilbert does not last long.

Just one day later - the psychologist overheard - Rosenberg and Frank agreed that “many of those who would have been sent to the concentration camps deserved it because they had defiled the national symbols - such as this' pig Carl v .

Ossietzky ‹«.

Frank's defense attorney Dr.

Seidl had visited mother well before the end of the trial and said to her: “Ms. Frank, the evidence is overwhelming.

You must expect the death sentence. "

The farewell letter

He was right.

A witness observed on October 1, 1946: “Frank was led into the courtroom through the small sliding door.

His eyes looked restless, uncertain and tearful, his mouth misshapen, his lips swollen.

He looked up at the ceiling when he heard the words: 'Condemned to death by hanging'. "

As a result, Norman moves even closer to our father ideologically, writes as the total suppressor and canon of our father:

»My dear dad,

although you have been imprisoned for 18 months, exposed to the constant beatings of the prosecution, spat upon and insulted by your own people, abandoned by friends and enemies, you speak to me clearly and in faith.

You have lived through every side of life with passion, have fought fights that many adventurers would like to envy you for, and perhaps not least you were privileged to be a leader in the epoch of Adolf Hitler. "

Mother,

too,

does not want

to

admit

anything

in one of her last letters to her

dearly beloved

Hans:

"Democracy!

- Everyone should supposedly be able to express their opinion!

That's how I looked at democracy.

We were all victims of a small criminal clique.

First and foremost, you always stood with one leg in the concentration camp, feared being shot in the neck.

And how miserably we were all deceived!

Here it is judged, merciless and merciless. "

Father shows his lack of insight in the farewell letter to Brigitte dated October 15, 1946, the evening before his nightly execution:

“No one will be able to prevent in the long run that full justice will also be bestowed on me later on.

The truth will prevail!

The convicted and killed will become the most effective accusers imaginable.

My 'guilt' is a purely political matter - not a legal one.

If people were wise, then they would have to have thought about the blissful calm of my death: No criminal dies like this! "

The contents of his suicide note still make me angry.