Hans Frank

Personal

Passions

Vocation

Notable

Family

German head of the Nazi Law Department and legal counsel to Hitler. He joined the Nazi Party in 1927 fresh from law school, became a member of the Nazi Law Department and eventually worked his way to the top. Bright and devoted to art and music, he was the son of a barrister convicted of corruption. Becoming a storm trooper in September of 1923, he passed the bar in 1926. He achieved the position of staff legal counsel to Hitler and gained his offices, but never became one of the inner circle. His journal, kept by the office staff (42 volumes in all) showed a man who, beneath his outer veneer of culture and charm, was icy, efficient and bloodthirsty. Becoming Governor-General of Poland on 20 December 1937, he squeezed food and supplies, forced labor and liquidated Polish intellectuals. By 10 March 1942, 360,000 Jews had been sent to the camps and gassed. He had wiped out the Warsaw ghetto of 400,000 Jews. Gradually, his political influence began to decline, and he became vacillating and insecure. He attempted suicide in May 1945, by cutting his throat and wrists. Unsuccessful, he was tried at Nuremberg, and on 16 October 1946 he was the fifth to be hanged. He was 46. While awaiting execution, he wrote his memoirs, Im Angesicht des Galgens (In the face of the gallows). In the capacity as his attorney, Frank was privy to personal details of Hitler's life. Frank made the sensational claim that Hitler had commissioned him to investigate Hitler's family in 1930 after a "blackmail letter" had been received from Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler, who allegedly threatened to reveal embarrassing facts about his uncle's Jewish ancestry. In 1987, his youngest child Niklas Frank wrote a book about his father, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung ("The Father: A Settling of Accounts"), which was published in English in 1991 as In the Shadow of the Reich. The book, which was serialized in the magazine Stern, caused controversy in Germany because of the scathing way in which the younger Frank depicted his father: Niklas referred to him as "a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic" and questioned his remorse before his execution. Link to Wikipedia biography