Hans Frank

Frank was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on 23rd May, 1900. He

joined the German army in 1917. He served in the Freikorps
and joined the German Worker's Party (which soon evolved
into NSDAP), in 1919, being one of the party's earliest
members took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. He went on to
study law, passing the final state examination in 1926, and
rose to become the personal legal advisor to Hitler. When
Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 he appointed Frank as
Minister of Justice in Bavaria. While in this post he
complained about the illegal killings that was taking place in
the concentration camp at Dachau. During the Night of the
Long Knives Frank raised objections to the execution of the
proposed execution without trial of 110 members of the SA.
As a result of his intervention only 20 men were shot. After
this Frank lost his influence in the NSDAP hierarchy.
Strongly influenced by the charisma of Hitler, he returned to the Party in 1928
whereupon he formed the "National Socialist Jurist Association" with himself as
leader. In 1929 Hitler appointed him director of the headquarters legal
department of the Nazi Party. He won an election to the Reichstag as a National
Socialist representative in 1930 and shared his experience with Friedrich Krger
who entered the Reichstag in 1932.
But it was for crimes committed in the General Government that Frank was to
pay with his life. Frank oversaw the creation of the ghettoes and the removal of
Jews to these ghettoes. He initiated the arrest of the Polish upper class and Polish
intellectuals regardless of their religion as he saw them as a potential threat to
his authority in the General Government. He used non-Jewish Poles for forced
labour. Four of the six extermination camps used during the Holocaust were built
in the Greater Government. At the Nuremburg Trials, Frank claimed not to have
known about these camps until 1944 but had said in public: I must ask you to
rid yourself of pity. We must annihilate the Jews.
However, he found himself involved in a power struggle with the head of General
Government police, Friedrich Krger, as to who had the final say in the General
Government. As Governor General, Frank clearly believed that he had. However,
he no longer had the immediate support of Hitler who had been angered by
some of the speeches that Frank had made.
Death
Frank was captured by American troops on May 3, 1945, at Tegernsee near
Berchtesgaden. Upon his capture, he attempted suicide in which he tried to cut
his own throat. After the attempt failed he tried suicide again on 5 May, when he
lacerated his left arm. However, this failed too.

After his arrest he was selected as one of the defendants in the Trial of the Major
War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from 20
November 1945 to 1 October 1946. During the trial he renewed his childhood
practice of Catholicism and, under the pressure of being on trial for his life,
claimed to have a series of religious experiences. Frank voluntarily surrendered
over forty volumes of his personal diaries to the Allies, which were then used
against him as evidence of his guilt. Frank confessed to some of the charges put
against him and viewed his own execution as a form of atonement for his sins.
On the witness stand he uttered:
"A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will still not have
been erased."
However, during the trial, he vacillated wildly between penitence for his crimes
and blaming the Allies, especially the Soviets, for an equal share of wartime
atrocities. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and
on October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging.