Frank, Hans Michael “Hangman of Czech nation”.

       Hitler’s paternal grandmother, (see Hitler parents) had been working as a cook in the household of a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger before she gave birth to Hitler’s father, Alois, out of wedlock. Frank claimed that he had obtained from a relative of Hitler’s by marriage a collection of letters between Maria Schicklgruber and a member of the Frankenberger family that discussed a stipend for her after she left the employ of the family. According to Frank, Hitler told him that the letters did not prove that the Frankenberger son was his grandfather but rather his grandmother had merely extorted money from Frankenberger by threatening to claim his paternity of her illegitimate child. Frank accepted this explanation, but added that it was still just possible that Hitler had some Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, he thought it unlikely because, “…from his entire demeanor, the fact that Adolf Hitler had no Jewish blood coursing through his veins seems so clearly evident that nothing more need be said on this.” As the Nazis rose to power, Frank served as the party’s lawyer, representing it in over 2,400 cases, and spending over $10,000. This sometimes brought him into conflict with other lawyers, and one, a former teacher of Frank’s appealed to him: “I beg you to leave these people alone! No good will come of it! Political movements that begin in the criminal courts will end in the criminal courts!” Frank was elected to the Reichstag in 1930, and in 1933 he was made Minister of Justice for Bavaria.

From 1933, he was also the head of the National Socialist Jurists Association and President of the Academy of German Law. From 1934, Frank was Reich Minister Without Portfolio. In September 1939 Frank was assigned as Chief of Administration to Generafeldmarschall der Panzertruppe, Kommandeur Battle of the Bulge, Gerd von Rundstedt

in the German military administration in occupied Poland. From 26-10-1939, following the end of the invasion of Poland, Frank was assigned Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories, controlling the General Government, the area of Poland.

  He was also granted the SS rank of Obergruppenführer. On 27-09-1941, Reinhard Heydrich  was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The main architects of the Holocaust, was hated by many, as well as his reputation for terrorizing local citizens led to him being chosen over Karl Hermann Frank

 as an assassination target. Karl Hermann Frank, a prominent Sudeten German Nazi official in Czechoslovakia prior to and during World War II and an SS-Obergruppenführer. He was executed by hanging on 22–05-1946 in the courtyard of the Pankrac prison in Prague, before 5,000 onlookers. He was buried in an anonymous pit at Prague’s Ďáblice cemetery. The operation was also meant to prove to the Nazis that they were not untouchable.  Heydrich was attacked in Prague on 27-05-1942 by a group of Slovak soldiers. Two of them Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in an operation code named Operation Anthropoid. They trew a hand grenade in his passing by staff car, coming from his home and Heydrich died from his injuries a week later, age 38, on 04-06-1942. Kubiš and his group were found on 18 June in the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodious on Resslova Street in Prague. In a bloody battle that lasted for two hours, Kubiš was wounded and died shortly after arrival at the hospital.   The other parachutists committed suicide to avoid capture after an additional four-hour battle with the SS on 18-06-1942 and betrayed by the team member Carl Curda , His reward was 500,000 Reichsmarks and a new identity, “Karl Jerhot”. He married a German woman and was the rest of the war a spy for the Gestapo. After the war, Sergeant Major Curda was caught by the restored pre-communist Czech Government, and was tried and convicted for high treason. He was executed in Pankrac Prison on 29-04-1947, age 35. His betrayed “friends” in the crib were Sergeant Jan Hruby, age 27, Lieutenant Adolf Opalka, age 27, Sergeant Jerslaw Svarc, age 28 and Sergeant Josef Valcik, age 27. The outside of the crib of the Orthodox Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius  in Prague.

       

Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the towns of Lidice and Ležáky and Ležáky. Lidice was razed to the ground; all adult males were executed, and all but a handful of its women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps. There was also an assassination attempt on Hans Frank, himself by Polish Secret State on 29/30 January 1944, the night preceding the 11^th anniversary of the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in Szarów near Krakow failed. A special train with Frank traveling to Lviv was derailed after an explosive device went off but no one was killed. The failed assassination attempt took place here on 29-01-1944 on the trespassing train in which the Governor-General traveled.

The General Government  was the location of four of the six extermination camps. Frank later claimed that the extermination of Jews was entirely controlled by Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler

and the SS and that he, Frank, was unaware of the extermination camps in the GG until early in 1944. During his testimony at Nuremberg, Frank claimed he submitted resignation requests to Hitler on 14 occasions, but Hitler would not allow him to resign. Frank fled Germany in January 1945, in advance of the Soviet Army.  Hans Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was also a good player, and he even received the Ukrainian chess grand master Efim Bogoljubow  at the Wawel castle. Frank was captured by American troops on 03-05-1945, at Tegernsee (see Hans Albers) (see Reinhard Gehlen) in southern Bavaria. Upon his capture, he tried to cut his own throat; two days later, he lacerated his left arm while attempting to slit his wrists in a second unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Frank was indicted for war crimes and tried before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from 20-11-1945 to 01-10- 1946. The former Governor-General of Poland was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity on 01-10-1946, and was sentenced to death by hanging. While awaiting execution, he wrote his memoirs. The sentence was carried out on 16 October by Master Sergeant John Chris Woods 

.  Hans Frank was next in the parade of death. He was the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with a smile on his countenance

      and, although nervous and swallowing frequently, this man, who was converted to Roman Catholicism after his arrest, gave the appearance of being relieved at the prospect of atoning for his evil deeds.  Frank here with Goebbels and Albert Speer were allegedly the only defendants to show remorse for their war crimes. “My conscience does not allow me simply to throw the responsibility simply on minor people… A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.” He answered to his name quietly and when asked for any last statement, he replied “I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.” Frank married 29-year-old secretary Brigitte Herbst (1895-1959) from Forst, Lausitz in Munich (1925). The newlyweds honeymooned in Venetia. They had five children: Sigrid (1927- ), Norman (1928- ), Brigitte (1935- ), Michael (1937- ), Niklas (1939- ). Brigitte appears to have been a rather domineering wife, not the properly submissive NAZI Frau. After Frank’s appointment as Govenor General, she took to calling herself “Königin von Polen”, “Queen of Poland”. While they had several children, their marriage was not a happy one. Finally Frank asked for a divorce, in 1942. Brigitte pleaded with him not to divorce her. She is reported to have said, “I’d rather be widowed than divorced from a Reichsminister!”

1e photo, Niklas Frank as a child with his father Hans Frank and mother Brigitte in Krakow in 1942.

   His son Niklas Frank,

    born 09-03-1939 in Munich, here on his father’s place in Nuremberg, wrote a book about his father which resulted in controversy in Germany because of the scathing way in which the younger Frank depicted his father, referring to him as “a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic” and questioning his remorse before his execution. The webmaster has this book and Niklas really hated his father.

In his last words Frank made the following statement:

At the beginning of our journey, we had no idea that turning away from God could have such pernicious, deadly consequences and that we must be ensnared deeper and deeper in our guilt (…) We call upon the German people, whose rulers we have been, back from this road upon which by divine right and justice we and our system must perish, and shall perish all who try to tread it, anywhere in the world.— Hans Frank, October 1946.

Frank and Hermann Goering (did you know, who committed suicide short before his hanging and all Nuremberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop , Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Frick, Arthur Seyss Inquart, Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Fritz Sauckel, and Julius Streicher condemned were secretly transferred in Army trucks to the Ostfriedhof, Eastern Cemetery of Munich, on 16-10-1946 and cremated. The coffins had faked names and they gave Streicher’s coffin ironical a Jewish name. The same night four Generals, an American, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian were secretly driven straight to the closest bridge, the Reichenbachbrücke over the river Isar and they scattered the ashes downstream.