1. Hans Michael Frank was a German Nazi politician, lawyer and convicted war criminal who served as head of the General Government in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.
41 Facts About Hans Frank
1. 2.
Hans Frank took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, and later became Adolf Hitler's personal legal adviser as well as the lawyer of the NSDAP.
3.
In December 1934, Hans Frank joined the Hitler Cabinet as a Reichsminister without portfolio.
4.
Hans Frank engaged in the use of forced labour and oversaw four of the extermination camps.
5.
Hans Frank remained head of the General Government until its collapse in early 1945.
6.
Hans Frank was sentenced to death and executed by hanging in October 1946.
7.
Hans Frank, the middle child of three, was born in Karlsruhe to Karl, a lawyer, and his wife, Magdalena, a daughter of a prosperous baker.
8.
Hans Frank graduated from high school at Maximilians gymnasium in Munich.
9.
Hans Frank served in the Freikorps under Franz Ritter von Epp's command, taking part in the crackdown of the Munchner Raterepublik.
10.
Hans Frank represented it in over 2,400 cases and spent over $10,000.
11.
In October 1928, Hans Frank founded the National Socialist German Jurists Association and became its leader.
12.
Hans Frank was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 8, Leignitz, in October 1930.
13.
On 10 March 1933, when the Nazis seized control of the Bavarian state government, Hans Frank was made the Staatskommissar in charge of justice, and was appointed one of the state's representatives to the Reichsrat until its abolition on 14 February 1934.
14.
On 26 June 1933, Hans Frank founded the Academy for German Law.
15.
Hans Frank served as the Chairman of the Academy's Legal Philosophy Committee and was editor of its several publications.
16.
In January 1934, Hans Frank was named as one of the three judges on the Supreme Party Court.
17.
In March 1933, in a speech on the Bavarian radio, Hans Frank issued "a greeting to his oppressed comrades in Austria" and threatened that, if necessary, the Nazi Party would "take over the safeguarding of the freedom of the German comrades in Austria".
18.
In May 1933, Hans Frank went to Vienna, accompanied by the Prussian Minister of Justice Hanns Kerrl and his Ministerial Director Roland Freisler, to promote Nazi propaganda.
19.
Hans Frank objected to extrajudicial killings as it weakened the power of the legal system, both at the Dachau concentration camp and during the "Night of the Long Knives".
20.
On 7 April 1938, Hans Frank addressed some 10,000 Nazis at the Passau Nibelungenhalle.
21.
In September 1939, Hans Frank was assigned as Chief of Administration to Gerd von Rundstedt in the German military administration in occupied Poland.
22.
Hans Frank oversaw the Warsaw ghetto and the use of Polish civilians as forced labour.
23.
On 16 December 1941, Hans Frank spelt out to his senior officials the approaching annihilation of the Jews:.
24.
Hans Frank participated in the growth of the politics leading to genocide in Poland.
25.
Hans Frank fled the General Government in January 1945, as the Red Army advanced.
26.
Hans Frank was captured by American troops on 4 May 1945, at Tegernsee in southern Bavaria.
27.
Rene Juchli reported that Hans Frank was suffering from partial paralysis of his left hand as a result of one of his suicide attempts.
28.
Hans Frank was indicted for war crimes and tried before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946.
29.
Hans Frank voluntarily surrendered 43 volumes of his personal diaries to the Allies, believing his struggles against other Nazi officials would be enough to secure his defence, and which were then used against him as evidence of his guilt.
30.
Hans Frank confessed to some of the charges, and testified in response to questions from his defence attorney:.
31.
Hans Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity on 1 October 1946 and was sentenced to death by hanging.
32.
Hans Frank was the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with a smile on his countenance.
33.
Hans Frank accepted this explanation, but added that it was still just possible that Hitler had some Jewish ancestry.
34.
The writer accepted Hans Frank's story as the truth, and added since Hitler was a Jew, "the Jews should pay Germans reparations for the War, because one of theirs caused the destruction of Germany".
35.
On 2 April 1925 Hans Frank married 29-year-old secretary Brigitte Herbst from Forst.
36.
Hans Frank sought a divorce in 1942, after meeting and falling in love with a former childhood acquaintance who was looking for her son, a soldier who had gone missing in the Eastern Front.
37.
Niklas Hans Frank had been shunned early on by his parental figure, because of his father's belief he was instead the son a former family friend, Karl Lasch, and so he instead bonded closer to Hilde, their nanny, and felt closer to his mother than his father.
38.
In 1987, Niklas Hans Frank wrote a book about his father, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung, which was published in English in 1991 as In the Shadow of the Reich.
39.
The book, first of a trilogy about his family's experiences, was serialized in the magazine Stern, and caused controversy in Germany, and even in some sectors of Poland, because of the scathing way in which the younger Hans Frank depicted his father: Niklas referred to him as "a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic" and questioned his remorse before his execution.
40.
Hans Frank took her own life by overdosing whilst sleeping with her 8 year old son, Hans' grandson.
41.
Whilst some, if not all, of Hans Frank' grandchildren have been noticeably affected by the events of their grandfather's life, Niklas' daughter has claimed her father's critical work about her grandfather was a "wall" around her, growing up.