Hans Frank ran the Generalgouvernement, the German colonial administration of occupied Poland, from October 1939 until the German collapse in 1945. The Generalgouvernement was the part of occupied Poland not annexed directly to the Reich. It was where the Operation Reinhard death camps were built, where the Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków and Lublin ghettos were established, and where around three million Polish Jews and around two million Polish non-Jews were murdered. Frank was the senior civilian official with administrative authority over the territory throughout. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty, and hanged on 16 October 1946.
What he ran
Frank governed the Generalgouvernement from a residence at Wawel Castle in Kraków, the medieval seat of Polish kings. The territory contained around twelve million people. The German policy, set out by Frank himself in his diary and in his speeches to senior staff, was the destruction of Polish national life and the reduction of the Polish population to forced labour for the German war economy. The Jewish population, around 1.5 million people in his territory at the start of his administration, was to be eliminated entirely. Frank was the senior official under whose authority that elimination was carried out.
The diary
The single most damning document for Frank is his own forty-three-volume official diary, kept by his stenographers and recovered intact at the end of the war. The diary records the daily business of the Generalgouvernement administration: meetings with senior officials, speeches at conferences, decisions on policy. It contains, in Frank’s own dictated words, a continuous record of his knowledge of and direction of the killing programme. He told a meeting of senior administrators in Kraków on 16 December 1941: As far as the Jews are concerned, I will tell you very plainly that they must be done away with in some way. The diary entry uses Frank’s standard direct language. He gave similar speeches at intervals throughout the war, recorded by the same stenographers, in the same volumes, all of which were used as evidence at his trial.
In his speech to the Generalgouvernement government on 16 December 1941, the day after the German declaration of war on the United States, Frank announced that he had been told that the Wannsee Conference would soon coordinate the extermination of European Jewry. The speech places him at the centre of the decision-making chain in real time, weeks before Wannsee actually took place.
The ghettos and the camps
The Warsaw Ghetto, the Łódź Ghetto, the Kraków Ghetto and dozens of smaller ghettos were established under Frank’s civilian administration. The Operation Reinhard camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were built on his territory and operated under his administrative authority, with the SS reporting through Odilo Globocnik in Lublin to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin and to Frank as the senior civilian official. Frank visited Lublin repeatedly during the period when Operation Reinhard was operating. He met with Globocnik. He inspected camps. He continued to authorise the operation.
The AB Aktion and the killing of the Polish elite
Frank also authorised, in spring 1940, the AB Aktion, the Extraordinary Pacification Action that targeted the Polish intellectual and political class. Around 30,000 Polish lawyers, doctors, teachers, priests and political activists were murdered during the operation. Frank’s diary records his approval. The killing of the Polish elite was a separate operation from the killing of the Jews, but it was conducted by the same apparatus on Frank’s authorisation, and it was part of the wider destruction of Polish national life that the Generalgouvernement administration was running.
The personal profit
Frank used his position to enrich himself. He removed art from Polish national collections to decorate his residence and his properties. The Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, taken from the Czartoryski Collection in Kraków, hung at Wawel Castle for most of the war and was recovered by American forces from his Bavarian villa in 1945. He used confiscated Polish property at scale. The personal corruption was, by the standards of senior Reich officials, comparatively unrestrained.
The trial and the conversion
Frank was captured by American forces on 4 May 1945 in his Bavarian villa, the same residence where the Lady with an Ermine was found. He attempted suicide twice in the days before his arrest, with limited success. He surrendered the forty-three diary volumes to American investigators voluntarily, in the apparent belief that they showed his administration in a favourable light. The diaries were used as the principal documentary evidence against him at Nuremberg.
At his trial Frank announced that he had reconverted to Catholicism in his cell, an institution he had abandoned as a young man, and made a series of statements that combined acknowledgement of guilt with elaborate philosophical reasoning about the German national soul. He acknowledged in court that a thousand years would pass and the guilt of Germany still would not be erased. He was found guilty and hanged at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946. His memoirs, dictated in his cell, were published posthumously.
What he was
Frank is the case of the senior civilian official who knew exactly what he was doing and recorded it in detail. The diaries are unique in the Holocaust documentary record: a senior administrator who kept a daily official record of his work, including the killing programme, and who handed the record over to his eventual prosecutors. The volumes contain everything: the policy, the meetings, the visits, the speeches, the personal observations, the justifications. They are the case against him. He had built it himself.
See also
Sources
- Hans Frank, Diary of the Generalgouvernement, 43 volumes, recovered 1945
- Stanislaw Piotrowski, Hans Franks Tagebuch, Polish Ministry of Justice, 1957
- Niklas Frank, In the Shadow of the Reich (memoir by Frank’s son), Knopf, 1991
- Nuremberg trial transcripts, particularly Frank’s testimony of April 1946
- USHMM: Hans Frank