Niklas Frank. The Unforgiving Son of the "Butcher of Poland"

"I am against the death penalty, but not in the case of my father."

Niklas Frank

On 19 December 1918, Hans Michael Frank (1900-1946) wrote: "Lord God, send us now the man who will bring us order ... I wish for our nation men who can once again restore it to universally acknowledged prominence (...)" Soon after, he heard Hitler and was impressed by his anger, aggression, self-confidence and passion, by Hitler expressing Frank's own fears and desires. Everything Hitler said seemed "absolute, uncommpromising, irrevocable, undeviating, final"; he was the Chosen One with the divine mission. Hans Frank joined the German Workers' Party (DAP) which in 1920 beame the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). There is an early photograph showing Frank in his Storm Division (SA) uniform, looking proud (O'Connor, 2013). Frank joined the Nazi Party, participated in a failed coup, became Hitler's personal attorney, ascended to the Minister of Justice in Bavaria, became the head of the National Socialist Jurists Association and President of the Academy of German Law, obtained the position of Reich Minister without Portfolio, of the Chief of Administration to von Rundsted (a military official overseeing the Nazis' rule in occupied Poland), was soon promoted to Governor-General of the newly "acquired" Polish territories. Hans Frank was ambitious and powerful. In the Nazi system, he made one career move after the other (via) and sort of became Hitler's vice-king (via).

R.C. Lukas agrees Poland was ‘a laboratory’ in which National Socialism tested its methods of administration and exploitation with a view to applying the results elsewhere in its Lebensraum empire. Analysis of the events at stake here cannot be carried out in terms of economic utility and institutional functioning alone. A vibrant variable underwrote the unity and trajectory of the system. A racism burned at the top of the Third Reich which was so thorough and uninhibited that it implicated the subordinate institutional hierarchies deeply. It was like a flame running along a system of fuses towards explosives. Poland experienced the ‘purest expression’ of National Socialism and mass murder grew up there as deliberate policy. It became ‘a trial ground for the extermination and enslavement policy’ planned for the Soviet Union. (via)

Hans Frank was the one responsible for tearing Jewish people from their homes and sending them into death camps. He oversaw six death camps in Poland (in Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór). Frank, the accomplice to genocide known as the "Butcher of Poland", later testified at the Nuremberg trials that he had had no idea what was had been going on in the death camps and had only heard of rumours (see: testimony from 18 April 1946). 

Frank was indicted for his war crimes and stood trial in Nuremberg in 1945 where he was one of only two Nazi officials to show guilt and remorse. After eleven months, the trial came to an end on 1 October 1946. He was declared guilty and sentenced to death. On 16 October, Hans Frank was executed by hanging (via).

This guilt he showed at the trials was, according to his son Niklas Frank, all lies. Niklas Frank was born in 1939 as the youngest of five children. In 1987, he published an accusatory book about his father; more books followed. Chronicling his father's crimes was not appreciated by his siblings and a great many others in Germany. Within his family, the reception to his father's book was, in fact, negative. Some of his siblings sent letters to newspapers saying: "This is not a proper son". One day, his older brother told him: "I hated your books, but I am grateful that you wrote them." (via). Not only in his books does Niklas Frank attack his father. The reactions are not always positive since there seems to be a disturbing element in this son despising everything about his father:

Reactions to what was said that evening varied but one strong theme did emerge. Widespread sympathy for Niklas’s attacks on his father was tempered by discomfort at the sheer level of vitriol and apparent absence of filial warmth. His father was a “big coward”, Niklas said, a man who “knew everything about the Holocaust” yet “went on and on and on”; a man who refused to take responsibility for the crimes he had committed. (via)

Niklas Frank's book "The Father: A Revenge" is irritating, from the very beginning (see excerpts below). According to Dahlke (2007), Frank forces the reader to take a voyeuristic position. Frank imagines a dialogue with his father, addresses him; the dialogue is doomed to fail since his dead father can neither respond nor listen. Dahlke asks the question whether Frank forces his readers to take over the dead father's role. With his hatred, the author tries to distance himself from his father but fails to do so. His emotions, in fact, are not under his control. The father is defeated but still has an enormous impact on the son who is turned into a stuttering, self-hating adolescent without self-reflection, an attempt to judge his father becomes a failed attempt to save himself, so Dahlke. 

You told me once I should make peace with my father. I have peace with my father because I acknowledged his crimes, and so I could lead a really good life, and also a happy one.
Niklas Frank

> This is how the book starts:

Top Nazi sperm enters a top Nazi egg.

She had no orgasm when you came - when I came.

She had no lofty sensations when you were lying on top of her, fat as you were - not even at the time you were siring me. You never knew that. I got it from Aunt Margot. "Can't imagine what men find in all that," Mother would say in astonishment - and then she would have one pregnancy after another. (Were you always the father?) Yet she bore me for you, the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio, the President of the Academy of German Justice, the Governor General of Poland and today a bloody footnote to the history of our times - executed, thank God, cremated and scattered in the Konwentz Brook at Solln near Munich, your ashes mixed with those of Göring, of Streicher and Ribbentrop, of Jodl and Kaltenbrunner, of Frick, Keitel, Seyss-Inquart, of Sauckel and Rosenberg - a nauseating water-soluble Nazi mess.

Your final photograph is on the table in front of me. There you are, still fresh in your death, at rest on your blanket, with your neck broken, your eyes closed, your mouth half open, your full lips maybe just a touch too pale - did you bite your lips under your black hood at the moment of your plunge?

> Some more excerpts:

(...) The suit in which you dangled out your life is really quite becoming. Or did they dress you in it after the fact? Was this when they also wiped the blood from your lips? As you were falling through the trapdoor, did you strike your chin on its wooden edge on the way down? Was that the reason for the blood? How unfair it would have been if the blow had knocked you out. You deserved to enjoy, in full awareness, every last millietre of rope, right up to the final shock. (...)

As a child I made your death my own.

The nights just before 16 October became sacred for me. I took pleasure in your death. (...) Maybe you have one more thing to tell me? Here is your opportunity. For even in your case the executioners insist on honouring that foolish tradiiton and letting you - you dreadful chatterbox - say a few final words. Well, get on with it, then: give me your final greeting. maybe now is the time for that word of advice about paper clips; or maybe very loudly you could shout, "My God, how you have all pissed on me!"; or "Hello, Herr Hoegner - my wife will never forgive you for being here!"; or: "What a life that was and what a death!" But no; you had to remain a smarmy bastard to the very end, for the present and for the hereafter. And so you say: "My thanks for the kind treatment shown to me during my imprisonment. I beg the Lord to accept me mercifully."

That sentence is only gramatically in order, Father.

(...) Were those words your ticket to Paradise?

The rope took your breath away even before the fall - the very second before, when you were standing up there, high above the others, your head in the black hood, your heart a high-pressure pump, your body stiff with the frenzy of fear. Yes, Father, it is a goddamned shitty shame to die completely awake and fully conscious, fit a as a fiddle, having been tested and declared by the officials at Nuremberg to belong to the top third of Nazi criminals, well-fed while all of Europe is starving - and then for you to give in and in a loud whisper say, "Jesus, have mercy"!

"I heard him say it very clearly. Before the snapping sound. That, you see, was the terrible thing about your father's death, that sound of his neck cracking. You could hear it all over the gymnasium." I weep, Father, I weep. Why do I weep? What was the snapping like? Like a cork being pulled from a bottle? Like the sound of a willow walking stick breaking? Like the splitting  of a log? Like the clicking of your tongue against the roof of your mouth?

It was the last sound you made; the only thing that followed it was your death fart. You are hanging. You are left there hanging. You are swaying gently back and forth. (...)

The end of a criminal, a big shot gets hanged, a thoroughly cultivated German, someone who had known the truth of poetry and music and who sold out for a Horch, a Mercedes and a luxury private railway carriage with mahogany and decadence on all sides.

(...) Well, Father, I've got to congratulate you on the creation of a post-war Germany, a new country in your spirit. (...) a raped land (...).

Once again, a choking, suffocatig, putrid mantle of political self-glorification has settled down over Germany. The arrogance of power is on the march just as you were then. They have your same shameless, sordid manner; they manipulate the law, they disdain the average citizen. No, your ties were not swept away with your ashes in the waters of the Konwentz at Solln. Your goddamned sahses fertilised far too many plants along the edge of that brook; they germinated again. Because of people like you, your Eternal Germany is threatened more from within than from without and its conscience is like yours - which is to say, it does not exist. One fateful initiative, one evil impulse, coming from almost anywhere and you can take over the reins once more, you and a thousand others like you. (...)

I have wicked fantasies lodged in my brain, one of them an image of millions of gallows erected along the autobahns right after the war; of the American Hangman Woods driving slowly past them in your confiscated Maybach and releasing the trapdoors one after the other. What a wholesome chorus of cracking necks would have resounded over Germany, the snapping neck bones of all those judges, lawyers, industrialists, guards, wardens and informers. (...)

Imagine a second that you survived, you the prototype of the German criminal (...). After a bit of de-Nazification, your metamorphosis from Nazi to good Christian Democrat would have taken place without a hitch. (...) your inspiring voice would reflect your ardour for the new democracy and your condemnation of the brownshirt dictatorship, to which, alas, you had falle a helpless victim (...).

The snapping of your neck spared me from having a totally screwed-up life. You certainly would have poisened  my brain with all your drivel, the fate of the silent majority of my generation who did not have the good fortune of having their fathers hanged.

That's why I'm happy to be your son, How poor by comparison are all the millions of other children whose fathers spouted the same rubbish filled with deceit and cowardice, with bloodthirstiness and inhumanity, but who were not so prominent as you. Their tirades were not worth recording, their journals not worth preserving. I have it good. (...)

There is no doubt about it: you will also lose the second Nuremnberg trial, this mini trial with your son as prosecutor, judge and hangman in one. (...) Almost every person who has ever spoken with me about you has had a remarkable urge to defend you to me (...). They told me this was utterly appalling and kept insisting on the virtue of filial piety - a virtue that evidently is meant never to be consumed, not even by the flames of the ovens that were packed with Jews. (...)

(...) you were a real arsehole of a human being. (...) And only after I die will I let my inner swine loose; will I let loose of you, you swine. (...)

When was your death? The first time you heard Hitler speak? (...)

(...) Your mother had run off to Prague by this time, a fabulous woman. Did she perhaps have an inkling that she had given birth to Rosemary's Baby?

(...) and I sit there in the Philharmonic Hall like an evil little sprite on your rounded shoulders (you already had that greasy look that came upon you with the years, already fat and paunchy) - I sit like a sprite on your shoulders with not a thought in the world for Meister Furtwängler; and I whisper in your ear:

Father, you have only nine more years to live. This neck of yours that I'm holding tight between my little legs... in exactly 3,567 days the sound of its snapping will reverberate through the gymnasium at Nuremberg. (...)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- Dahlke, B. (2007). Familienpornographie. Niklas Franks Abrechnung mit dem Täter-Vater. In. I. Stephan & A. Tacke (Hg.) Geschichte(n) erzählen. Nach-Bilder des Holocaust (53-65). Böhlau Verlag; link

-  Frank, N. (German original published in 1987). The Father.: A Revenge. A Son's Judgement on His Nazi War Criminal Father. Biteback Publishing.

- O' Connor, G. (2013). The Butcher of Poland. Hitler's Lawyer Hans Frank. History Pr.

- photographs of Niklas Frank via and via and via and via