The children have seen him and are looking back at him now. It makes him uneasy. “Why are they staring at me? That boy especially, with a yellow star on his arm. Did I do something wrong? Is it the car they’re looking at? What’s going on?” He decides to make a face and sticks out his tongue mockingly. “Now he’ll stop looking at me! Ha, like that! Good, that scared him. See how he ran off? I showed him!”
Ghetto: he has often heard the word at home and he knows that this is the place to come to get the lowest price on all kinds of things the Jews have. But why this is, he does not understand. When his mother returns to the car, he decides to ask her:
“Mother, why don’t they smile? Why do they look at us with such hate?” And he adds, “It’s Sunday after all, and they have a yellow star on their arms.”
Niklas always wears lederhosen and a jacket on Sundays.
His mother brushes away his questions impatiently and tells him not to ask any more because he won’t understand. This little boy is Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, the Butcher of Poland.
He has never met a Jew. The meaning of the yellow star is a mystery to him. His brother Norman said there was once a Jewish boy in his class before the war but that he disappeared one day and no one bothered to find out where he’d gone. Norman is eleven years older than Niklas. Norman went to the ghetto once too, with his father and the driver. He thinks the ghettos were there before their family came to Poland. But he never understood why his father went to the ghetto either.1
Niklas always stays in the car while his mother, Brigitte, shops in the ghetto. Every time, she returns with jewelry, furs, rugs, and other valuable items, thrilled by the deals she has negotiated. It is the only thing that matters to her. The morbid silence and the indescribable misery she walks through has no effect on her whatsoever.
Once, Niklas was allowed to get out of the car to stretch his legs. Walking down a dark passageway, a particularly cheerless house caught his attention. He pushed open the heavy door to find a man yelling furiously at an old woman who was just skin and bones. She stared at the ground while he accused her: “You evil witch.” The little boy was so frightened he burst into tears. The man told him, “Don’t get so upset; she’ll be dead soon.” Niklas never forgot that scene. It would still haunt him when, years later, sitting in a room he kept purposely unheated, he would write his first book about his father, Hans Frank, on an old Erika typewriter that had once belonged to his mother.
When they arrived in Poland in 1939, the Franks took up residence at Wawel Castle—which once belonged to the Jagiellon monarchs—on the hills above Kraków, the capital city. His father commandeered this Renaissance castle for the family’s personal use and he had a wing furnished in the style of the Third Reich. An enormous Nazi flag flew above its walls. That the Franks lacked for nothing was an understatement. The family lived in the private apartments on the second floor. The number of employees in their personal service was impressive, and Niklas, the little prince, lived in unheard-of luxury. More than seventy years later, he would remember the day his parents offered each brother a pedal car. Thrilled, Niklas immediately got behind the wheel of the nicer of the two, a miniature Mercedes … but his mother ordered him out, informing him that he was in Norman’s car. He thought his car looked ordinary. It was a stinging realization.2 Nevertheless, the two brothers never tired of racing their sports cars through the halls of the castle. Niklas would wait until one of the domestics approached, then pedal at full speed into the legs of the hapless servant. No one would dare reprimand the little prince, the son of the governor-general.
Many receptions were held at the castle, whose wine cellar was stocked with fine wines and French cognacs. Guests smoked Cuban cigars. Succulent dishes, chocolates, and fruit jellies were passed from silver trays. No one would ever have imagined that people were living in abject misery and dying of hunger just a stone’s throw away.
It was not until after the war that Niklas learned of his father’s role in the legalization of the ghettos, which were initially under the jurisdiction of the police. Hans Frank defended this policy, which he said was taken “in the interests of the Jews.”3 Niklas would write later that his mother “should have thanked Hitler for the ghettos, which she treated as if they were discount stores especially designed for the Frank family.”4
Psychiatrists at Nuremberg testified that certain Nazi officials presented perfectly normal psyches that harbored neither fanaticism nor sadism, but this was not the case of Hans Frank. A versatile and tormented figure, he was an early and total convert to National Socialism. Right up until the end, he would prove a slavish vassal to Hitler, that “glorious genius in the art of ruling.”5 He looked up to the Führer as a heaven-sent Übermensch6 and desperately sought to ingratiate himself with him.
Hans Frank was one of three children in a middle-class German family. His father was a lawyer. His parents’ marriage was unhappy, however, and his mother left while the children were still young to join her lover. Hans Frank was shuttled between both parents. He studied law at university in Munich and quickly radicalized, becoming obsessed by the idea of German superiority in culture and power. In 1923, he joined the Storm Detachment, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. Hitler was as yet only the failed revolutionary of the Beer Hall Putsch, but Frank was quickly seduced by his persona as the great orator of the people.
During his studies, Frank met Brigitte Herbst. At twenty-nine, she was five years older than Frank and employed as a secretary for the Bavarian Parliament. They married on April 2, 1925, in Munich. A year later, with his law degree in hand, he became the first line of defense of Hitler and the Nazi Party during its rise to power.
In 1933, Frank was named Minister of Justice for Bavaria, President of the Academy of German Law, and a Reich Minister without portfolio. He was instrumental in shaping German law to accommodate Hitler’s totalitarianism, a fact he would deny. Frank defended his actions, “Constitutional Law in the Third Reich is the legal formulation of the historic will of the Führer, but the historic will of the Führer is not the fulfillment of legal preconditions for his activity.”7 While taking measures to eliminate Jews from the General Government territory of occupied Poland, he declared that in the absence of justice “the state too loses its moral backbone, it sinks into the abyss of night and horror. You can depend on it that I would rather die than give up this idea of justice.”8 He thought of himself as a faithful servant of the law, even a martyr to its cause. Hitler, on the other hand, held the law in utter contempt. For him, lawyers were just a form of common criminal and anyone involved in the practice of law was fundamentally evil or would become so over time.9
In late 1939, when Niklas was seven years old, Hans Frank was named governor-general of Occupied Poland, a vast swath of central Poland under Nazi control, and was responsible for overseeing the Jewish ghettos, including the largest in Warsaw, which was created in 1940 and destroyed in 1943. Under his administration, nearly two million Jews were gassed in the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.10
Hans Frank had five children: three boys and two girls. Norman, the eldest son, was born on June 3, 1928, and Niklas, the youngest, on March 9, 1939. Brigitte Frank liked to remind her husband that she had borne him five children. This was an important fact. When she wasn’t sure of the identity of the child she was carrying—she was not a model of marital fidelity—she simply aborted, explaining to a suspicious Hans that she miscarried or that the child was too premature to survive.
In the speech he delivered on November 25, 1939, in the Polish city of Radom, Hans Frank outlined his mission as governor-general. “What a pleasure it is to finally tan the hide of the Jewish race. The more of them die, the better.”11 Sixty-six thousand Jews were living in Kraków. Hans Frank’s plan was to eradicate them from the city and to build German neighborhoods in the place of the Jewish ones, where one could breathe “good pure German air.”12 Niklas remembered his father telling his mother triumphantly when he
was named governor-general, “Brigitte, you’ll be the queen of Poland!” Hans Frank’s most pressing goal in late 1941 was to solve the problem of what to do with the Jews. He began by executing any Jew found outside the ghetto, which officially launched a manhunt that led to terrible massacres throughout the occupied territory. Jews were no longer sent to the ghettos, either, but transported directly to extermination camps where they were gassed as soon as they arrived.
Years later, Niklas could not remember exactly when it happened but at some point, the three youngest children began to spend most of the year in the family’s home in Bavaria with their governess Hilde and only a few months in Kraków. Brigitte did not like to travel with young children.13 Beginning in 1941, only the two oldest, Norman and Sigrid, lived year-round in Kraków, where they attended the German school.
The Franks were cold, distant parents. Niklas was nicknamed Fremde (stranger). Once, his father chased him around the dining room table, calling after him, “Who are you, little stranger? You’re not even part of this family, are you? What do you want from us, little stranger?” The only thing Niklas ever wanted was to be held by his father, just once. But his presence had a strange effect on people. He liked, he said, to stay quiet and observe his family of criminals.14
His mother was a bad-tempered, authoritarian woman. She is the “German mother” whom Niklas describes with such hatred in the book he would write years later.15 The Frank children have no memories of being cuddled or hugged—or even of their parents’ presence. Their parents were, they have said, too busy living their respective lives, leaving the children to be raised by governesses. In his earliest memories, Norman can only see his mother; she spent very little time with him, but his father even less. The Franks entertained regularly, the castle filling with high-ranking Nazi officials, musicians, movie actors, and opera singers. Hans Frank liked to flatter himself that he was a man of culture. In Kaputt, the Italian author Curzio Malaparte, who was a war correspondent covering the Eastern Front, portrays Frank as a self-styled Renaissance signore, hosting grandiose dinners of obscene opulence in the midst of his court, while the Polish people were dying of starvation and fear. The despotic Frank was a great admirer of classical music and liked to play Chopin for his guests on his Pleyel piano, never mind that Chopin had been banned by the Nazis; they even destroyed his statue in Warsaw. Malaparte noted, “What makes these executioners suffer is a mystery. They fear nothing more than the weak, the unarmed, the oppressed, the sick: they fear the elderly, women and children, they fear the Jews.”16 The family spent weekends and holidays at the magnificent Kressendorf palace, outside Kraków. The boys loved the property, where they would shoot birds with their air rifles for hours on end. Norman once killed ninety-eight sparrows.17
After Norman rejoined the family in Poland in 1940, Hans Frank would occasionally allow his eldest and favorite son to accompany him on Reich business. Norman claimed he remembered little from this period; he was thirteen at the time. Traveling to Vienna, they would pass near Auschwitz, but Norman said he never knew what was happening there. The Nazis’ largest concentration camp was not technically in Frank’s jurisdiction, as it lay outside the German zone of occupation, but it was only forty miles from Kraków. Norman knew undoubtedly that it was a camp for Nazi prisoners, but he always insisted he never learned it was an extermination camp until after the war. Niklas does not believe him.18
One memory that has stayed with Niklas involves his governess, Hilde. One day, she decided on her own initiative to take Niklas and one of his brothers inside a work camp; it was most likely Plaszow, on the outskirts of Kraków. There, he witnessed a scene that, at the time, he found hilarious: the guards had hoisted some weak, emaciated men onto the backs of donkeys, who kicked and bucked wildly, throwing their riders to the ground, much to the delight of the assembled crowd. Then a nice officer, whom Niklas supposed was a friend of Hilde’s, gave him a hot chocolate.19
Unlike his oldest brother, the youngest of the Frank children wanted to know everything. His hunger for the truth is his life’s work. The only sentiment he feels for his father is loathing. That said, he considers him a “sorry bastard! All he cared about was jewels, castles, handsome uniforms. Human life was worth nothing to him.”20 His was a reign of terror.
Hans Frank boasted, “I am the German king of Poland!” But if anyone observed that a real king never has to say he is one, he would answer: “I have the power of life and death over the Polish people, but I am not the king of Poland. I treat the Poles with the magnanimity and benevolence of a king, but I am not their king. The Polish people are not worthy of a king like me. They are an ungrateful people…. They do not deserve the honor of having a German master.”21
The Franks’ marriage was unhappy. Hans was frequently absent. He confided to the psychologist at Nuremberg, Gustave Gilbert, that his wife was too old for him, making them incompatible both physically and emotionally. Brigitte was a far cry from the Nazis’ feminine ideal of a devoted mother and housewife. Frau Frank was ambitious, unscrupulous, and the mistress of one of her husband’s friends. She was an unfaithful spouse even during their honeymoon when she carried on an affair with a Hamburg shipowner. Yet, after Frank rekindled his relationship with his childhood love, a certain Lilly Groh, Brigitte forced him to come back home. Frank was too valuable a husband to let him leave her, and she would stop at nothing to keep him; she even went to Heinrich Himmler to expose Groh as a Jew. This was enough to convince Niklas that his mother was perfectly aware of the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.22 She also implored Hitler to stop Frank from divorcing her, saying she “would rather be the widow of a Reich minister than his divorcée.” Niklas admits he adores this expression of his mother’s.23 Hans Frank responded by exposing Brigitte’s infidelities, notably with his friend, the Doctor Karl Lasch, who was the governor of the Radom district of Nazi occupied Poland. He even went so far as to accuse the lovers of smuggling contraband and he claimed that Lasch was Niklas’s biological father. The question of Niklas’s parentage is quickly dismissed in the book Niklas wrote, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (My Father: A Reckoning).24 As an adult, Niklas went to see his father’s former secretary, who assured him that his father was not Lasch. All of Hans Frank’s sons remembered that their father was frightened of their mother, even when he was imprisoned at Nuremberg.25
Beginning in 1942, Hans Frank saw his power considerably undermined. He was criticized for the content of some of the speeches he delivered at German universities, where he argued for an independent justice system. However, it was primarily his corruption and personal enrichment that led to his change of fortunes. Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler were openly hostile to him as they worked to expose his incompetence and demanded his dismissal. He was forced to cede to Himmler certain essential powers he held over the police,26 but, and despite the fact he submitted his resignation to Hitler fourteen times, he remained in his post in Kraków until the total collapse of his authority” in August 1944. On January 17, 1945, he was forced to flee Wawel Castle for Bavaria, following his family who had left several months earlier. Before leaving his stronghold, he took care to arrange for the transfer to Bavaria of his most prized possessions as well as the artworks he had massively pillaged, including paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, and Leonardo de Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. He celebrated his departure with great pomp.27
The Frank family moved back to Schoberhof, the family’s country house, since refurbished, near Schliersee Lake. Hans Frank had purchased it in 1936: a fifty-four-thousand-square-foot structure built in typically Bavarian style with a slate roof, an upper exterior in dark wood, and a white concrete base. Some of the Frank children spent their childhood years at Schoberhof as veritable apprentice farmers.28
It was there that Frank was arrested by American forces on May 4, 1945. Several days earlier, he had entrusted Brigitte with fifty thousand reichsmarks. “My father handed her the money as if she were a prostitute,” Niklas would later remember, “in fu
ll view of my brother Norman, without an ounce of affection.”29
Norman had no doubt the Allies were coming for his father. He had been listening to enemy radio and knew they were fast approaching. Hans Frank knew it, too, but he placidly awaited his arrest. One day when Norman visited him in his office at Schoberhof, Frank laid a table with cake and coffee for his oldest and favorite son. “I must be the only minister who is looking forward to his own arrest quite so cheerfully,” he confided to Norman.30 Frank believed he would be exonerated on the evidence of his speeches and private diaries: forty volumes containing a record of his daily activities, from 1939 to 1945, and which he voluntarily turned over to the Allies. He never imagined they would become key elements in his prosecution, but they did, thanks to statements such as the following:
“I must ask you to steel yourselves against all considerations of compassion. We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them, and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich…. The Jews are also exceptionally harmful feeders for us. In the Government General we have approximately 2.5 million [Jews], and now perhaps 3.5 million together with persons who have Jewish kin, and so on. We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will have to take measures that will lead somehow to successful destruction; and this in connection with the large-scale procedures which are to be discussed in the Reich. The Government General must become as free of Jews as the Reich.”31 Frank was also counting on his conflicts with the Nazi hierarchy to exonerate him of any crime. Norman considered this to be an incomprehensible miscalculation on his father’s part. At the moment of his arrest, the American army lieutenant who oversaw the mission, Walter Stein, told the Frank children that their father would be home soon.32 Niklas was six years old.
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