Frank made two suicide attempts. On the day of his arrest, he tried to slit his throat after having been beaten by the Allies. He made a second attempt two days later. During his imprisonment at Nuremberg, Frank called Hitler a psychopath and a satanic devil, surrounded by other diabolical “men of action” like Bormann and Himmler, and he tried to convince the Allies that all of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich had been secretly planned by those three officials.33 Hans Frank was among those many Nazis who were unable to admit their guilt; it was the devil Hitler who made him do it.
Back at Schoberhof, Brigitte Frank had her hands full trying to protect the family’s property. The house was looted at night by Polish and Ukrainian prisoners who had been freed from the work camps, but Brigitte had managed to hide a box of jewels with her neighbor. Niklas would recall that she later bartered some of these for food at a camp for displaced Jews.34
On another occasion, a heavily armed American soldier attempted to help himself to the contents of the wine cellar and lined Brigitte and the children against a wall as if to shoot them. Niklas remembered that his mother calmly asked him to spare the children, before the soldier’s superior officer ended the charade.
The family was forced to leave in August 1945, with only two suitcases and some furs, seeking lodgings in an inn before finding a small two-room apartment in the neighboring village of Neuhaus am Schliersee. Once the furs had been sold, Brigitte sent the children out to beg for food. She tried to enroll Norman in the only nearby school for his age but the principal refused to admit the son of a war criminal. By this time, Norman was eighteen. With no other choice than to continue his schooling at home, he failed his exams and never went on to university.
Five months passed without any news of Hans, until the family learned that he had tried to commit suicide again. They had been following the trial on the radio. In September 1946, the entire family went to see him for the last time, before the verdict was delivered. Norman found his father thin and greatly changed. Hans delivered a last word of advice to his eldest son, remembered later by Norman: “He told me to be strong and always remember never to speak my mind unless I first thought carefully about what I would say.”35
The memory of this last meeting still fills Niklas with rage: “I remember it very clearly. I was sitting on my mother’s knees and he was sitting behind a window […] and he was friendly and laughing. It was my strongest impression of him because it was the last time I saw him. And I knew it was the last time. And he said to me, ‘Ah, Niki, in three months’ time we will have a wonderful Christmas Eve in our house.’ And I sat there thinking, ‘He is lying.’ He knew he was going to be executed. Why was he lying to me?”36
To this day, Niklas cannot understand why his father never spoke plainly to him or left him with a word of advice, saying: “I am going to die, and I am guilty, and you will never meet me again, but here is something for your later life.”37 Niklas was seven years old when his father was sentenced; the news was everywhere in the small village where they were living, and a topic of conversation at school, as well. He never cried over his father’s death.38 Yet his father’s lack of remorse still weighs unbearably on him. “We inherited his faults,” he has said,39 and he struggles to find words sufficiently strong to describe his father, this “weak,” “vain,” “hypocritical,” “cowardly,” “murderer” and “ass-kisser.” But he admits, “It was this coward who built the gas chambers.”40
Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, Hans Frank was executed by hanging on October 16, 1946. Several months after his arrest, he had converted to Catholicism under the guidance of an Irish Franciscan father, Sixtus O’Connor. Niklas believes that if anyone could have learned anything about his father, it was Pater Sixtus. This new Frank declared: “It is as though I am two people—me, myself, Frank here—and the other Frank, the Nazi leader. And sometimes I wonder how that man Frank could have done those things.”41 But Niklas also thinks the priest disliked his father. When he asked O’Connor what his father’s last words were as he walked to the gallows, O’Connor told him he did not remember. He sent the Frank children their father’s book of prayers after his death.42
Norman believed a death sentence was preferable to a life sentence, such as Rudolf Hess received, reasoning that it would have been very difficult to bear such a long sentence. “A life sentence for my father would have been a life sentence for the whole family.”43
Frank was executed with ten other Nazi officials (twelve were sentenced to death, but Göring had already committed suicide and Martin Bormann was convicted in absentia). However, he was the only one of the ten to go smiling to his death. He had the look of a man who had been freed of his demons. Standing on the gallows, he had this to say: “I am grateful to you for my treatment during my detention and I ask God in His mercy to take me to Him.”44 A palm reader had told him in 1935 that he would be the center of a large trial and would die a violent death before he was fifty. Given that he was a lawyer, Frank was not surprised by her prediction.45 He was forty-six when he was hanged.
Brigitte Frank met the same fate as all of the other wives of Nazi officials who were condemned at Nuremberg: she was arrested under orders of the minister of denazification, Alfred Loritz, in May 1947. She was in the kitchen of the apartment in Neuhaus, in Upper Bavaria, when the police came to arrest her. She became distraught when she had to leave four children behind her with nothing and no means of support. Her eldest daughter, Sigrid, had been married since 1945. It was the first time Niklas ever saw his mother cry; he and his siblings had only known her to be a hard woman. When the verdicts were delivered at Nuremberg, she kept a list of the names of the accused and drew a cross next to the name of each condemned man or, in the case of a different sentence, wrote that next to the name of the accused. She coolly drew a cross next to her husband’s name and did not shed a tear at his execution.
Brigitte Frank was taken to Göggingen, near Augsburg, to join the ranks of Emmy Göring, Ilse Hess, Luise Funck, who was the wife of the former Reich Minister of the Economy, and Henriette von Schirach, the wife of Baldur von Schirach, who was the head of the Hitler Youth. Brigitte Frank was prisoner number 1467. These women who had lived in great luxury during the war learned to make do with straw mattresses, rats, and bugs in prison. Hunger and close quarters became their daily reality. Their children were allowed to visit only occasionally, and the women worried constantly for their safety and health in devastated, postwar Germany.
They also had some astonishing conversations. Brigitte Frank congratulated Emmy Göring for the “magnificent” death of her husband, thanks to the cyanide pill he kept on him, unlike Hans Frank. Emmy Göring did not miss an opportunity to taunt Brigitte. “So now the Queen of Poland has lost the Reich and her husband both!”46 Sometimes the women raised a toast to “the health of their dead men” and to Adolf Hitler “who took their husbands’ best years.” Brigitte Frank denied the denazification court’s accusation that she ever purchased jewelry on the black market or by any other means. But when she was faced with incontrovertible evidence and could find no other argument in her defense, she declared, “I am not an anti-Semite.”47 On the several occasions when her son visited her in prison, she brought him to listen to Ilse Koch, the wife of Buchenwald’s lead commandant, who liked to sing old Nazi songs. Ilse Koch was known as “the Bitch” or “the Witch” because of her sadism. Her songs made Brigitte laugh.
She sported a tan when she was released in mid-September 1947.48 She told her children: “It was my best vacation ever. Emmy Göring liked it very much too.”49 The two women had grown close during their detention. Brigitte was impressed by the list of jewels Emmy owned, as enumerated by the denazification court.50
In 1951, Norman made the decision to leave the family and emigrate to Argentina. His presence was discovered, however, by Argentine Nazis, who looked to him to take up his father’s causes. He sought to hide himself by working in a mine near the Boli
vian border.
That same year, Niklas was sent to a boarding school in Wyk auf Föhr, where he stayed until 1959, when he turned twenty. He looks back on those years as an incredibly happy period of his life. Far from home, he no longer had to listen to his mother’s shouting. The school observed the extremely strict rules of the Teutonic Order. Niklas felt right at home. Mornings were reserved for classes; afternoons for sports. The other students knew who Niklas’s father was, but showed little interest. Niklas found a father figure in the school’s Pastor Lohmann, who had made it his mission to open his doors to the children of the Nazi Party, showing them it was possible for people who were not like them to love them.51 One day, when he was twelve, Niklas wrote at the top of a letter he was composing to his mother “Niklas Frank, Prince of Poland.” Lohmann gave him a stern warning: “You must never do that again.”52 Also at the school were Adolf and Barthold Ribbentrop, the sons of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich’s Foreign Minister. They never kept company with Niklas, however, who does not remember that they ever discussed their fathers.
Brigitte Frank was at that time living on a monthly pension of just five hundred marks, of the five thousand she was promised from the government when it seized her property in 1947.53
In 1953, she willingly sold the memoirs Hans Frank had penned shortly before his death, published under the title Im Angesicht des Galgens (The View From the Gallows). It was a bestseller in Germany, where it was sold and read—in secret—by the thousands. As the book’s editor, Brigitte Frank made herself a tidy sum of around 200,000 deutschmarks.
In his memoirs, Hans Frank discusses the question of Hitler’s Jewish ancestry. Under the influence of his nephew, William Patrick Hitler, who was the son of his half brother, Alois, Hitler asked him in the late 1930s to research the records of Maria Schicklgruber, his paternal grandmother. She had been employed as a cook by a Jew named Leopold Frankenberger before giving birth to Adolf’s father, Alois Hitler. Hans Frank wrote in his memoirs that he had found letters exchanged by Maria and the Frankenberger family regarding a request for child support. Adolf Hitler interpreted the letters, not as proof that the Frankenberger’s son was his grandfather, but that his grandmother Maria had managed to blackmail the family for money by threatening to reveal the paternity of this illegitimate son. Respected historians such as Ian Kershaw have dismissed Frank’s revelations, but others have investigated further. As far as Niklas is concerned, his father found no conclusive proof of Hitler’s alleged Jewish ancestry, but he enjoys the story for demonstrating that the man who used the question of ancestry to decide the fates of millions of people had very uncertain origins himself.
When the book stopped selling, around 1958, Brigitte began to rent beds in her house to travelers arriving at the train station in Munich: five marks for the night. By hanging sheets between mattresses lined up in her living room, she could sleep up to five people at a time.
Niklas adored the theater but after his graduation, he decided to pursue studies in law, history, sociology, and German literature. He never earned a diploma but he became a journalist and a writer. He was the Culture editor at both the erotic magazine Her and then at Playboy where he worked for three years. He also worked for the German magazine Stern for twenty years. Unlike some children of Nazi officials, Niklas has been perfectly clear: “I am not afraid of the past; I want to know everything.”54 To this day, he carries with him a photo of his father, taken just after his death. When asked why, he answers, “I am pleased by what the picture shows: he is dead.”55
When a parent feels no regret or guilt for crimes he has committed, it can have very different effects on his children; they might choose to follow their father’s lead and feel no guilt, or they might feel so troubled by what their father did that they reject him completely. Niklas Frank falls into this category: it is intolerable to him that his father never expressed remorse or regret and that he tried to justify his actions. “No, he never regretted anything … I hate him, that bastard who’s burning in hell and who hounds me,” he says about his father.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t have the horrible impression he’s manipulating me like a puppet on a string…. Does that sound unbelievable? Even as a child, I always felt like I was living in a family of criminals. It was a vague feeling, but I was convinced of it, unlike my older brothers and sisters who always refused to face the facts. It wasn’t long before I saw photos of the camps on the front pages of the newspapers: piles of naked bodies, skeletons in rags, and, you know, children holding out their tiny wrists to show their number…. They were the same age as me, they were being held so close to the castle in Poland where my father was stockpiling his gold and where I was acting like a prince in my pedal car. It was a horrifying realization … I tried like crazy to imagine myself in those photos; I tried to feel their suffering in my own body, the anguish of those Jews who were going to die. I tried to be them. They still haunt me.”56
His father’s death also torments him. He imagines his father’s final moments: the wait, the corridor, the priest, the thirteen steps leading up to the gallows, and then finally the noose and death. Niklas tried to understand his father; he pored over every document he could lay his hands on before finally coming to a conclusion: “I could find nothing to explain what he did, except greed and fanatical ambition. And despite the atrocious things he said about the Jews, I think he didn’t give a damn and was not truly anti-Semitic. If Hitler had decided to do the same thing to the French or the Chinese, he would have delivered the same impassioned speeches using Nietzsche, Schiller, Goethe, and Corneille.”57
In an interview he granted to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Niklas admitted he would have liked to have a baker for a father. But like other children of Nazi leaders, he thought it would have been even worse for him if he had been the son of Himmler or Göring.58
Niklas believes his father “deserved to be executed and was delighted to be.”59 He also questions his father’s late conversion to Catholicism, believing he only did so for absolution. However, he recognizes he shares some of his father’s traits; he considers himself to be a brilliant liar and an excellent speaker with an aggressive sense of humor—his father’s sense of humor.60 The book he published in Germany in 1997 about his father was virulently criticized, especially by some other Nazi children: Klaus von Schirach and Martin Adolf Bormann, in particular. The latter was a professor of theology at the time and expressed regret he and Niklas had never spoken about their fathers. For some of these children, rejecting or cursing their fathers was out of the question. For others, the book was too violent, in both its scenes and its language.
Niklas’s brother, Michael, attacked him publicly in an open letter to Stern, which he ended as follows: “My brother Niki is and will always be a stranger.”61 Even his closest friends broke with him. The book was shocking right from its opening scene involving masturbation.
Niklas wrote, “The child I was appropriated your death. The nights leading up to October 16 became sacred to me. I would lie down naked on the sour-smelling linoleum in the water closet, my legs sticking straight out, my left hand holding my flaccid penis and then, lightly rubbing it, I could start to see you.”62 At the time of those events, Niklas was living with his four brothers and sisters in a small apartment in Neuhuas, at Dürnbachstrasse 7.
A journalist once explained to Niklas that his orgasm was the sign of his desire to outlive his father; Niklas has said that interpretation was an eye-opener for him.63 His own understanding of the situation is more complex, however, and he openly criticizes the German people: “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about my father and everything the Germans did. The world will never forget. Wherever I go abroad, as soon as I say I am German, people think immediately of Auschwitz. I think they are perfectly right to.”64
Later, Stern serialized a fifth of his book under the title, “My Father, the Nazi Murderer.” The weekly series ran for seven weeks. There, Niklas recounts how, on the anniversary
of his father’s death, he masturbates under his father’s portrait or imagines himself dissecting him.
His mother is also raked over the coals: a provincial upstart driven by social status. “My mother was as cynical as she was cowardly. She was mad about furs and would have herself driven in a Mercedes, accompanied by an SS guard, to buy on the cheap those corsets the Jews made so well. She didn’t give a damn that they were starving.”65
In Konrad Adenauer’s postwar Germany, whose slogan was “Don’t ask questions! Rebuild the country!” Niklas regretted he never asked his mother to answer for what she did during the war. About those years, Niklas had this to say: “Don’t believe for a minute that nostalgia for the Reich just disappeared! Every measure was taken to prevent the regime from facing trial, to stop sons from questioning their fathers, to block any kind of sincere introspection. We’ll pay for it! Thankfully, media from around the world are watching us closely and are up in arms as soon as a Turk is attacked or a Jewish cemetery is vandalized. Without that, everything could happen all over. I love the German people but I haven’t a shred of confidence in them.”66
For Niklas, his mother was a fundamentally immoral woman who, like many Germans, consciously profited from the Third Reich. In the book he published about her in 2005, Meine deutsche Mutter (My German Mother), he lets loose his hatred for this woman who never showed any remorse. At least, he writes, she never tried to glorify her husband and never again spoke of the Reich, except for a single anecdote about Hitler’s gallantry that she delighted in retelling. She was wholly absorbed by the task of satisfying her children’s needs and had no time for anything else.67
Niklas tried to kill her with an overdose of her medicine in 1959. She had suffered a heart attack and had been hospitalized at the University of Munich hospital, where Niklas came to see her to celebrate his twentieth birthday a few days early. She was overweight, and her legs were swollen by water retention but she wanted to look nice for her son and had asked a nurse to do her makeup for the occasion. Her heavily powdered and rouged face, with bright red lipstick, looked garish to Niklas. She knew Niklas had never loved her but she couldn’t refrain from asking him point-blank: “Tell me, you never loved me, my child?” He didn’t answer, and she filled in the silence—as if nothing had just happened—by instructing him to follow his father’s example and study law, wishing him “an important future.”68 Brigitte Frank died a few days later on March 9, Niklas’s birthday. She was sixty-three.69
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