Hans Frank:
Leading Jurist of the Reich
Hans Frank (r), Governor General (Gauleiter) of Poland with Himmler
(l).
Hans Frank as Minister of Justice (1933).
In 1930, Hilter entrusted Frank to research his ancestry in order to
dispell rumors that Hitler had Jewish blood. The discription of his
progress, below, is from the book, The
Trial of the Germans, by Eugene Davidson, University of Missouri
Press, 1966:
"Frank undertook this delicate task, and he declared in the autobiography
written in his cell at Nuremberg that what he discovered made it appear
possible, if not likely, that Hitler's father had been half Jewish.
The main facts are clear enough. Hitler's grandmother, a Fraulein
Maria Anna Schicklgruber, worked as a cook for a well-to-do Jewish family
named Frankenberger. The Frankenbergers had a son who was nineteen
years old at the time Hitler's forty-two-year-old grandmother bore a child
out of wedlock, and the Jewish family paid for the support of the child
up to the time it was fourteen years old. Frank wrote that the money
was given to avoid a public scandal. Apparently, although Frank does
not say so, Fraeulein Schicklgruber had threatened to bring a suit against
the Frankenbergers. Frank wrote that many letters were subsequently
exchanged between them and Hitler's grandmother, which seemed to him to
be evidence of a cordial relationship. Nevertheless, both he and
Hitler were convinced that the child was actually the offspring of a millworker,
Johann Georg Hiedler, a second cousin of Fraeulein Schicklgruber, who five
years after the birth of the child married her and legitimized her son.
But Frank, writing in Nuremberg no longer for the benefit of the Fuehrer,
was also of the opinion that it was not out of the question that Hitler's
father, who later changed his name from Hiedler to Hitler, was half Jewish."1
Hans Frank describes Hitler's effect on him to a prison psychologist:
"I can hardly understand it myself. There must be some basic
evil in me. In all men. Mass hypnosis? Hitler cultivated
this evil in man. When I saw him in that movie in court, I was swept
along again for a moment, in spite of myself. Funny, one sits in
court feeling guilt and shame. Then Hitler appears on the screen
and you want to stretch out your hand to him . . . . It's not with
horns on his head or with a forked tail that the devil comes to us, you
know. He comes with a captivating smile, spouting idealistic sentiments,
winning one's loyalty. We cannot say that Adolf Hitler violated the
German people. He seduced us."2
Verdict and Sentencing of
Hans Frank
1 Eugene Davidson,
The
Trial of the Germans, University of Missouri Press, p. 430.
2 Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg:
Infamy on Trial, Viking, p. 184.