--- title: "Life and Death of Hans Frank" description: "Hans Frank was Governor-General of occupied Poland and a convicted Nazi war criminal. Read his life, crimes, Nuremberg trial and execution." url: "https://www.normandy1944.info/home/commanders/life-and-death-of-hans-frank" date: "2026-08-18T13:34:53+00:00" language: "en-GB" --- ![Life and Death of Hans Frank](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/commanders/german/d-day-normandy-beyond-commanders-hans-frank-bw.jpg) # Hans Frank ## SS-Obergruppenführer Country of origin: Germany - [ Hans Frank](#) Commanders ## Who was Hans Frank? **Hans Frank** was a **German lawyer**, **senior Nazi official** and **convicted war criminal** who served as **Governor-General of occupied Poland** during the **Second World War**. Before Hitler took power, a close associate of [**Adolf Hitler**](https://www.normandy1944.info/home/commanders/life-and-death-of-adolf-hitler) and an important legal figure in the early Nazi movement, Frank's political influence in Berlin declined sharply after January 1933. Nevertheless, Frank played a central role in administering occupied Polish territories and implementing policies that resulted in widespread persecution, forced labour and mass murder. Following Germany's defeat in 1945, he was arrested, tried before the **International Military Tribunal** at **Nuremberg** and **executed** for **war crimes and crimes against humanity on 16 October 1946**. ### Quick Facts **Full name:** Hans Michael Frank **Born:** 23 May 1900, Karlsruhe, German Empire **Died:** 16 October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany **Age at death:** 46 **Political party:** National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) **Position:** Governor-General of Occupied Poland (1939–1945) and Reich Minister without portfolio (1934–1945) **Years in office as GG:** 1939–1945 **Known for:** Nazi occupation policy in Poland, the General Government, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the Nuremberg Trials **Military service:** Prepared for military service at the end of the First World War, but the war ended before he saw service or combat **Profession:** Lawyer **Executed:** 16 October 1946 following conviction at the Nuremberg Trials ### Early Life and Education **Hans Michael Frank** was born in **Karlsruhe** on **23 May 1900**. The middle child of a lawyer, he spent much of his youth in **Munich**. During the final phase of the First World War, Frank was ready to enter military service, but the war ended before he could serve or fight. After the war, Frank studied law. In **1924**, he completed his doctorate in law, beginning a legal career that would soon become deeply connected with the rise of the Nazi movement. ### Radical Nationalism and the Early Nazi Movement During the turbulent years after the First World War, **Hans Frank** became involved in radical nationalist and völkisch circles. He joined the **Thule Society**, served in the **Freikorps** under **Franz Ritter von Epp**, and became an early supporter of the **German Workers' Party (DAP)**, which later became the **National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP)**. > In **November 1923**, Frank took part in the failed **Beer Hall Putsch** alongside [**Adolf Hitler**](https://www.normandy1944.info/home/commanders/life-and-death-of-adolf-hitler). After the coup attempt collapsed, he briefly fled to Italy to avoid legal prosecution, returning only when proceedings against him were stayed. ### Adolf Hitler's Personal Lawyer Frank soon became one of **Adolf Hitler's** most important legal advisers and rose to prominence as the chief lawyer of the **NSDAP**. During the party's rise to power, he represented Hitler and the Nazi movement in hundreds of legal cases, using the courtroom as a political stage as much as a legal forum. One of Frank's most significant legal appearances came during the **1930 Leipzig court-martial** of three **Reichswehr** officers accused of spreading Nazi propaganda within the army. As defence counsel, Frank helped turn the trial into a national event. Hitler appeared as a witness, using the opportunity to present the Nazi movement as a disciplined political force and to win sympathy among elements of the German officer corps. > By **October 1928**, Frank had founded the **National Socialist German Jurists Association**. In **1930**, he was elected to the **Reichstag**, a seat he would hold until the collapse of the Third Reich. ### The Architecture of the Nazi Legal State After the Nazi seizure of power in **1933**, Frank was appointed **State Commissioner for Justice in Bavaria** and later became **Bavarian Minister of Justice**. On **2 June 1933**, Hitler raised him to the rank of **Reichsleiter**, one of the highest political ranks in the Nazi Party. Frank also founded the **Academy for German Law** and served as its president. In **December 1934**, he entered the Reich government as a **Reich Minister without portfolio**. In these roles he attempted to reshape the German legal system according to Nazi ideology, arguing that law should serve the racial and political goals of the state. > Although Frank occasionally objected to arbitrary killings when they undermined the formal authority of the legal system, such objections were not based on opposition to Nazi repression itself. His work helped provide the regime with a legal facade while the rule of law was dismantled and replaced by the will of the Führer. ### Governor-General of Occupied Poland The defining and most destructive chapter of Frank's life began after the German invasion of **Poland** in **September 1939**. On **26 October 1939**, he was appointed **Governor-General** of the occupied Polish territories not directly annexed into the German Reich. Frank established his headquarters in **Kraków** and took up residence in **Wawel Castle**, one of Poland's most important historic and royal sites. From there he governed the **General Government**, an area that initially covered roughly 90,000 square kilometres and later expanded substantially after the District of Galicia was incorporated into the General Government in 1941. It contained millions of Polish citizens and Jews under German occupation. ### The General Government Under Frank's administration, the **General Government** became a territory of exploitation, forced labour, terror and mass persecution. Polish society was stripped of political rights, cultural institutions were attacked, and the civilian population was subjected to arrests, executions, deportations and forced labour. Frank's rule was marked by the systematic destruction of Polish political, intellectual and cultural life. Universities were closed, elites were persecuted, and the occupying authorities sought to reduce the Polish population to a pool of labour for the German war economy. ### Life at Wawel Castle While the population under his rule endured occupation, starvation, forced labour and mass violence, **Hans Frank** lived in comfort at **Wawel Castle** in Kraków. He surrounded himself with art, music and the symbols of power, presenting himself as a cultured ruler of occupied Poland. His wife, **Brigitte Frank**, embraced the family's elevated wartime status. According to their son Niklas Frank, when Hans Frank became Governor-General he knelt before Brigitte and told her, **"Brigitte, you will become the Queen of Poland."** The phrase originated with Hans Frank himself; Brigitte was not formally addressed as the "Queen of Poland." She nevertheless exploited the family's privileged position in occupied Poland for personal gain. The contrast between the luxury of Frank's household and the suffering of the people under his administration became one of the most revealing features of his rule. ### Persecution of the Polish Population Frank's administration oversaw widespread repression of the Polish population. Civilians were rounded up for forced labour, communities were subjected to collective punishment, and countless people were imprisoned or executed as part of German occupation policy. The **General Government** was not intended to function as a normal civil administration. It was designed as a colonial occupation regime in which German interests, military needs and Nazi racial ideology shaped every aspect of policy. ### The Holocaust in Occupied Poland The territory governed by Frank became central to the persecution and murder of European Jews. Jewish communities were forced into overcrowded ghettos, including the **Warsaw Ghetto**, where starvation, disease and deportations destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. On **16 December 1941**, Frank spoke to senior officials about the fate of the Jewish population in the General Government. His words revealed both his knowledge of the regime's intentions and his willingness to participate in its murderous policy: "We were told in Berlin, 'Why all this bother? We can do nothing with them... So, liquidate them yourselves.' Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them." > This statement later became one of the most important pieces of evidence demonstrating Frank's involvement in the Nazi program of persecution and mass murder. ### The Death Camps of the General Government During Frank's tenure, the **General Government** became one of the central locations of Nazi mass murder in occupied Europe. Several of the main extermination camps were located within or closely connected to the territory under his administration, including **Bełżec**, [**Sobibór**](https://www.normandy1944.info/holocaust/concentrationcamps/sobibor), **Treblinka** and [**Majdanek**](https://www.normandy1944.info/holocaust/concentrationcamps/majdanek). Frank later claimed that the extermination program had been controlled entirely by [**Heinrich Himmler**](https://www.normandy1944.info/home/commanders/life-and-death-of-heinrich-himmler) and the **SS**, and that he had not known the full extent of the killing operations until late in the war. The **International Military Tribunal** rejected these claims. His own speeches, diaries and administrative position demonstrated that he was fully implicated in the policies that made genocide possible within the territory he governed. As Hitler's deputy in the General Government, Frank bore political responsibility for crimes committed within the territory. According to Niklas Frank, this was also central to his father's conflict with Himmler: Frank insisted upon the **"unity of law" (Einheit des Rechts)** and regarded himself as the supreme political authority in the General Government, while in practice the decisive coercive power increasingly rested with Himmler and the SS. ### Decline of the Third Reich As the war turned against Germany, Frank's power declined. The advance of the **Soviet Red Army** in **January 1945** forced him to flee Kraków and abandon the General Government. By then, millions of Jews and non-Jewish Poles had perished within the territory under his administration through executions, starvation, forced labour, deportation and mass murder. Frank's attempt to distance himself from the worst crimes of the regime came too late. His role as Governor-General had placed him at the centre of one of the most brutal occupation regimes in Nazi Europe. ### Capture and the Nuremberg Trials Frank was captured by American troops on **4 May 1945** near **Tegernsee, in the Schliersee area**, in southern Bavaria. After his arrest, he attempted suicide twice, leaving him with a partially paralyzed left hand. According to Niklas Frank, the first attempt followed a severe beating by American soldiers who had recently liberated Dachau Concentration Camp. He was indicted before the **International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg** on charges of **war crimes, preparing a war** and **crimes against humanity**. Frank had grown up in the **Old Catholic (Alt-Katholik)** tradition, a church separate from the Roman Catholic Church. During his captivity, he turned to Roman Catholicism and presented himself publicly as a man confronting the moral consequences of National Socialism. Niklas Frank, however, rejects the idea that his father truly accepted personal guilt, noting that Hans Frank wrote critically of the trial and denied that it represented genuine justice. In a decision that proved disastrous for his defence, Frank voluntarily surrendered **43 volumes** of his personal diaries to Allied investigators. He appears to have believed that the diaries would show his conflicts with other Nazi officials and help separate him from the worst crimes of the regime. Instead, they provided extensive evidence of his administrative guilt, his knowledge of persecution and his complicity in the crimes committed in occupied Poland. ### Judgment and Execution When confronted with his own statements at Nuremberg, Frank did not deny them. In one of the most striking moments of the trial, he acknowledged that the guilt of Germany would not be erased even after a thousand years. Yet his statements about responsibility were contradictory. When asked by his lawyer whether he personally bore responsibility for the killing of Jews, Frank acknowledged responsibility but then broadened that guilt to Germany as a whole. In his final statement before the judges retired to consider their verdicts, he argued that German guilt had been offset by crimes committed against Germans by Russians, Poles and Czechs. On **1 October 1946**, the tribunal found **Hans Frank** guilty of **war crimes** and **crimes against humanity**. He was sentenced to death. > On **16 October 1946**, Frank was executed by hanging at **Nuremberg Prison**. His body was later cremated in Munich and his ashes were scattered into the **Wentzbach, which flows into the River Isar** to prevent his grave from becoming a site of pilgrimage or veneration. ### In the Face of the Gallows Before his execution, Frank wrote memoirs titled **Im Angesicht des Galgens**, translated as **In the Face of the Gallows**. In these writings, he made the controversial claim that he had investigated **Adolf Hitler's** ancestry in **1930** after an alleged blackmail threat from Hitler's nephew. Frank claimed to have found evidence that Hitler's paternal grandmother had been impregnated by a Jewish man named **Leopold Frankenberger** in Graz. This claim, known as the **Frankenberger hypothesis**, has been rejected by modern historians. There is no reliable evidence for the story, and Jews were not legally permitted to reside in Graz at the time in question. > Scholars have suggested that Frank may have fabricated the story either to offer a false explanation for Hitler's antisemitism or to secure a notorious place for himself in postwar history. Today, the claim is regarded as baseless. ### A Fractured Family Legacy Frank married **Brigitte Herbst** in **1925**. The couple had five children: **Sigrid**, **Norman**, **Brigitte**, **Michael** and **Niklas**. Their family life was shaped by ambition, status, bitterness and the crimes of the regime Frank served. After the war, the legacy of Hans Frank divided his children. Some members of the family continued to defend or soften the memory of their father, while others struggled under the weight of his crimes and the public knowledge of what he had done. ### Niklas Frank and the Burden of History The youngest son, **Niklas Frank**, took a very different path from most children of senior Nazi leaders. Rather than defending his father or minimizing his crimes, he publicly condemned him and spent decades confronting the legacy of the Third Reich. In **1987**, Niklas Frank published **Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung**, published in English as **The Father: A Revenge**. The book caused major public controversy in Germany because of its brutal honesty and its refusal to separate Hans Frank from the crimes committed under his authority. In Poland, Niklas Frank's work was received very differently, and he has been honoured there for his confrontation with his father's crimes. > In **September 2026**, his new book, **My Hanged Father and His Bastards**, is scheduled for publication. **Philippe Sands**, who wrote the preface, described the book as a **"wake-up call."** Niklas Frank's work remains one of the most powerful examples of a child of a Nazi leader publicly rejecting the attempts to excuse, romanticize or rehabilitate a perpetrator. Through his writing and public appearances, he has continued to warn against historical amnesia and the dangers of forgetting where political fanaticism, antisemitism and authoritarian rule can lead. ### Legacy Hans Frank is remembered as one of the central civilian perpetrators of Nazi rule in occupied Europe. As **Governor-General of occupied Poland**, he presided over a regime of exploitation, repression, forced labour, ghettoization and mass murder. Unlike battlefield commanders whose reputations are shaped by military operations, Frank's historical importance lies in administration, law and governance used as instruments of terror. His career shows how legal knowledge, bureaucracy and political ambition could be turned into tools of persecution and genocide. > The facts of Frank's life require no exaggeration. His own speeches, diaries and official position reveal the truth of his role in the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust. His story remains a warning about the destructive power of ideology when law and government are placed in the service of hatred. ### Key Dates **23 May 1900:** Born in Karlsruhe, German Empire. **1918:** Prepared for military service during the final phase of the First World War, but the war ended before he saw service or combat. **1924:** Received a doctorate in law and began his legal career. **1926:** Joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP). **1930:** Became one of Adolf Hitler's legal advisers and personal attorneys. **1933:** Elected to the Reichstag following the Nazi rise to power. **26 October 1939:** Appointed Governor-General of occupied Poland. **1942:** Participated in high-level discussions concerning the implementation of the Holocaust. **17 January 1945:** Fled Kraków as Soviet forces advanced into occupied Poland. **4 May 1945:** Captured by American forces in Bavaria. **20 November 1945:** Appeared before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. **1 October 1946:** Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. **16 October 1946:** Executed by hanging at Nuremberg Prison, Germany. > “This biography was reviewed and revised in collaboration with **Niklas Frank**, son of Hans Frank.” ![Life and Death of Hans Frank](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/commanders/german/D-Day-Normandy-Beyond-Commanders-Hans-Frank-2026.jpg) Personal information - Hans Frank - Born: 23 May 1900 - Karlsruhe, German Empire - Died: 16 October 1946 - Executed by hanging at Nuremberg, Germany --- Highest achievement: SS-Obergruppenführer --- Signature ![](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/autographs/Hans_Frank_signature.png) Hans Frank's autograph --- [ More info can be found here ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank) Page updated on: 18 August 2026 --- Hans Frank's medals and awards Below are some of the primary medals and awards associated with this biography, illustrated in part by identical, period-original examples from my personal collection. ![Nuremberg Party Day Badge](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Nuremberg_Party_Day_Badge.png) Nuremberg Party Day Badge Awarded to those who had attended the 1929 national rally in the city of Nuremberg. ![Golden Party Badge](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Honorary-Badge-in-Gold-of-the-NSDAP.png) Golden Party Badge Awarded at the discretion of Hitler to certain members of the party who merited special treatment. ![Blood Order](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Blood-Order-Medal.png) Blood Order Awarded for participants in the 1923 putsch. ![Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Grand_Cross_of_the_Order_of_Saints_Maurice_and_Lazarus.png) Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus Awarded for distinguished merits. ![The Danzig Cross](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Danzig-Cross.png) The Danzig Cross Awarded to those who contributed to building up the Nazi Party. ![War Merit Cross](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Kriegsverdienstkreuz-2e-Klasse-mit-Schwertern.png) War Merit Cross Awarded for outstanding service to the war effort and acts of bravery. ![Nazi Party Long Service Award](https://www.normandy1944.info/images/medals/germany/Nazi_Party_Long_Service_Award_with_ribbon.png) Nazi Party Long Service Award Award was given in three grades of ten years, fifteen years, and twenty-five years of service. #### Cite this historical page I aim to provide accurate, open-access accurate historical records. 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