Hans Michael Frank (23 May 1900 – 16 October 1946) was the Governor-General of the General Government of Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945. Also Adolf Hitler's personal lawyer, Frank was a high-ranking member of the Nazi Party and was prosecuted and hanged during the Nuremberg Trials.
Biography[]
Hans Michael Frank was born on 23 May 1900 in Karlsruhe, Grand Duchy of Baden, in the German Empire (present-day Germany). In 1917 he joined the Reichswehr during World War I and served in the Freikorps. Frank was also one of the first members of the Nazi Party after its foundation in 1919.
Frank passed state exams in 1926 and became a lawyer for the Nazi Party, rising to become Adolf Hitler's personal legal adviser. In 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag and was made Minister of Justice for Bavaria under Hitler's Nazi Germany in 1933. He objected to extrajudicial killings because it went against the law, but in September 1939 he was made the Governor-General of the General Government (German-ruled Poland) after the start of World War II and was responsible for the deportation of Poles, Slavs, Jews, Gypsies, gays, the crippled, political prisoners, and Catholics - including most of Poland's priests - to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland. Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Sobibor extermination camps were run by General Government, killing 2,000,000 Polish Jews. Frank fled Poland in January 1945 as the Red Army of the Soviet Union advanced into the Third Reich, and he was captured at Tegernsee on 3 May 1945 by US Army soldiers.
Nuremberg Trials[]
Frank after hanging
He was among the defendants during the Nuremberg Trials of 1946, in which the Allied Powers tried Nazi war criminals for their actions. Frank and Germany's Minister of Labor Albert Speer were the only Nazis to show remorse for their crimes during the trials. However, Frank was not hesitant to bring up the atrocities committed by the Soviets as they massacred Germans in their invasion of Nazi-held Europe in 1945. Before he was hung, he thanked his guards for their kind treatment of him and asked for God to accept him with mercy. Frank was hanged on 16 October 1946.
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