“I’m looking at his picture on the gallows to make sure he’s dead”

“The father, an account” (The Father, a revenge, in english), a work by the German journalist Nicolas franck, is an editorial phenomenon in Germany. Because Frank, a common surname in German, is the son of Hans frank, senior official of the Nazi regime and military governor of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Frank had absolute power in Poland until early 1945, Soviet troops entered Poland from the east and had to flee. On May 3 of the same year, he was arrested in Germany for American soldiers.

Tough among the tough, Hans Frank was tried by the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg trials, he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Frank had been a Nazi since the beginning of the movement led by Adolf Hitler. In 1919, after the First World War and at the age of 19, he already joined the German Workers’ Party (DAP), at the origin of the National Socialist Party of German Workers (NSDAP), the official name of the Nazi Party.

In 1930, he was already elected deputy. He was the head of the Nazi Bar Association and approved, as minister, matanzas like the first one that happened in the Dachau field.

An accusation against his father

The book is everything a depth charge against his father. Frank says that every day he looks at the full-length photo of his hanged father “to remember and be sure that is really dead”.

His father, Hans Frank, was held responsible for the murder of nearly four million poles (a large part of them Jews) because one of their main tasks was to secure your eviction to death camps.

Hans Frank was Gauleiter (district chief), a post which in practice meant being Hitler’s plenipotentiary representative in Poland. Franc never accepted responsibility for his crimes, nor in front of the gallows. Niklas Frank’s attitude is not the most common.

People like Edda Goering have always refused to condemn their parents’ crimes. Niklas Frank no. After years of working for the weekly ‘Stern’ he decided to write a book which is openly an accusation against his father.

Niklas Frank does not remember WWII (he was born in 1939 and I was 6 during the defeat of Nazi Germany). Today, at the age of 82, he publishes a book for which he has spent years studying the abundant correspondence and family diaries kept from his father, who before being military governor of Poland was a jurist who loved Renaissance art and was a friend of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.

A coward and a liar

Niklas Frank does not follow his family’s attitude. While his siblings never condemned his father, his book says his father was a man drunk with pride, obsessed with his political career, a coward and a liar.

He also criticizes his mother, whom he assures us that he was above all while waiting to earn money. Niklas last saw his father at the age of seven, shortly before he was hanged.

He says that during his investigation wanted “at least one good deed, sign of something, sign of a little flower somewhere in its existence, but I found nothing ”.

His father, to Niklas Frank, was an ogre, the same man who ruled Poland on fire and blood under Hitler. Remember that since childhood “I had the conviction to belong to a family of criminals”.

Brussels, special

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