Niklas Frank can’t shake his father, the Nazi war criminal Hans Frank. He never will. He compares him to a goblin, an evil spirit clinging to his shoulders, refusing to let go. He will always have it with him.
“I hated my father”, he says, on a cloudy autumn morning, in his little house on the plain north of the Elbe, a place that seems to have come out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. “Now I despise it.”
Niklas was six years old when his father sat in the dock at Nuremberg. The trial began on November 20, 1945, 80 years ago today. Today, 87 years old, he has been a widower for three years and, smoking one cigarette after another, he talks about memories and regrets of that Germany and of a past that seems infinite.
“It will never end,” he explains, “because the victims are still alive, burning in my brain.”
Niklas Frank was a born prince of National Socialism, the son of Hitler’s chief lawyer and viceroy in the territories between present-day Poland and Ukraine, where the Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps were located. The boy, the youngest of five brothers, grew up in the luxury of Wawel Castle in Krakow, from where the “Butcher of Poland” orchestrated the murder of millions of Jews. He was seven years old when Hans Frank was hanged on October 16, 1946, along with the other Nazi leaders sentenced to death.
For years Niklas carried the famous photograph of his father’s corpse with him. “To make sure he’s dead.” In the image, he is seen with a tag on his suit that says: “H. Frank.”
Niklas has repeated the mantra for years: “I am against the death penalty, except in the case of my father.” “I’m selfish,” he says now. “If my father had not been hanged, he would have wrecked my brain with his ideology. He was a fascinating young man. He spoke so fluently, was so inspiring, that he would surely have wrecked my brain, and I probably would have needed decades after his death to find the truth.”
Niklas Frank lives in Ecklak, a village of 300 inhabitants in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, north of Hamburg. Since the end of the 1970s he has worked for the Hamburg weekly Sternboth as a journalist and as a columnist. Even as a child – in the Krakow ghetto or in Nuremberg prison, where he visited his father a few weeks before his execution – he was an observer. His wife, Hannelore, was a judge in the small town of Itzehoe.
Arriving at Ecklak by road from Itzehoe, the host advises visitors: “Go into the next garden before the interview begins.” Next door, along the road that runs through the village, is a statue he commissioned: a crocodile with its skin painted in the black, red and yellow colors of the German flag, and a giant teardrop. A plaque reads: “The only honest monument to the Jewish children, women and men murdered by us (also applies to Austria)”.
“As far as German crimes are concerned,” says Niklas, “there is no one more chauvinistic than me. I have no interest in other countries with many murders. No one has committed crimes like we committed in the Holocaust.”
Near the statue there is a small wooden structure. On the door a sign reads: “Entrance to Hell”.
The visitor hesitates, opening the door cautiously. Inside is a photograph of Hans Frank with Adolf Hitler. There are photos of corpses in the extermination camps. There’s another one we’ve never seen and it causes an unsettling discomfort. It is the corpse of Hans Frank. But not clothes, as in the famous photograph of the executed in Nuremberg. He’s naked. Niklas Frank obtained this photograph two years ago and believes it should be made public. It would be “personal revenge”, but he says no media wants to publish it.
“Everyone can tolerate so many images of naked Jews, mountains of images,” he complains. “And they can’t tolerate the naked killer?”
Among the rare breed of children of high-ranking Nazis, Niklas Frank stands out since he published the book Der Vater. Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A Reckoning) in the 1980s. The son of the Butcher of Poland confronts his father without compromise, sometimes brutally. He is an extreme reflection – because his father’s crimes were extreme – of a society that, since the 1960s, has undertaken a similar undertaking: holding parents and grandparents accountable for their crimes, committed or not. And accept that this legacy defines national identity. But few reached him, and not all of society shared his attitude, nor all the children of the Nazis. Another Germany said to herself: yes, Nazism was criminal, but denied that her parents or grandparents could have taken part in it.
In his book East-West street (2017), on the origins of international criminal law, Philippe Sands brought together these two Germanys in the figures of Niklas Frank and Horst Wächter, son of Otto von Wächter, another Nazi criminal who, unlike Frank, managed to escape from Nuremberg. While Frank accused his father, Wächter justified his: “I know that the whole system was criminal and that he was part of the system, but I don’t think he was a criminal.”
The conversation with Niklas Frank begins in a small booth next to his house, where he smokes. He smokes the same Camel cigarettes that his mother, Brigitte Frank, nicknamed the “Queen of Poland,” smoked. On the wall of this room hangs a drawing, made by one of his nephews, of Lady with an Ermine. The same painting by Leonardo da Vinci that Hans Frank appropriated and hung on the walls of Wawel Castle.
Niklas recalls the few pleasant memories associated with his father, who called him shiver — “foreigner” or “stranger” — because Hans suspected that Niklas’ biological father might be someone else: Karl Lasch, one of his subordinates, or Carl Schmitt, the eminent legal philosopher. This was the environment in which Hans Frank moved, Hitler’s lawyer in the 1920s, president of the German Academy of Law and Reich Minister without Portfolio before being appointed governor general of occupied Poland.
“He’s a criminal, but he became one because he was a coward and because he wanted to make a career,” Niklas says. “Besides, he was in love with Hitler.” He says he found no anti-Semitic references in his father’s youth diaries. He believes that if Hitler had ordered him to hate the Spanish, Hans Frank would have persecuted the Spanish or the French.
—And what is Hans Frank in you, his son?
-Cowardice. And, if necessary, I can lie very well. This is my father’s legacy. That said, I lied very little. I only did this when I had an affair with someone other than my wife.
He gets emotional when he remembers that moment. He also recalls a scene during his wife’s terminal illness: “I was in the back of the house, drinking a beer and crying. Suddenly, Auschwitz appeared in my head, Auschwitz, Auschwitz. In a very strange way, this comforted me. Because we were able to live a long time and even experience a deadly disease like cancer.”
In his speeches in schools he asks young people to imagine that the Jews killed in the extermination camps are their loved ones. To view it. How they are taken from their homes, put on trains, forced into gas chambers. He has done this exercise a thousand times. “How many times have I sent my wife, our daughter, our three grandchildren to the gas chamber!” he says. “Feel one millionth of the fear we have inflicted on millions of innocent people.”
He also tells young people: “Enjoy life, but remember that you are German. So you have to keep in mind what your grandparents and great-grandparents did, or saw them do, and did nothing to stop them. Please react immediately if you encounter people who speak inhumanely.”
Niklas stresses that these boys and girls “are not responsible” and “should not feel guilty”, but is wary of the Germans. He sees with alarm the increase in anti-Semitism and, in the statements of even moderate politicians about immigrants, a tone that reminds him of another era. He cites the electoral successes of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which garnered 21% of the vote in the general election in Ecklak.
All of Germany’s efforts to address the crimes of the Nazi era, a model effort for many, have a different meaning for Hans Frank’s son. “We live in the best democracy we ever had, but it was built by Nazis.” He argues that, after World War II and the advent of democracy, “they obeyed the new system, just as they had obeyed the Third Reich.” “I assume there are only a million true democrats in Germany,” he says. “The others are ready to live in a dictatorship and love it.”
Inside his home, Niklas shows EL PAÍS a small room, his bedroom, where dark, twisted paintings he made as a teenager, depicting hanging men, adorn the walls. In the living room he takes out a box of photos from the golden – or perhaps darkest – era when the Franks ruled Krakow. Hitler was there, his father was there. Familiar presences, here neither distant nor exotic. “This is the queen of Poland, dressed in white, enjoying life,” he says, pointing to his mother Brigitte, who died in 1959, when he was 20. “They knew exactly what was happening in the camps.” “And this is me!” he says, pulling out a photo that looked like he was about a year old. “Mr. Frank’s unloved son.”
Later, aboard his old Mercedes, while taking his visitors back to the station, he advises, almost at the end of this intense morning, to be wary of the Germans.
—Do you include yourself?
—Sometimes I don’t trust myself. When I start lying. Or when I act like a coward. This makes me furious.
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