When hatred is a family heirloom

Niklas Frank, an 86-year-old former journalist, is known in Germany for his absolute contempt for his father. As a high-ranking Reich official, Hans Frank, appointed by Hitler in Poland, was among those sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials.

When he hitchhiked across the country as a teenager, the scene almost always played out the same way. “Do you know who you’re sitting next to? I’m the son of the Nazi Hans Frank! Yes, the governor of Poland!” The driver would then, without exception, indulge in invoking “glorious memories” of the Reich. In the 1950s, it was common to encounter former Nazis on German roads. “Oh, really? How terrible, poor boy! Come to my place for lunch,” they would say pitifully to Niklas Frank. By playing the victim, he was able to eat for free, because his family, disgraced and deprived of his pension, no longer had any money. “In public they were democrats, but in private they remained loyal to Hitler,” Frank recalls of these kind drivers.

Retired in Ecklaak in Schleswig-Holstein, a small village near the North Sea coast, an hour northwest of Hamburg, the 86-year-old is the last surviving child of Hans Frank, who was responsible for the deaths of four million people. Known as the “Butcher of Poland,” he was one of 12 high-ranking officials of the Nazi regime sentenced to death by hanging on October 1, 1946, following the Nuremberg Trials. The sentence was carried out 15 days later, on October 16.

Eighty years after the opening of that historic process on November 20, 1945, Niklas Frank still harbors an abiding distrust of his fellow countrymen that extends far beyond the leading figures of the time. “I see every German followed by his own negative shadow,” he wrote in the book Father: Revenge, dedicated to his father. “I am afraid of the shadow of the German born from your spirit.”

It is no exaggeration to say that his life was shaped by the legacy of a monstrous father he barely knew. Raised like a prince in Wawel Castle in Krakow, Poland, with four siblings, surrounded by servants and stolen works of the Old Masters, little Niklas was seven years old when his father was executed.

Screaming out his anger, disgust, and rage at his origins became his life’s mission. After becoming a journalist, he devoted seven books to the subject, and an eighth is in preparation. Unlike his siblings, as well as other children convicted at the Nuremberg trials, who chose silence or denial, Frank chose hatred. “I am against the death penalty in all cases, except in the case of my father,” he writes in his first book, “In the Shadow of the Reich.” Even today, he keeps a black-and-white photograph of his father’s body, just removed from the gallows on October 16, 1946, handy. “I look at it every day, to remind myself, to make sure that he is really dead.” In the remote areas of Schleswig-Holstein, a region in the far north of Germany, his father’s image continues to haunt him. “Not a day in my life has passed without your pig’s snout appearing in my mind,” he writes.

In his charming thatched-roof house, his father's dark presence is felt everywhere. In the library, where the shelves are filled with books about the Nuremberg trials and the war. In the box of black-and-white photographs, which he opens for no particular reason, commenting on each one without interruption. On the walls of his bedroom, too, where, next to a portrait of his late wife, he hangs his disturbing teenage drawings: strange, morbid, and tortured figures.

Father's naked body

His father’s dark shadow stretches all the way to the next street, in the heart of this quiet rural area that prides itself on being the lowest point in the country – supposedly 3,54 metres below sea level. On the street, Frank has put up signs inviting passers-by to peek into his garden, leading them to a shed with only an unsecured door, like a tomb. Inside, he has pasted photographs of the bodies of deportees, interspersed with shots of his father. One of them shows his father’s body, completely naked, just after his execution. An archivist recently sent Frank the chilling photo, and he immediately tried to publish it in the newspaper. Without success. “Everyone publishes photographs of the bodies of Jews in the camps, but not of a dead Nazi!” he fumed. “For me, that would be revenge.” He challenged us: “Would you publish it?” At the end of the garden, his father’s dark coat hung on a scarecrow, standing out clearly from the landscape.

Almost 80 years after the execution, Frank still has not found peace. His hated father stood on his shoulder “like an evil spirit”, constantly following him. Time has not changed anything. In his opinion, “it” will never stop, because the victims are still alive and will never disappear. “Every German has Auschwitz as a second name. Niklas Frank hyphenated Auschwitz.”

"I don't think he was inherently anti-Semitic. If Hitler had ordered the massacre of the Spanish or the French instead of the Jews, he would have done the same. He worshipped Hitler."

In 2022, when his beloved wife died of cancer, images of that death camp reappeared in his mind. “Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz,” he repeated mechanically. Strangely, he claimed that these images helped him overcome the pain of loss. “I thought that, despite this illness, we managed to enjoy a long and pleasant life.”

For a long time, Frank had only vague memories of his childhood. His little pedal car, the authoritative and cheerful way he gave orders to the Polish servants in the house, the races through the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, which he sometimes visited and to which, years later, he returned as a journalist to interview Polish President Lech Walesa, sitting at the very table that had once belonged to his father.

There was also the ride in a Mercedes through the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, escorted by the SS, with his mother Brigit, determined to obtain furs and clothes for a pittance from desperate families. “Im Westen liegt Frankreich, im Osten wird Frank reich,” they joked in Berlin at the time: In the west lies France, in the east Frank gets rich. Looting was everywhere: the treasury of the Polish state, clothes, jewelry, stolen works by old masters. Among the looted goods was a great work: “Lady with an Ermine” by Leonardo da Vinci. Hans Frank kept it hanging in his office. Young Niklas felt afraid of this woman with a headband and smooth hair, whom he believed was holding a rat in her hands.

Carnivorous family

“I grew up thinking that Poland belonged to us,” he continued, describing the Frank family as “carnivores.” His last meeting with his father, in Nuremberg prison a few days before the verdict, also remained etched in his memory. He could still see the hulking figure of Hermann Göring, the Reich Marshal, in the cell next door. His father promised that they would meet again soon for Christmas. “Even at the age of seven, I knew he was lying,” he said, with a look of disgust. He does not remember crying when he heard of his father’s death, but he still saw his mother holding a list of defendants and marking the names of those sentenced to death, including her husband’s, as she listened to the verdict on the radio.

This father, ready to see himself as the “King of Poland”, was neither among the most influential functionaries of the Reich, nor among Hitler’s closest people, although he had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1923. His wife Brigitte often mocked him when she saw him always sitting in the second row in official photographs. The Führer himself knew that he was obedient and ready to fight for National Socialism: proudly boasting of his doctorate in law, he worked to convert judges and their allegiance to that ideology by founding a law academy in Munich in 1933.

“He happened to become Hitler’s personal lawyer in the early 1930s and, without anyone really understanding why, he was promoted when Germany invaded Poland,” explained Niklas Frank. “I don’t think he was inherently anti-Semitic,” he added. “If Hitler had ordered the massacre of the Spanish or the French instead of the Jews, he would have done the same. He adored Hitler.” His eldest daughter, Sigrid, once wondered if their father loved the Führer more than his own children.

“Hans Frank became a criminal out of cowardice and because he wanted a career,” his son summed up. At Nuremberg, when called to account for his crimes, he always claimed not to have known what was happening in the camps, even though they were right next to his castle, hiding behind his status as a legal expert and behind his rivalry with the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. Even today, that claim drives his son crazy. “Of course he knew, everyone knew!”

As Soviet troops advanced on Poland in 1945, his parents, whom he described as a petty bourgeoisie intoxicated with grandiose delusions, fled, taking with them the treasures looted from the country. They filled five trucks with paintings, including a da Vinci. After the liberation, the authorities managed to recover only a fraction of the looted property. Raphael's portrait of the young man was never seen again. Niklas Frank believed that his mother had sold him to support the family, who were suddenly left without any means.

Upon returning to Bavaria after the war, her terrifying mother, whom she despised almost as much as her father, managed to resell jewelry she had stolen from Jews in Poland to Holocaust survivors. She also managed to publish her husband's diary and letters from prison, which she had typed herself on her typewriter. Aware of the appeal these writings had for a nostalgic audience, she made a good living (250.000 marks) and was given a Volkswagen Beetle by the company's director himself, who also bought dozens of copies of the book.

It was only after his mother's death in 1959 that Frank began to ask questions, disrupting one family gathering after another. He delved into his father's archives, questioned witnesses, and persistently searched for a sign of remorse that would at least give him something to hold on to. But he found nothing. Even the line of remorse that Hans Frank had hesitantly uttered at Nuremberg, for which the other defendants criticized him, "A thousand years will pass, and Germany will not be free from its guilt," was bitterly rejected by his son. In his eyes, it was nothing more than a tactical false confession by a coward desperate to win over the judges.

His mother, on the other hand, seemed to sense the depth of his inner turmoil. Consciously or not, she left behind in a letter to a friend after the war a sentence that he would cling to for decades: “Looking back, we were terrible,” she wrote that day. Yet she did nothing to help the Jews, unlike Hermann Göring’s wife, a former actress who tried to save several artists.

Attack on German Shepherds

As an adult, young Niklas decided to live. He refused to let his family legacy destroy him. He got married, had a daughter, and later grandchildren. His career as a journalist led him to work for the German edition of Playboy and then for Stern magazine. But his personal demons sometimes surfaced in his writing. In 1985, he published a scathing article in Stern against German shepherds, entitled “German vermin.” He described the dogs as degenerate, docile and servile, always ready to obey, miserable “sexual stimulants” for frustrated men. “Furious readers protested in front of the newspaper’s headquarters, forcing employees to walk through an impressive guard of honor formed by trained German shepherds,” recalled journalist Sven Mihaelsen, who interviewed him for the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2014. The German shepherd, a breed that was adored by many families at the time, was a favorite companion of the Nazis.

“Hating your father is a long process,” he summarized. In fact, he had to wait until he was in his fifties to bring himself to write about his father. He did it in one go, under the influence of alcohol, on his mother’s typewriter—an old “Erika” that she used to turn the “butcher’s” notes into a bestseller. Published in 1987, the book, which had previously been serialized in Stern, shocked the public. The darkness and brutality of the narrative led to accusations of exhibitionism. Critics condemned his style as crude, dirty, and obscene. The book had to be censored in some places before it could be published in the United States. In it, he described, among other things, how, as a teenager, he masturbated to thoughts of his father’s execution.

Stern was inundated with angry letters. Some journalists distanced themselves from the controversy. “You can’t imagine what I’m going through,” Frank told a colleague. His surviving siblings bitterly blamed him. None of them chose to condemn Hans Frank so vehemently. But none of them led peaceful lives either. The eldest, Sigrid, who moved to South Africa during apartheid, constantly denied the reality of the Holocaust. The youngest sister, Brigitte, known as Giti, committed suicide at the age of 46—the same age their father was hanged. She said she did not want to live longer than he had. The youngest brother, Michael, began to compulsively drink milk, up to 13 liters a day, becoming obese, which ultimately led to his premature death at the age of 53.

Only Norman, the oldest and the only one who really knew Hans Frank, gave up the fight against the family curse. “My father was a criminal, but I loved him,” he said. “I can understand that. You can love and hate at the same time,” Niklas Frank admitted. Norman died an alcoholic at the age of 80.

Descendants of other Nuremberg convicts who were still alive at the time also condemned him: Eda Göring, Hermann Göring’s beloved daughter and Hitler’s goddaughter, once hung up on him in anger when he tried to mediate a request from an American journalist who wanted to interview her. “Niklas Frank is a medical case. His hatred for his father is disgusting,” Wolf Ridiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler’s closest associates, told Le Monde in 1995.

In the 1980s, Germany was already starting to talk about its past. “But attacking a holy father figure with such words was unacceptable at the time. Even a father like his,” explained Andreas Lebert, a journalist for “Die Zeit” and a former colleague of Frank’s at Stern. “People hated him for what he wrote. And God knows, I’ve read worse things in my life than what he wrote about his father.”

As wounded as he was, Frank went further and became more radical, even claiming that the publication of his first book had brought him “a sense of infinite triumph.” After writing about his father, he turned to his mother, and then to his brother Norman. He never shied away from morbid and shocking scenes, insisting that the grotesque was, in his view, the only possible response to such a legacy. Speaking to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he recounted how he had laughed when he saw his mother’s remains, which had to be exhumed and placed in a plastic bag so that his sister Giti could be buried in the same grave, at the request of her stingy husband.

“Nobody has gone so far in condemnation and severance,” said historian Fabien Theofilakis, deputy director of the Mark Bloch Center in Berlin. “Nobody has written and spoken so much about his parents as he has. His approach is unusual because it represents a radical, dramatic reckoning. Making his hatred public is a key element in his strategy of self-construction.”

A tendency towards the grotesque

“When you’re in his presence, you’re one step away from Hitler,” said the French-British essayist Philip Sands, who became Frank’s friend about 15 years ago. Coming from a Jewish family decimated by the Holocaust, Sands had never thought before meeting Frank about what life was like for a man whose father was hanged for the murder of four million people. “I’ve always been on the side of the victims,” he said. “But I think for Niklas every day is hard, like an explosion in his head. He’s damaged, traumatized.” Sands felt a deep tenderness for him. “He could have been the conscience of Germany, but because he’s also so extreme, he’s alienated a lot of people. I don’t think he cares, he doesn’t want to take on that role.” Niklas Frank likes to call himself a chauvinist, but only when it comes to sports and crime.

His stubbornness can be irritating at times. “He has this theory that the horrors the Nazis committed are part of a deeper German character, that the Germans could do it again,” Sands analyzed. “He’s like a thorn that can’t be pulled out,” Lebert said.

The steady rise of the right in Germany has confirmed the meaning of his life's struggle. In Eklak, as well as at the federal level, the right exceeded 20% in the elections held in February.

“There are only a million true democrats in this country; the rest are ready for dictatorship, they have had enough of democracy,” declared Frank, who openly admits his sympathies with the Social Democrats. He also claimed to witness persistent anti-Semitism, quoting the words of Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” He also lashed out at conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose recent comments that immigrants were ruining the “urban landscape” reminded him, he said, of his father’s speeches in which he described Poland as a “dusty nest of Jews” that would soon be cleaned up by a “German hand” using “a shovel, insecticidal powder and other necessary products for everyday use.”

Frank says he intends to die in 2037—at the age of 98—because he hates “not knowing the end date.” If necessary, he says, he will take his own life; death does not frighten him. He opens a new pack of Camels, the cigarettes his mother used to smoke. Behind him hangs a pencil drawing his grandson made: a reproduction of The Lady with an Ermine.

Prepared by: NB