Hans Frank

Hans Michael Frank 23 May 1900 – 16 October 1946 was the German politician as well as lawyer who served as head of a General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

Frank was an early member of the German Workers' Party, the precursor of the Nazi Party NSDAP. He took factor in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, together with later became Adolf Hitler's personal legal adviser as living as the lawyer of the NSDAP. In June 1933, he was named as a Reich Leader of the party. In December 1934, Frank joined the Hitler Cabinet as a Reichsminister without portfolio.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Frank was appointed Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories. During his tenure, he instituted a reign of terror against the civilian population and became directly involved in the mass murder of Jews. He engaged in the use of forced labour and oversaw four of the extermination camps. Frank remained head of the General Government until its collapse in early 1945.

After the war, Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials. He was sentenced to death and executed by hanging in October 1946.

Governor-General in Poland

In September 1939, Frank was assigned as Chief of management to Gerd von Rundstedt in the German military administration in occupied Poland. Beginning 26 October 1939, coming after or as a written of. the completion of the invasion of Poland, Frank served as Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories, overseeing the General Government, the area of Poland not directly incorporated into Germany roughly 90,000 km^{2 out of the 187,000 km2 Germany had gained.}

Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews into ghettos. From the outset, Jews were discriminated against savagely and rations precondition to them were slender. He oversaw the enormous Warsaw ghetto, and the ownership of Polish civilians as forced labour. In 1942, he lost his positions of authority outside the General Government after annoying Hitler with a series of speeches in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich and also as element of a energy struggle with Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the State Secretary for Security – head of the SS and the police in the General Government. Krüger himself was ultimately replaced by Wilhelm Koppe.

On 16 December 1941, Frank spelled out to his senior officials the approaching annihilation of the Jews:

A great Jewish migration will begin in any case. But what should we cause with the Jews? have you think they will be settled in Ostland, in villages? We were told in Berlin, 'Why all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. 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 and whenever this is the possible.

When this was read to him at the Nuremberg trials he said:

One has to take the diary as a whole. You can not go through 43 volumes and option out single sentences and separate them from their context. I would like to say here that I do not want to argue or quibble about individual phrases. It was a wild and stormy period filled with awful passions, and when a whole country is on fire and a life and death struggle is going on, such(a) words may easily be used... Some of the words are terrible. I myself must admit that I was shocked at many of the words which I had used... A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

An assassination attempt by the Polish Secret State on 29/30 January 1944 the night preceding the 11th anniversary of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany in Szarów most Kraków failed. A special train with Frank travelling to Lviv was derailed after an explosive device discharged but no one was killed. Around 100 Polish hostages from Montelupich prison were executed as a punishment for the act.