Hans Frank and the Nazis

Hans Frank was born in Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany on 23 May 1900. Being young, he served but one year in the German military during the first World War. After leaving the military, Frank joined a Freikorps unit for a short time; in 1919, Frank joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Worker's Party, DAP), the forerunner to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Worker's Party, NSDAP or Nazi).²

In 1923, Frank participated in the Beer Hall Putsch as a Storm Trooper (Sturmabteilung, Storm Detachment), also known as the Brown Shirts. In 1926, Frank passed the bar and began working as a lawyer in Munich. Quickly, he found himself busy defending Brown Shirts who were arrested during street fights with Communists. There were 40,000 of these cases; Frank acted as the defense lawyer in 2,000 of them.³

Hans Frank was retained as Adolf Hitler's personal attorney, and represented him in 150 cases.⁴ Frank quickly rose through the Nazi ranks, being appointed head of the legal division; however, in 1926, he resigned from the Nazi party as a protest against Hitler's opportunism towards South Tyrol. A year later he rejoined, and he again did well for himself within the party, representing many party members, including Hitler in his many libel cases.⁵ This success, though, was evidently not enough to keep Frank happy within the Nazi party, for he repeatedly attempted to leave the party. In 1929, the desire to leave stemmed from the idea of pursuing a career as a legal scholar. It required Hitler's intervention to dissuade him.⁶

After Hitler's seizure of power, Frank was of diminishing usefulness to the Nazi party. He was given many honorable titles, all equally powerless, that lent face-value plausibility to Hitler's "legal revolution." For instance, in 1933, he was the minister of justice for the state of Bavaria and in 1934, he was Reich minister without portfolio. He was also the "Reich Commissioner for the Standardization of Justice in the Länder".⁷ Additionally, from 1934 to 1941 Frank was the president of the Academy for German Law, a toothless committee with the "self-assigned" job of reconfiguring existing German law to better fit Nazi principles. He envisioned this organization would lend its weight to make sure that there were no overt extralegal maneuvers; instead it became a vehicle for "facilitating the breakthrough of totalitarian concepts into wide areas of the legal profession."⁸

It was clear that from the start Hans Frank openly admired Adolf Hitler without restriction, and that he believed in the Nazi's Twenty-Five Points. However, Frank took these Points as a theatrical statement, being more for show in order to recruit more members, rather than for what they really were, a bald statement of Hitler's ultimate aims when he took power. Frank, from the first, was a follower, a hanger-on, and never a true leader within the Nazi hierarchy.⁹

Although men from the middle class were recruited to bestow a veneer of respectability upon the Nazi party, the plain truth was that Hitler scorned the middle class. As a consequence, only Albert Speer and Joachim von Ribbentrop overcame the "stigma" of middle-class origins to become powerful within the Nazi hierarchy. It did not help that Frank was also a lawyer - Hitler, in his equating education with weakness, was undisguised in his contempt of that specialty.¹⁰

Nevertheless, Frank continued in his idolatry of Hitler and craved the acceptance and acknowledgement that would come with admittance to Hitler's "inner circle." He seemed to either discount or completely overlook the fact that Hitler would never give credence to him or his ideas. Frank was an extremely insecure person who craved order, and for a long time after joining the Nazis, he held to the idea that he would gain personal glory with Hitler. In this vision of glory, Frank saw himself being the creator of a legal system "linked to the people and based on ancient Germanic ideas."¹¹ He was consistently oblivious to the fact that Hitler was hostile to law and lawyers, and to any obstacles that might curtail his options.¹²

Frank's power and personal prestige within the party began its long, slow decline nearly as soon as the seizure of power was completed and lawyers were not necessary for power. Frank himself recognized a "positively systematic persecution of jurists." Yet he felt that he was in a powerful enough position that he could speak out formally against Röhm's murder and the legal issues that surrounded it without penalty. He was wrong. Hitler was inherently incapable of separating the person of Hans Frank, the Reich legal chief, from the indiscriminate category of jurists, which he hated. It only served to highlight Frank's naivete when he complained that Hitler had never requested his presence in order to expound on legal matters. It pointed to some sort of willful blindness that, as late as 1944, Frank's response to this overt rejection was to exult in the idea that he had been the one to pave the way for Hitler.¹³

(1) Schroeder, 38.
(2) http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/franktest.html
(3) Snyder, 97.
(4) Snyder, 97.
(5) http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/text/x07/xr0765.html
(6) Fest, 213.
(7) Fest, 213.
(8) http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/text/x07/xr0765.html
(9) Fest, 209.
(10) Fest, 210.
(11) Fest, 211.
(12) http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/text/x07/xr0765.html
(13) Fest, 214.