Hans Frank in Occupied Poland

It was all the more surprising, then, that in September 1939 the declining star that was Frank was taken away from his reserve unit in Potsdam, where he was preparing to join the Wehrmacht in the Polish campaign, and brought to Hitler's special train car. There, he was appointed to serve in Poland as the Gauleiter (Governor General) of the Government General in Poland, with the position officially beginning on 26 October 1939.¹⁵ Frank took this job seriously, even though others in the Nazi hierarchy saw Poland as a throwaway country with an out of the way job, not at all important to the central Nazi endeavors. Poland was to be literally used up as a resource for supplies and workers, while at the same time being the laboratory where the "technique of state" and its bureaucracy would be elaborated upon. In this sense, the position was tailor made for the particular and fastidious Frank.¹⁶

Here as in other areas under Nazi rule, there was no single person clearly in charge. Hitler's practice of leaving his underlings to struggle with one another for "power and jurisdiction" continued, and Frank found himself fighting with the Wehrmacht and the SS (Schutzstaffel, Black Shirts). Hitler himself fostered this conflict, failing to give Frank any political support or help, while concurrently actively nurturing the SS's power in Poland, even though the SS was, on paper, subordinate to the Governor General. This began a long process of continual conflicts in which Frank was perpetually the loser. Frank did eventually manage to contain the Wehrmacht's effect in Poland, reaching a compromise with Hermann Göring on how best to exploit the Government General economically.¹⁷ On the other hand, Frank was consistently undercut and outmaneuvered by the callous SS leader Heinrich Himmler , with the nominally equivocal Frank finding himself trying to govern Poland even more zealously and mercilessly than Himmler did. Whenever Frank tried to assert his power as Governor General, making useless proclamations that were without force of law and utterly devoid of police enforcement, the SS simply went ahead with its own vision for Poland, ignoring Frank's calls for his perusal of all their plans.

In September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich announced that deportation of German Jews and those living in newly annexed territories would be sent to the Government General. From the beginning of Frank's tenure in Poland, he complained bitterly about the Jews that were to be resettled into his territory from other areas within Occupied Europe, saying he had no place to resettle these deported persons.¹⁸ Nevertheless, these complaints fell on deaf ears, with Jews continuing to be sent to the Government General, and on 1 October 1940 Hans Frank ordered that ghettos be established throughout the Government General.¹⁹ As the war progressed, Hitler, according to Frank, ordered in June 1941 that the Jews living in the Government General would be removed from that area in the near future, and the Government General would become for all intents and purposes a "transit camp".²⁰

Thus, it was clear that Frank had a hand with the persecutions of the Jews; whether he was to be considered directly involved was arguable. Although he was not involved in the Final Solution to the Jewish Question on the level of Heydrich and Himmler, it was however clear he had knowledge of concentration camps and had some involvement with the rounding up and concentrating of Jews within the Government General.²¹ His own words repudiated the idea that he could not have known the import of what he was doing and what others within the Nazi regime were doing with regard to the Jews. Consider this speech, presented on 16 December 1941:

The Jews represent for us extraordinary malignant gluttons. We have now approximately 2,500,000 of them in the General Government, perhaps with the Jewish mixtures and everything that goes with it, 3,500,000 Jews. We cannot shoot or poison those 3,500,000 Jews, but we shall nevertheless be able to take measures, which will lead, somehow, to their annihilation . . . the General Government must become free of Jews, the same as the Reich. Where and how this is to be achieved is a matter for the offices which we must appoint and create here.²²

Ultimately, Frank's vision for Poland was utterly incompatible with how Hitler wanted Poland to be treated. Frank evidently indulged in "radical brutality" at times in order to try to become more powerful, by supporting Hitler and Himmler in their genocidal racial views. But this was never consistent; he wavered between this brutality, where he brutally encouraged the mass starvation and murder of Jews, and a more high-handed rationality, where he advocated the self-sufficiency and "rational exploitation" of the Jewish ghettos. This vacillation would not win him any friends and would certainly cost him his power in the end. Frank recognized that Hitler's aims of eradicating the Government General of its Jews would work counter to the Reich's need for material and labor; at the same time, he wanted to become important to Hitler. He could never establish a way to bridge these two contradictory aims.

By 1942, Frank's grip on the Government General was seriously weakening, and on 5 March of that year, he was ordered to stand in front of a tribunal consisting of his enemies, including Himmler. Upon pain of the tribunal telling Hitler about Frank's abuses of power, including placing family members into cushy positions, he agreed to be relieved of his power over racial and police matters. Later that year, Frank delivered several lectures where he decried the fact that German law was being cut down by the Nazi police state. To reward this disobedient act, Hitler stripped Frank all his intra-party positions, but inexplicably did not accept any of Frank's fourteen letters of resignation from the office of Governor General.²³ Frank, in his insecurity, continued to boast of his special place with Hitler, even claiming that Hitler had bestowed upon him the honorary title of "the great realist politician of the East."²⁴

(14) Fest, 214.
(15) Fest, 216.
(16) http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/franktest.html
(17) Fest, 215.
(18) http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/text/x07/xr0765.html
(19) Jäckel, 50.
(20) Schroeder, 42.
(21) Jäckel, 53.
(22) http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/franktest.html
(23) http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/frank_on_Jews.html
(24) http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/text/x07/xr0765.html