The Butcher of Poland (eBook)

Hitler's Lawyer Hans Frank

Garry O'connor (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-0-7524-9862-1 (ISBN)

Infos

The life of Bavarian Hans Frank, one of the ten war criminals hanged at Nuremburg in 1946, has not received the full attention the world has given to other Nazi leaders. In many ways, he warrants it more. His life symbolised Germany's hubristic and visionary ambition to an alarming degree, much better than anyone else's, perhaps because he was an intellectual of the highest calibre. An early supporter of the Nazi Party, Frank ultimately became Hitler's personal lawyer and later served as Governor General of Poland during the Second World War. He was a fervent advocate of Nazi racist ideology and became the primary - if not the archetypal - symbol of evil, establishing a reign of terror against Polish civilians and becoming directly involved in the mass murder of Jews. The Butcher of Poland is a harrowing account of Hans Frank, the man who formalised the Nazi race laws.

GARRY O'CONNOR is the author of more than a dozen books, including best-selling biographies of Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness, William Shakespeare and Pope John Paul II, as well as several plays.

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INTRODUCTION

This is a cautionary tale that can never be told too often. Hans Frank’s colourful and sensational life has up to now only once been revealed in its vivid and dramatic colours – by his son, Niklas, in his book In the Shadow of the Reich (Der Vater, Munich, 1987; English version Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1991), with a different emphasis from what follows. Niklas Frank’s coruscating and shocking account, bravely honest and compelling in judgement, and entirely unforgiving, is an autobiographical stream of outrage, related in the first person by the son who was brought up in his father’s shadow and had to deal with what his father had done, and his reputation. This cry of rage was followed by two further books, both as yet untranslated into English: Meine Deutsche Mutter (My German Mother, Munich, 2007) and Bruder Norman! Mein Vater war ein Naziverbrecher, aber ich liebe ihn (Brother Norman: My father was a Nazi criminal, but I love him, Munich, 2013). The trilogy, in ‘discharging Niklas’ heavy burden’, has been described in the German press as ‘taboo-breaking, tragic and painful’.

Otherwise, apart from a factually meticulous and exhaustive life in German by Dieter Schenk, untranslated into English, and a primarily academic account of his legal career by Dr Martyn Housden, an English historian, Frank’s life has in the English-speaking world tended to be overlooked or overshadowed in the lurid and overpopulated gallery of Nazi criminals – swamped by the tens or hundreds of books written on his confrères in evil that even today continue to flood the market.

Frank’s life has for me one particular fascination: I believe no one has remarked on it except for the subject himself. In an extraordinary and rather eerie way it reflects the universal story of Faust. It was of course Hitler who, as Mephistopheles, was behind this weak Faustian central figure, and pulled his strings, first in Bavaria, then in Poland. So it is Hitler as much as Frank who shares the ghastly limelight as ‘The Butcher of Poland’.

It provides a new twist to, or development, of the Faust theme and legend, and it has many points of contact with Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List, although without the inspirational central figure of the latter. It would more than lend itself to be being filmed. The force of destiny, the good angel, the alleviating spirit which finally prevails in the face of unimaginable evil is Poland itself, and the Polish people. The story is unremittingly dark, yet hardly darker than Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s great play. The raging doubts and weakness of Frank’s character, and the sacrifice of his soul to eternal damnation are seen to be constantly at play, and provide the dynamic of the drama.

I have come to this subject in a curious way. First, I have known three actor friends and subjects of biography who have had a connection with the Third Reich: two of these gave memorable film performances as Hitler. First, Alec Guinness enacted his crisis and torment in Hitler:The Last Ten Days, in 1973; the second, Derek Jacobi, was cast as the Führer in Inside the Third Reich, in 1982. Ian Hogg, the third, played Alois, Hitler’s father, in Hitler: The Rise of Evil, a Canadian production. All three had in common the fact that they contributed to a knowledge of what made Hitler tick, what his inner life consisted of, and how it was ever possible that he became the destroyer and supreme tyrant of the last century.

There is a more intimate or personal touch which, from a family point of view, brought me slightly closer to the subject. Maggie Teyte, the operatic soprano who was my great aunt, when her career was in its heyday in the 1930s, took part in a triumphant London Philharmonic tour of Germany with Sir Thomas Beecham, who at the time was her lover.

Hitler, who wooed all celebrities, especially musical celebrities, who could be seduced to his mission, told Beecham, ‘I should have liked so much to come to London to participate in the Coronation festivities (of George VI), but cannot risk putting the English to the inconvenience my visit might entail.’

Beecham’s subtle reply apparently left Hitler looking bewildered: ‘Not at all. There would be no inconvenience. In England we leave everyone to do as he likes.’

Maggie Teyte was also introduced to Hitler. She told me in the 1970s, ‘he was an awful little man and he smelt.’ She refused to sing for him. This reminded me of a story about C.J. Jung, whom the Führer tried to summon to analyse him: Jung refused to leave Switzerland to meet him and take part in his charade. Yet others, like the Mitford sisters, queued up to meet him and found him charming.

Hitler played a great part in the life of Hans Frank, spiritually and emotionally a greater part than anyone else. It stimulated Teyte’s imagination for, later, when she came to prepare a concert version of Gounod’s Faust, she said, ‘Hitler really started it all. I could just see him – reaching out, twisting, destroying. He was the real Mephistopheles. I always thought he should be the centre of the opera – not that milksop Marguérite or that weakling Faust.’ So for her, as for Frank, the Satanic or Mephistophelian figure in Germany was always Hitler.

It will hardly come as a surprise, then, that the main thematic influence on what follows is Thomas Mann’s great flawed masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, which I have read and drawn on in the Penguin Classics translation by H.T. Lowe-Porter. Mann sees the origin and roots of Nazism in the formation of character, personality and actions of its leader, as deeply embedded in German cultural history. To give one example, the following statement of the novel’s narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is an indication of the main concern of Mann’s fictional investigation:

In a nation like ours, I set forth, the psychological is always the primary and actual motivation; the political action is of the second order of importance: reflex, expression, instrument. What the breakthrough to world power, to which fate summons us, means at bottom, is the breakthrough to the world – out of an isolation of which we are painfully conscious, and which no vigorous reticulation into world economy has been able to break down since the founding of the Reich. The bitter thing is that the practical manifestation is an outbreak of war, though its true interpretation is longing, a thirst for unification (Doctor Faustus, p. 297).

Thomas Mann might well have put his finger on the deep cultural roots of Nazism in Doctor Faustus. There is a further consideration, however, often neglected by those who write up the crimes of the Third Reich and their perpetrators and hold them wholly and solely responsible for what they did, which of course they were. This other factor, which it is wrong to overlook, is the dynastic importance of German families and German family life.

In Western culture the interrelation between gods or God, the spiritual aspect of life and the responsibility of man, especially in the working out and influence of the family on history as well as the personal fate of individuals, find repeated and profound expression in the deep-rooted family drama. These emerge in such seminal works as the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus, Sophocles’ Theban plays, which depict the life of Oedipus and his family, and then in the body of works by Shakespeare, Racine, Chekhov, Ibsen and, closer to our age, O’Neill, Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Likewise, in the drama of the Third Reich’s birth and rise to power, the importance of the families who were its progenitors has largely been overlooked, forgotten or deliberately whitewashed in the fear that so many of their components and features are common to the universal human family. For example, in the Canadian film, all the scenes depicting Hitler’s family life and in particular his crucial and influential relationship with his cruel father, were cut prior to being broadcast.

In Heinrich Himmler’s family, where three brothers, Gebhard, Ernst and Heinrich all joined the SS, the impeccable middle-class professional, teaching, religious, patriotic background of the family, stretching far back into the past, was a formative influence that was duplicated thousands if not millions of times in German families in 1900, the year both Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank were born.

What is described in the following pages by its adherents and followers as a heroic epic, namely the two Hitler putsches – the earlier failure in 1923 and the ultimate seizure of power in 1933 – were great days for the mainly very young participants; to be compared, for example, to the formation of the Irish Free State, to the birth of Israel, or the emergence of an independent India after the turmoil of the Raj withdrawal, and the civil war in which hundreds of thousands died – and to the present-day events in the Middle East in which the same constituents seem all too prevalent. The fact they all led to very different ends is not the point I am trying to make here.

During the First World War German boys who were left at what was called ‘the home front’ saw war as ‘a game in which, according to certain mysterious rules, the numbers of prisoners taken, miles advanced, fortifications seized and ships sunk, played almost the same role as goals in football, and points in boxing’. A game that provided a whole generation of boys far more profound excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer.

Here was one of the strongest roots from which the vision of Nazism grew. In fact, this underlying vision of Nazism...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.11.2013
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Schlagworte: governor general poland • Hans Frank • hitlers lawyer • invasion of poland • nazi leaders • nazi race laws • nuremburg trials • poland world war two • Second World War • WWII
• ISBN-10: 0-7524-9862-2 / 0752498622
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7524-9862-1 / 9780752498621