Talk:Hans Frank
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Converted to Catholicism from what? Kwantus 17:59, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)
From Nazism. Wellreadone 01:43, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Annoyed Hitler?
- In 1942 he lost his positions of authority outside of the General Government after annoying Hitler with a series of speeches...
What was the component of these speeches that annoyed Hitler? How could one annoy Hitler and not be dead or punished in some way, rather than merely transferred? I'm just curious. --NightMonkey 01:16, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
There are reports that Hitler asked Hans Frank to investigate his family tree. The story goes that Frank discovered that Hitler's mysterious grandfather was a tobacco merchant called Frankenburger, a Graz JEW! He is said to have given Hitler a number of documents as evidence of this. Is there anything to suggest this might be true? Have any such documents survived? It has been pointed out that Jews were banned from Graz until 1860, but how strenuously was this ban enforced? I dare say there were illegal immigrants then, as there are today and if this gentleman was wealthy, which seems likely as he allegedly employed Maria Anna Schicklgruba (Hitler's paternal grandmother) as a cook, could he have "paid off" immigration officials? Did Hans Frank ever say anything to confirm or deny this story?
The idea that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish doesn't really fit. It was a confusion of dates, names, times and places in which none of them ever matched up. There are two plausible grandparent figures and neither was Jewish. --Davril2020 21:32, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
The reason for Frank's survival under Hitler is cited as twofold in Airey neave's book on the Nuremberg Trials. One is Frank's gross flattery of Hitler, and another is the fact that Frank had been ordered to undertake inquiry into Hitler's genealogy by Hitler himself. Though the details of Hitler's parentage are impossible to verify conclusively via independent means today (we have no surviving DNA samples, for example, that would answer the question once and for all), research into the subject has been, needless to say, intense. Even when Neave wrote his book, the questions remained fascinating. He writes (p. 111):
- "In 1930 'disquieting rumours' had spread about Hitler's origins. It was said by his opponents that his father was half-Jewish. Writing in his cell at Nuremberg, Frank agreed that this was possible, if not likely, to be true.
- In 1930, the subject was of the gravest concern to Hitler. He ordered Frank, the consientious jurist, to undertake a secret inquiry. Hitler's grandmother, Fraülein Maria Anna schicklgrüber, was cook to a well-to-do Jewish family. In 1837, at the age of forty-two, she had an illegitimate son. Who was the father? The question was of momentous importance to the Nazi movement, for the child was Hitler's father, Alois.
- There were two candidates. The first was Jewish: the nineteen-year-old son of the household, by name Frankenberger. The second, a millworker, Johann Georg Hiedler. He later married her and legitimised the boy. At the time of the inquiry, the latter solution appealed to Frank since it did not imply that the father of Alois was Jewish.
- Frank later cast doubts on this solution at Nuremberg. He wrote that the Jewish Frankenburgers paid for the maintenance of Alois until he was fourteen. This, said Frank, was to avoid a public scandal. Was it because Fraülein Schicklgrüber had named the nineteen-year-old son of the house as the father, and threatened legal action?
- Alois Hiedler changed his name to Hitler in 1876 and thus became the Führer's father, by his niece and third wife Klara Põlzl. No doubt Alois was illegitmate. But was his father Jewish? It is more likely that the millworker Johann Georg hiedler was the father, but the Frankenbergers who provided for the Hiedler family contributed, as Eugene Davidson writes, to one of the great ironiues of history."
If there existed a kind of 'fog' obscuring the true facts, to the extent that the above doubts assumed some substance in either Frank's or Hitler's eyes, then Frank's knowledge of Hitler's potential genealogy would provide Frank with quite a bargaining chip. Plus, looking over the curious history of the Nazi party, it becomes apparent that murder was the solution that was applied to troublesome people outside the Party (e.g., General Kurt von Schleicher). Ernst Rõhm, having resigned his Nazi party membership in 1925 (see the Wikipedia article on Ernst Rõhm for more details of the convoluted situation) was technically an 'outsider' in this sense, though Hitler's vacillation right to the very end on dealing with him (a pattern that became recurrent through Hitler's rule) allowed Rõhm to become a more serious potential threat to Hitler than he might have been had Hitler acted earlier. Frank, as an 'insider', was subject to the more devious manipulative solution of Hitler's - placing Frank in an official position (complete with suitably pretentious and long-winded title) while ensuring that his responsibilities in office overlapped with and clashed with another appointee (in this case Obergrüppenführer Krüger, in overall charge of the police in Poland). Keeping troublesome insiders busy in bureaucratic wrangles with other Party appointees was Hitler's 'divide and rule' strategy, a point alluded to but not stated in quite such explicit terms in Neave's book. It is also safe to state that Hitler regarded Frank with some degree of hostility. Neave cites several exchanges between the pair that testify to this quite eloquently, though Frank never descended to the nadir achieved by Alfried Rosenberg, the Nazi party 'philosopher', of whom Neave said "By 1940 Hitler had started to treat Rosenberg with contempt. Perhaps it was because the wrteched man really bored him stiff." (p. 103) Frank's competence as a legal person, and the fact that he pursued Hitler's wishes in Poland with ruthless thoroughness, were probably two more reasons why Hitler, though displaying animosity toward Frank because he was a lawyer (Hitler made quite a few proclamations with respect to his views on lawyers), never quite reached the point of despising him to the same extent as Rosenberg. Hitler no doubt enjoyed the reports from the SS on the conduct of Frank and his family in Poland too - Neave writes:
- "Reports from the SS on the 'unbelievable conduct' of the Frank family had poured in to Hitler, who laughed, no doubt unkindly. He knew the emptiness of the Governor-General's position. Poland was subjugated by the SS. But he had to admit that Frank had done his best to carry out his original orders. These were characteristic of Hitler himself: 'To assume administration of the conquered territories with the special order ruthlessly to exploit this region as a war zone and booty country, to reduce it, as it were, to a heap of rubble in its economic, social, cultural and political structure'." (p. 112)
Quite a few figures 'annoyed Hitler' and lived to tell the tale - Colonel-General Alfried Jodl being one of them. Though Jodl was technically an 'outsider', not being an actual Nazi Party member, his contributions to Hitler's military campaigns in Europe made him an 'insider', and one who was in military rank subordinate in any case to Wilhelm Keitel, who was a much weaker man and much more easily subject to Hitler's whims and caprices. Doubtless Hitler took much advantage of that in power struggles with military officers ... Calilasseia 09:10, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
