Niklas Frank

Last updated

Niklas Frank
Born (1939-03-09) 9 March 1939 (age 85)
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
OccupationAuthor and journalist
Notable works Hitler's Children
In the Shadow of the Reich
Relatives Hans Frank (father)

Niklas Frank (born 9 March 1939) is a German author and journalist best known for an intimate and strongly accusatory book about his father, Hans Frank, a lawyer who became Governor-General of the General Government in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

Contents

Background

Frank was born in Munich on 9 March 1939 to Hans Frank and Brigitte Herbst [1] as the youngest of five children. His brothers and sisters were Sigrid (1927–d. in South Africa), Norman (1928–2010), Brigitte (1935–1981), and Michael (1937–1990). [1] When Niklas was about eight months old, his father was appointed Hitler's Governor-General of the General Government in German occupied Poland. In this position, Hans Frank became responsible for the Nazi policy of enslaving the Poles and exterminating the Polish Jews. Niklas grew up in Cracow, Poland. He was seven years old when his father was executed in Nuremberg trials (16 October 1946). [2] By then, he had been shunned by his father due to Hans' belief he was instead the son a former family friend, Karl Lasch, [3] and was closer to his nanny Hilde. [4]

Contrary to his father's later stance on the concentration camps and ghettos, his children were not isolated from them, despite them not being a topic their parents discussed directly with them. Niklas was often taken to a concentration camp by Hilde, their nanny. On one occasion, for Niklas and his brother's Norman's enjoyment, the guards made undernourished prisoners sit on a donkey, which would then be made to jump and throw them to the ground. Niklas would also be told that a sad prisoner was a "witch", whom he did not have to worry about, since she would "dead very soon". At another point, a polish servant soiled bed sheets with soot, and his mother screamed he would be sent to the camps. Niklas, who had befriended the pole, heard this and began to cry, which made his mother stop scolding the man and start comforting her son. In the end, she let the matter go, and after the war the surviving polish man and his wife would credit Niklas with saving their lives. [5]

His mother died in 1959. Niklas studied German literature, sociology, and history, and became a journalist, working for the German edition of Playboy and for the weekly Stern . Over the course of the years, his initial embarrassment about his father developed into a "burning, obsessive hatred" as he uncovered minute details of his father's life during a 40-year search. [6] In the early 1990s, Frank was still working as a journalist, [7] after a career during which he interviewed, among others, the Polish trade-union leader, Lech Wałęsa. [8]

Author

Frank contributed as a writer to the 1967 film A Degree of Murder and also to the 1973 Tatort television series episode Weißblaue Turnschuhe, but this would not have earned him lasting fame. In 1987, however, he published a book about his father, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung ("The Father: A Settling of Accounts"), translated into English as In the Shadow of the Reich (1991). This book, serialized in the magazine Stern , caused controversy in Germany because of the unheard-of, savage way in which its author sought to utterly destroy the memory of his father, referring to him as "a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic" and questioning his remorse before his execution. [9] [10] Together with Israeli author Joshua Sobol, Frank later wrote the play Der Vater (The Father), commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival). It was first performed in 1995 at the Theater an der Wien and directed by Paulus Manker. In it, the son exhumes the putrid corpse of his father Hans and revivifies him to answer for his deeds, while his 'phallic mother' (Brigitte) and Hitler are played by one and the same person. [11] Having thus dealt with his father, Niklas Frank concentrated on his by then deceased mother, the once 'Queen of Poland', in his book My German Mother (2005), which reads in part like a satire of high-ranking Nazi women. He concluded his trilogy with Brother Norman! (2013), reporting the painful discussions with his eldest and favorite brother, who had died three years before, on their diverging views of a youth spent in occupied Poland and on filial love. [12]

Appearances in documentaries

Niklas Frank appears as himself in the 1993 television documentary Personenbeschreibung and also in the 2012 film, Hitler's Children. He also appeared in a 2015 BBC documentary, which was shown as an episode of Independent Lens, My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did that aired in May 2016. [13] An April 2017 BBC HARDtalk programme was dedicated to him. [14] He was also interviewed in the Hans Frank episode of Hitler's Most Wanted (Series 1, Episode 8, 2019).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Frank</span> German politician and war criminal (1900–1946)

Hans Michael Frank was a German politician, war criminal, and lawyer who served as head of the General Government in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

Mischling was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and "non-Aryan", such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of 'hybrid', 'mongrel', or 'half-breed'. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Kershaw</span> British historian of Nazi Germany (born 1943)

Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's foremost experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Lammers</span> German jurist and Nazi politician (1879–1962)

Hans Heinrich Lammers was a German jurist and prominent Nazi Party politician. From 1933 until 1945 he served as Chief of the Reich Chancellery under Adolf Hitler. In 1937, he additionally was given the post of Reichsminister in the cabinet. During the 1948–1949 Ministries Trial, Lammers was found guilty of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in a criminal organization. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in April 1949 but this was later reduced to 10 years and he was released early.

The Historikerstreit was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves. The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS were buried. The service was attended by President of the United States Ronald Reagan, who had been invited by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the nation's Nazi past, and inspired a slew of criticisms and defenses that made up the initiating arguments of the Historikerstreit. The dispute quickly outgrew the initial context of the Bitburg controversy, however, and became a series of broader historiographic, political, and critical debates about how the episode of the Holocaust should be understood in Germany's history and identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Mommsen</span> German historian (1930–2015)

Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prize-winning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as a result of the Historikerstreit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher R. Browning</span> American historian of the Holocaust

Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).

The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. It essentially centres on two questions:

Martin Broszat was a German historian specializing in modern German social history. As director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich from 1972 until his death, he became known as one of the world's most eminent scholars of Nazi Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adolf Hitler</span> Dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Otto Wächter</span> Austrian Nazi lawyer and politician

Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter was an Austrian lawyer, Nazi politician and a high-ranking member of the SS, a paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party. He participated in the Final Solution extermination of Jews in Europe, and was instrumental in creating an SS division consisting of Ukrainians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nisko Plan</span> Cancelled Nazi deportation plan for Jews

The Nisko Plan was an operation to deport Jews to the Lublin District of the General Governorate of occupied Poland in 1939. Organized by Nazi Germany, the plan was cancelled in early 1940.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexuality of Adolf Hitler</span>

The sexuality of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, has long been a matter of historical and scholarly debate, as well as speculation and rumour. There is evidence that he had relationships with a number of women during his lifetime, as well as evidence of his antipathy to homosexuality, and no evidence of homosexual encounters. His name has been linked to a number of possible female lovers, two of whom committed suicide. A third died of complications eight years after a suicide attempt, and a fourth also attempted suicide.

There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelm Keppler</span> German industrialist, Hitlers economic advisor, SS-Obergruppenführer

Wilhelm Karl Keppler was a German businessman and one of Adolf Hitler's early financial backers. Introduced to Hitler by Heinrich Himmler, Keppler helped to finance the Nazi Party and later served as one of Hitler's economic advisors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Sichrovsky</span> Austrian journalist and politician

Peter Sichrovsky is an Austrian journalist, writer, former politician and Member of the European Parliament. He belonged to the Freedom Party of Austria during his two terms in the European Parliament, although he was officially non-attached.

Hitler's Children is an Israeli-German 2011 documentary film directed by Chanoch Zeevi that portrays how relatives of Adolf Hitler's inner circle deal with the burden of that relationship and the identification of their surnames with the Holocaust. They describe the conflicted feelings of guilt and responsibility they carry with them in their daily lives and the disparate reactions of their siblings and other family members.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliography of Nazi Germany</span>

This is a list of books about Nazi Germany, the state that existed in Germany during the period from 1933 to 1945, when its government was controlled by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party. It also includes some important works on the development of Nazi imperial ideology, totalitarianism, German society during the era, the formation of anti-Semitic racial policies, the post-war ramifications of Nazism, along with various conceptual interpretations of the Third Reich.

The Frankenberger thesis, also Frankenreiter thesis, is a thesis which has been disproven by historians that claims Adolf Hitler's paternal grandfather was Jewish.

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 Steiner 1975, p. 405.
  2. Nagorski 2000.
  3. Swart, Mia. "'I knew my father would be hanged': Remembering Nuremberg". Al Jazeera. Retrieved 21 October 2024.
  4. Frank, Niklas; Navazelskis, Ina (6 June 2016). "Oral history interview with Niklas Frank RG-50.030.0880". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 November 2023.
  5. Frank, Niklas; Navazelskis, Ina (6 June 2016). "Oral history interview with Niklas Frank RG-50.030.0880". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 November 2023.
  6. Benesch 1991, p. 59.
  7. Benesch 1991, p. 60.
  8. Sands 2012.
  9. Frank 1991.
  10. Benesch 1991, p. 58.
  11. Glothlin 2006: 174–198
  12. Frank, Niklas; Navazelskis, Ina (6 June 2016). "Oral history interview with Niklas Frank RG-50.030.0880". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 November 2023.
  13. "TV Schedule". WYES.org. 24 January 2013. Archived from the original on 21 August 2017. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
  14. "Nazi leader's son: 'Don't trust us' Germans". 26 April 2017. Retrieved 26 April 2017..

Sources