Niklas Frank, son of a Nazi criminal hanged at Nuremberg: ‘I am against the death penalty, except for that of my father’

Niklas Frank can’t shake off his father, the Nazi war criminal Hans Frank. He never will. He compares him to a goblin, an evil spirit clinging to his shoulders, refusing to let go. He’ll always have him with him.

“I used to hate my father,” he says, on a cloudy autumn morning, in his little house on the plain north of the Elbe, a place that seems straight out of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. “Now I despise him.”

Niklas was six years old when his father sat in the dock at Nuremberg. The trial began on November 20, 1945, 80 years ago today. Now 87, he has been a widower for three years, and as he chain-smokes, he recounts his memories and laments that Germany and a past that seems infinite.

“It will never end,” he explains, “because the victims are still alive, burning in my brain.”

Niklas Frank was a born a prince of National Socialism, the son of Hitler’s chief lawyer and viceroy in the territories between present-day Poland and Ukraine, where the extermination camps of Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, and Sobibor were located. The boy, the youngest of five siblings, grew up in the lap of luxury in Wawel Castle in Krakow, from where the “Butcher of Poland” orchestrated the murder of millions of Jews. He was seven years old when Hans Frank was hanged on October 16, 1946, along with the other Nazi leaders condemned to death.

For years, Niklas carried with him the well-known photograph of his father’s corpse. “To make sure he’s dead.” In the image, he is seen with a tag on his suit that reads: “H. Frank.”

Niklas repeated the mantra for years: “I am against the death penalty, except in the case of my father.” “I am selfish,” he says now. “If my father hadn’t been hanged, he would have destroyed my brain with his ideology. He was a charming young man. He spoke so fluently, he was so inspiring, that he surely would have ruined my brain, and I probably would have needed decades after his death to find the truth.”

Niklas Frank lives in Ecklak, a village of 300 inhabitants in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, north of Hamburg. From the late 1970s he worked for the Hamburg weekly Stern, as both a reporter and columnist. Even as a child — in the Krakow ghetto or in Nuremberg prison, where he visited his father a few weeks before his execution — he was an observer. His wife, Hannelore, was a judge in the small town of Itzehoe.

Arriving in Ecklak by road from Itzehoe, the host advises visitors: “Go to the garden next door before the interview begins.” Beside it, by the road that runs through the village, stands a statue he commissioned: a crocodile with its skin painted in the black, red, and yellow colors of the German flag, and a giant teardrop. A plaque reads: “The only honest monument to the Jewish children, women, and men murdered by us (also applies to Austria).”

“As far as German crimes are concerned,” Niklas says, “there is no greater chauvinist than me. I have no interest in other countries with many murders. No one committed crimes like the ones we committed with the Holocaust.”

Near the statue, there is a small wooden structure. On the door, a sign reads: “Entrance to Hell.”

The visitor hesitates, cautiously opening the door. Inside is a photograph of Hans Frank with Adolf Hitler. There are photos of corpses in the extermination camps. There is another one we’ve never seen, and it causes unsettling discomfort. It is the corpse of Hans Frank. But not clothed, as in the well-known photograph of those executed at Nuremberg. He is naked. Niklas Frank obtained this photograph two years ago and believes it must be made public. It would be “a personal revenge,” but he says no media outlet wants to publish it.

“Everyone can tolerate lots of images of naked Jews, mountains of them,” he complains. “And they can’t tolerate the naked murderer?”

Among the rare breed of children of high-ranking Nazis, Niklas Frank stands out, ever since he published the book Der Vater. Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A Reckoning) in the 1980s. The son of the Butcher of Poland confronts his father without compromise, sometimes brutally. He is an extreme reflection — because his father’s crimes were extreme — of a society that, starting in the 1960s, embarked on a similar endeavor: holding parents and grandparents accountable for their crimes, whether committed or uncommitted. And accepting that this legacy defines national identity. But few went as far as he did, and not all of society shared his attitude, nor did all the children of Nazis. Another Germany told itself: yes, Nazism was criminal, but they denied that their parents or grandparents could have participated in it.

In his book East West Street (2017), about the origins of international criminal law, Philippe Sands brought these two Germanies together in the figures of Niklas Frank and Horst Wächter, son of Otto von Wächter, another Nazi criminal who, unlike Frank, managed to escape from Nuremberg. While Frank accused his father, Wächter justified his: “I know that the whole system was criminal and that he was part of the system, but I don’t believe he was a criminal.”

The conversation with Niklas Frank begins in a tiny booth next to his house, which he uses for smoking. He smokes the same Camel cigarettes his mother, Brigitte Frank, nicknamed the “Queen of Poland,” used to smoke. On the wall of this room hangs a drawing, made by one of his grandsons, of Lady with an Ermine. The same Leonardo da Vinci painting that Hans Frank appropriated and hung on the walls of Wawel Castle.

Niklas recalls the few pleasant memories associated with his father, who called him Fremdi — “stranger” or “foreigner” — because Hans suspected that Niklas’s biological father might be someone else: either Karl Lasch, one of his subordinates, or Carl Schmitt, the eminent philosopher of law. This was the environment in which Hans Frank moved, Hitler’s lawyer in the 1920s, president of the German Academy of Law, and Reich Minister without Portfolio before being appointed Governor-General of occupied Poland.

“He’s a criminal, but he became a criminal because he was a coward and because he wanted to advance his career,” says Niklas. “Besides, he was in love with Hitler.” He says he hasn’t found any antisemitic references in his father’s youthful diaries. He believes that if Hitler had ordered him to hate the Spanish, Hans Frank would have persecuted the Spanish, or the French.

— And what is there of Hans Frank in you, his son?

— Cowardice. And, if necessary, I can lie perfectly well. This is my father’s legacy. That said, I’ve lied very little. I’ve only done so when I’ve had a relationship with someone other than my wife.

He gets emotional when he remembers that time. He also recalls a scene during his wife’s terminal illness: “I was in the back of the house drinking a beer and crying. Suddenly, Auschwitz appeared in my head, Auschwitz, Auschwitz. In a very strange way, this comforted me. Because we were able to live long lives and even experience a fatal illness like cancer.”

In his talks at schools, he asks young people to imagine that the Jews killed in the extermination camps are their loved ones. To visualize it. How they are taken from their homes, put on trains, forced into gas chambers. He has done this exercise a thousand times. “How many times I sent my wife to the gas chamber, our daughter, our three grandchildren!” he says. “You feel a millionth of the fear that we inflicted on millions of innocent people.”

He also tells young people: “Enjoy life, but remember that you are German. So you must keep in mind what your grandparents and great-grandparents did, or saw done and did nothing to stop. Please react immediately if you come across people who speak inhumanely.”

Niklas emphasizes that these boys and girls “are not responsible” and “should not feel guilty,” but he distrusts Germans. He views with alarm the rise in antisemitism and, in the statements of even moderate politicians about immigrants, a tone that reminds him of another era. He cites the electoral successes of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which, in Ecklak, garnered 21% of the vote in the general election.

All of Germany’s efforts to confront the crimes of the Nazi period, a model effort for many, have a different meaning for Hans Frank’s son. “We live in the best democracy we’ve ever had, but it was built by Nazis.” He argues that, after World War II and the arrival of democracy, “they obeyed the new system, just as they had obeyed the Third Reich.” “I assume there are only a million true democrats in Germany,” he asserts. “The rest are prepared to live in a dictatorship and love it.”

Inside his house, Niklas shows EL PAÍS a tiny room, his bedroom, where dark, twisted paintings he did as a teenager, depicting hanged men, adorn the walls. In the living room, he takes out a box of photos from the golden age — or perhaps the darkest — when the Franks reigned in Krakow. Hitler was there, his father was there. Familiar presences, neither distant nor exotic here. “This is the Queen of Poland, in white, enjoying life,” he says, pointing to his mother, Brigitte, who died in 1959, when he was 20. “They knew exactly what was happening in the camps.” “And this is me!” he says, pulling out a photo in which he must have been about a year old. “Mr. Frank’s unloved son.”

Later, in his old Mercedes, while driving his visitors back to the station, he advises, almost as a conclusion to this intense morning, a distrust of Germans.

— Do you include yourself?

— Sometimes I don’t trust myself. When I’m starting to lie. Or when I’m being a coward. This makes me furious.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition