Hans Frank

Frank, the middle child of three, was born in Karlsruhe to Karl, a lawyer, and his wife, Magdalena (née Buchmaier), a daughter of a prosperous baker. He graduated from high school at Maximilians gymnasium in Munich. At age 17 he joined the German army and fought in World War I. After the war he got involved in the "freikorps" movement, extreme right-wing paramilitary units that engaged in intimidation, extortion, street brawls and political murders (many of these groups were later absorbed into the SS when the Nazis came to power).

In October 1923, he officially joined the NSDAP. In November of the same year, Frank took part in the "Beer Hall Putsch", the failed coup attempt. Frank later became a lawyer and a legal advisor to both Hitler and the Nazi party. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Frank was appointed to a variety of important posts, including president of the Reichstag and minister of justice in the Nazi government.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Frank was appointed governor-general, becoming the supreme chief of occupied Poland’s civil administration. An enthusiastic proponent of Nazi racist ideology, Frank ordered the execution of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the wholesale confiscation of Polish property, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Polish workers who were shipped to Germany, and the herding of most of Poland’s Jews into ghettos as a prelude to their extermination.

The General Government was the location of four out of six extermination camps, namely: Bełżec, Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibór; Chełmno and Birkenau fell just outside the borders of the General Government.

Frank later claimed that the extermination of Jews was entirely controlled by Heinrich Himmler and the SS, and he - Frank - was unaware of the extermination camps in the General Government until early 1944, a claim found to be untrue by the Nuremberg tribunal.

Frank was captured by Allied forces in May of 1945 and placed on trial with other high Nazi officials at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, charged with, among other things, crimes against humanity.

During his testimony at Nuremberg, Frank claimed he submitted resignation requests to Hitler on 14 occasions, but Hitler would not allow him to resign. Frank fled the General Government in January 1945, as the Soviet Army advanced.

Frank was found guilty on counts three and four (war crimes and crimes against humanity) and sentenced to death. He was executed on October 16, 1946.