The guard at Nuremberg prison didn’t look at him when he gave the date. It was September 1946, and seven-year-old Niklas understood what the visit meant. His father, Hans Frank, the man who had ruled occupied Poland as governor general, was going to be hanged. The family sat on one side of a thick glass window with small holes at the bottom.
Hans Frank sat on the other. Through the gaps, he promised that they would all be together for Christmas at the family estate in Bavaria. It was a lie, and the boy knew it. Niklas had been born in March 1939, just months before his father was appointed to the most powerful and brutal position in the Nazi occupation machine.
By the time he was old enough to understand the world, his father presided over a kingdom built on murder. The family lived in Wawel Castle in Kraków, the ancient residence of Polish kings. Hitler had personally ordered that Frank take up residence there as a symbol that Polish identity no longer existed. From that seat of power, Hans Frank oversaw the ghettoization, starvation, enslavement, and murder of millions.
The General Government became the site of four of the six extermination camps. The family lived in luxury while Poland burned. Niklas’s mother, Brigitte, styled herself the “Queen of Poland,” a title she embraced with relish. She rode through the ghettos of Kraków and Warsaw in an open Mercedes, extracting jewelry, furs, and valuables from Jews condemned to death.
She stole furniture and art from churches and castles. The family spent weekends at a country estate surrounded by servants. In Berlin, people mocked the corruption. It was said Frank went to the East to get rich.
The marriage between Hans and Brigitte was profoundly unhappy. Brigitte had numerous affairs, which fueled rumors about the paternity of some of the children. In 1942, Hans fell in love with a childhood acquaintance named Lily Groth and sought a divorce. Brigitte fought ferociously.
She traveled to Berlin, secured audiences with Himmler and Magda Goebbels, and persuaded Hitler to personally forbid the divorce. Her priorities were clear when she remarked that she would rather be widowed than divorced from a Reichsminister. In retaliation, she informed Himmler that her husband’s mistress was Jewish, an accusation designed to destroy the woman. The marriage survived, poisoned by resentment, until the end of the war.
The children were not shielded from the horrors. Niklas was often taken to concentration camps by the family nanny. On one occasion, for the amusement of Niklas and his brother Norman, guards forced emaciated prisoners to sit on a donkey which would then buck them to the ground. The children were told that a sad prisoner was a witch who would be dead soon.
On another occasion, a Polish servant accidentally soiled bed sheets with soot, and Brigitte screamed that he would be sent to the camps. Niklas, who had befriended the man, began to cry until his mother relented. After the war, the servant credited the boy with saving his life. The last months of the war brought ruin.
By January 1945, the Red Army was advancing, and Frank fled westward. The family had already returned to Bavaria. Hans arrived at their home in the final months of the war, a broken man watching his world collapse. Niklas, then five, remembered one encounter vividly.
He found his father in the bathroom, shaving. Hans put some foam on the boy’s nose. It was the only intimate moment Niklas could recall with his father. In another memory, Niklas ran around a large dining table, chasing his father and asking for a hug, while Hans moved away, saying, “Who are you?
You are a stranger. ” Niklas later came to believe his father suspected he was not his biological son. American troops captured Hans Frank in May 1945. He was beaten and forced to run a gauntlet of soldiers.
The ordeal broke him. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his throat and then his wrist, leaving his left hand partially paralyzed. Unlike many other Nazi leaders who destroyed evidence, Frank voluntarily surrendered his 43 volumes of personal diaries, believing his documented conflicts with Himmler would serve as his defense. Instead, the diaries became the prosecution’s most powerful weapon against him.
At Nuremberg, Frank converted to Roman Catholicism and claimed religious revelations. When asked whether he had participated in the annihilation of Jews, he answered, “I say yes, and the reason why I say yes is because having lived through the five months of this trial and particularly after having heard the testimony of the witness Rudolf Hoess, my conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. ” He added, “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased. ”
Historians debated the sincerity of his remorse.
His own son Niklas regarded it as theatrical cowardice, a final attempt at self-preservation disguised as contrition. On 1 October 1946, the tribunal found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. The executions took place in the early morning hours of 16 October 1946 in a small gymnasium in the courtyard of Nuremberg prison. Hans Frank was the fifth man to climb the scaffold.
Unlike the defiant Julius Streicher, Frank entered the chamber with what observers described as a smile, appearing relieved at the prospect of atonement. Asked for his last words, he replied quietly, “I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity, and I ask God to accept me with mercy. ” He closed his eyes and swallowed as the black hood was placed over his head. Moments later, the trap opened.
The morning after the execution, the nanny took the children for a walk and told them their father was dead and in heaven. His brother Michael and sister Brigitte began to cry. Their mother said, “Why do you cry? Your father is happy in heaven now.
Look at Nikki. He also does not cry. ” She pressed Niklas’s hand and asked why he was not crying. “I don’t have a personal feeling,” Niklas explained decades later.
“And by the way, I was always very pragmatic in my life. ”
That emotional distance protected him as a child. It would later enable him to undertake a decades-long investigation into his father’s crimes that none of his siblings could have endured. Brigitte continued to live at the family estate until her arrest in May 1947.
She was imprisoned with other wives of sentenced war criminals, forming friendships and rivalries with women like Ilse Hess and Emmy Göring. She never expressed remorse for the crimes committed under her husband’s authority. After her release, she published her husband’s book, which presented his self-serving interpretation of the Nazi era. She died in Munich in 1959, impoverished and unrepentant.
The five Frank children each navigated the weight of their father’s legacy in profoundly different ways. Sigrid, the eldest, was eighteen when the war ended. She expressed worry that the family would not be forgiven for what they had done to the Jews and feared retribution. Yet despite this early awareness, she remained a committed Nazi.
She immigrated to apartheid South Africa, drawn to a regime that enforced racial segregation. She developed an addiction to tranquilizers and died there under circumstances that remain uncertain. Norman was the eldest son. His father’s last words to him were advice to remain silent about the family’s past.
That counsel shaped his entire life. He struggled with alcoholism. Though he recognized and was critical of his father’s political work, he followed the guidance and maintained silence. This put him at odds with his younger brother Niklas, whose public denunciations he viewed as excessive.
Yet privately, Norman later confessed to being proud of his brother’s courage. He died in 2010. Brigitte, known as Gitty, was ten when the war ended and twelve when she visited her father in prison before his execution. As an adult, she struggled with the legacy she carried.
According to Niklas, she had written in her diary at age sixteen that she did not want to become older than her father, who had been hanged at forty-six. In 1981, at the age of forty-six herself, she took her own life, reportedly overdosing while sleeping next to her eight-year-old son. The official cause of death was recorded as cancer, but the circumstances suggested something more deliberate. Michael became an ardent defender of his father’s innocence, maintaining that Hans Frank had been unfairly judged by history.
Niklas described his brother’s peculiar addiction to milk, a compulsion that contributed to severe obesity and ultimately organ failure. Michael died in 1990 at the age of fifty-three. Niklas took the opposite path. While living in Bavaria after the war, he came across an American newspaper with photographs of concentration camp victims, including children his own age.
When he realized these camps had been located in Poland, where he had spent his early childhood, the discovery gave him what he called a shock that made the resistance against my father stronger. What began as embarrassment transformed into what he described as a burning obsessive hatred as he uncovered minute details of his father’s life over a forty-year research project. In 1987, he published The Father: A Settling of Accounts. The book caused a sensation.
Where others had defended, excused, or remained silent about their parents, Niklas attacked his father with savage intensity. He referred to Hans Frank as a slimehole of a Hitler fanatic and questioned the sincerity of his last-minute religious conversion. The book reads as a monologue addressed to his father in hell, filled with hatred, contempt, and detailed documentation of crimes. Some praised his honesty.
Others questioned whether such a public evisceration of one’s own father was appropriate. In 2005, he turned his attention to his mother. The book portrayed her as an ice-cold opportunist who exploited her position to enrich herself while Jews were being murdered around her. In 2011, he completed a trilogy about his family.
He read his father’s 43 volumes of diaries, studied trial transcripts, interviewed survivors and historians, and traveled to the sites of atrocities. The result was not peace or closure but a form of ongoing reckoning that he compared to a lifelong wound that cannot heal. The family remained in contact despite fierce disagreements. Niklas maintained relationships with his siblings even as he publicly denounced the man they defended.
The divisions were less about love than about truth, about whether acknowledging historical reality was worth the pain it caused. Into his eighties, Niklas continued to write and give public talks. He expressed no regret for his public denunciations of his parents and argued that honest confrontation with the past was the only path forward. His work stands as a challenge to the more common pattern among Nazi descendants, which has been to maintain silence, offer qualified defenses, or refuse to engage with the historical record.
Niklas once said that his father’s execution was the greatest favor he could have received. In a world where Hans Frank had survived to raise his children, Niklas believed he would have been indoctrinated into the same worldview that led his father to oversee the murder of millions. The execution freed him to discover the truth on his own terms, however painful that discovery proved to be.
