Son Hans Frank fights fathers heritage

[pjotr]

Niklas Frank was just seven years old when his father, Hans Frank, Hitler’s legal adviser and Governor General of occupied Poland, was executed at Nuremberg as a Nazi war criminal. Throughout his life, Niklas has attempted to come to terms with the enormity of the crimes his father committed, and this remarkable book traces how after years of research he uncovered the extent of the horror unleashed by the man who was known as the butcher of Poland.

The Father is an extraordinary account of a scarred son struggling to comprehend the depravity of the acts that were committed by his father. Whereas other descendants of Hitler’s henchmen and co-collaborators have tried to explain or to forget the crimes of their forebears, Niklas’s disgust for his father’s actions is unremitting. This book is his attempt to seek revenge.

Featuring forewords by Philippe Sands and Sir Ian Kershaw, The Father is by turns shocking, twisted and heart-rending; a devastating settling of accounts written by a son addressing his father as he pictures him burning in the eternal fires of hell.


Niklas Frank with the image of his hanged father in Nürnberg, West-Germany

Hans Frank, Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories. During his tenure, he instituted a reign of terror against the civilian population and became directly involved in the mass murder of Jews. He engaged in the use of forced labour and oversaw four of the extermination camps. Frank remained head of the General Government until its collapse in early 1945.

[pjotr]

[pjotr]

[pjotr]

[pjotr]

Niklas Frank visits a meeting a far right meeting of a Rightwing National Populist political party. The critical Frank states that the politicians of this party use exactly the same words and slogans as the Nazi's 85 years ago. He goes into discussions with the far right people present at the meeting and gets a hostile reaction. His life mission is to counter the ideas and ideology (Nazism) of his father Hans Frank, the Butcher of Poland. Niklas Frank is deeply ashamed of his fathers actions, work and presence in Poland, the murder of Polish Jews and Roman Catholic Poles. Women, childeren and men. That gruesome heritage of his father haunts him.