The Nuremberg Interviews (8 page)

He said, too, that several years ago he had a middle ear infection, with some drainage from either ear. As a child, however, he never had ear disease. Because of this infection, he constantly kept cotton plugs in both ears for prophylactic purposes. I asked how long he had been doing that, and he said on and off for two or three years. “My hearing is extraordinarily acute, even with the cotton plugs in the canals. You see, I’m musically inclined. I play the piano and organ.” His favorite composers were Brahms, Bach, and Max Reger; he added that the latter was a Bavarian composer. “I did not care for Wagner,” he observed seriously. “My tastes are more classical. Der Führer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories.”

At five years of age, he had diphtheria and “almost died.” He recalled an appendectomy at the age of thirteen. He remembered a doctor putting a “needle” in his throat when he was twelve. He grimaced, then smiled, at the recollection. He had two scars on his neck, one on either side, at the level of the thyroid cartilage, which he said were self-inflicted the first day he was captured (May 3, 1945), at Tegernsee. He again attempted suicide on May 5, 1945, he said, when he lacerated his left arm at the antecubital space and at the wrist. He still had a tickling sensation of the first three fingers.

“I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.”

When had he begun to realize that Hitler was not so good? Frank sighed and answered equivocally: “I lost my official office in 1942 because I was outspoken against concentration camps and against policy by force. My lawyer has copies of those speeches.”
¹

And what had he done against these things from 1942 onward? “Hitler took away all my offices but left me as governor of Poland. I remained in Krakow until the end. I wanted to resign twelve times but couldn’t get Hitler to accept my resignation. I wanted to return to the army, but Hitler would not allow it.” He had held a reserve lieutenancy of infantry in the army since World War I.

Had he had any suicidal thoughts recently? “On the contrary. A man
is responsible for the thousands who worked under him. I consider suicide the greatest sin. I’m glad I didn’t succeed.”

At this point I offered him a cigarette, and he smiled and accepted, saying: “Ah! American cigarettes are like the American soul — sweet and light.” It was my impression that he was not being hypocritical or attempting to be cynical. I believe he meant it for a compliment, and that the remark in itself was significant from a character standpoint.

We casually discussed his early life. He attended elementary school from 1906 to 1910 in Munich. During the years 1910 to 1919 he was a student, also in Munich, but in 1916–17 he “couldn’t stand” school anymore and went to Prague. “I wrote about the conflicts I had in school in my autobiography. It was an inward revolution. I revolted against the outmoded ways of teaching in school.” He said he published a periodical while in school, called
Deutsche Jugend Zeitung
(
German Youth Newspaper
), which was mimeographed and spread “wildly” among the students—“more than a thousand copies.” The paper was banned by the authorities. Its viewpoint was “that the students should educate themselves — a protest against old and obsolete forms of teaching.”

He added: “It was just a development of puberty — I later forgot all about it and became a lawyer.” He spent four years in law school in Munich and Kiel, graduating in 1926. He became an assistant teacher of jurisprudence in a school in Munich, and remained a teacher until 1930. At the same time he had a private practice as a lawyer, and one of his clients was Hitler. In 1930, “I had to decide between teaching and law, and I decided on law because of family responsibility.” He became a National Socialist in 1923, the year he met Hitler. His law practice was “political.”

Frank was married in 1925. His wife, Brigitte, was now fifty — four and a half years his senior. They had five children, three boys and two girls, ages six to eighteen. His wife was well. For the last three years they have been separated. They were never happily mated, he says. The only thing that kept them together was the children, and now the trials. “It’s no fault of my wife — it’s my own as well. A difference in temperaments. My wife was a secretary, has a normal education. But she is uninterested in anything which I consider interesting. She is practical, I am an idealist.” They lacked a “common ground.” She had, for instance, no interest in music. He knew her but six months before they married. “We are not well-adjusted sexually. She is a typical north Prussian cold type, not
interested in sex. Just day-to-day happenings.” Both were Catholic. Recently, Frank returned to the church. “I would like to tell you more about that when you have time.”

The interviewing of Frank continues. Spent about an hour or more with him this evening. In the dock in court he presents a rather bemused picture, a manner which he has presented since I first saw him on my arrival here on January 8, 1946. At times he smiles sardonically at some piece of testimony, and other times he smiles and it is difficult to state whether or not the smile is the result of an appropriate external stimulus or the result of inner fantasy. Once he smiled beamingly when the American judge, Biddle, asked some questions of the American prosecutor, Jackson. This was appropriate in a way, since all of the defendants heartily approved of Biddle’s questions (relevant to the cases against the organizations), yet none of the other defendants smiled so beamingly.

In his cell today, in the early afternoon (court recessed to a closed session), he was most cordial, bubbling over with laughter, smiles, and inappropriate good humor. He had been reading when I entered the cell in the company of Triest (the interpreter). He said: “Have you heard? On Thursday begins the defense of the art collector!” He laughed uproariously at his own witticism, high-pitched, almost hysterical laughter; then sudden seriousness, during which his tortuous right temporal vein stood out prominently. “Yes. If his time had been spent more collecting planes, and less time collecting art, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

“It’s strange. Man can get used to captivity. Back to the feelings when people lived in caves.” He again laughed loudly but without humor, with a certain uncontrolled quality. I asked him what he meant, for instance. His face became serious again. “The urge for activity is not great anymore. I live here easily, like a holy man, a hermit.” He laughed sharply and harshly. “In a cloister one must voluntarily keep his promises of poverty and virginity. Here you are forced to do it. Are you Catholic?” He addressed the query to Triest and myself. We answered in the negative, and I asked him why he had asked. “Maybe the pope will move to America! There is but one power in the world to stave off Russia. Our power was too small. Pope Pius, who reigns now, was once in America.”

Asked about his own religion, he replied: “I’m an accepted Catholic. In Germany the son always adopts the mother’s religion. She is Catholic.
It’s all in the three-hundred-page autobiography I wrote, which I gave to Dr. Gilbert.”
²
He then showed me a thin book called
Cabin Boy of Columbus
, written by him. “My idea was that Columbus had a cabin boy who was really a young man. I dictated this book in ten hours. It was published at Christmas 1944. It’s written in the form of an old testament by an old lady. It would have been better if I had stuck to writing such books rather than gone into politics.”

Frank’s father died on January 16, 1945, the same day that Frank left Krakow. He says he believes there is some significance in these two events occurring on the same date. His father died in Munich, where he was a practicing lawyer. He was seventy-seven years old. He had been ill for three months, “the result of seeing so many people burned and dying from bombing raids.”

Frank went on describing his father: “He was very good-humored, a jurist from the Rhine Palatinate. He practiced all kinds of law, but was completely unpolitical. He was good-natured, humorous, liked wine, was well liked, just like a man from the Rhine country would be.

“He was an elder lawyer, a jurist.” What was his attitude toward the Nazis? “He was a very strong opponent of the Nazi Party. He was a democrat. He always said, ‘You’ll see what will happen.’ He had many Jewish friends.”

How did you happen to become anti-Semitic? “Anti-Semitism was not the reason I joined the party. It was because of Germany.” Were there many Jews killed in Poland? “No. In Auschwitz there were; that was in Upper Silesia. I want you to read documentary evidence which proves it was completely out of my hands. For that which I am responsible, I am responsible, but I never had a single Jew put in a concentration camp or burned — that I can prove. You’ll be surprised if you see what my defense counsel has. The extermination of the Jews was a personal idea of Hitler’s. It was in Hitler’s testament. In that he said he had exterminated Jews because they had started the war.”

Frank described his mother, age seventy-two, as “a very strong woman, of country stock, from upper Bavaria. She was a temperamental woman, humorous — a very beautiful woman, artistically inclined. She has a large circle of friends who take care of her now. The proverb ‘No friends in time of need’ does not fit in my case. I’m touched by the care the people around my mother and wife are giving them. My mother is well educated and always writes me quotations from Goethe and
Schiller. It’s very amazing for an old woman like that, especially since my only sister was arrested. She had never been a party member — she was arrested just because she was my sister. My wife was not arrested. Maybe they took my sister because they didn’t want to take my wife.”

His sister is forty, the wife of an employee of the patent office. When her husband came back from the front, he found his wife arrested. His sister’s husband was also not politically inclined. “That’s the only thing I don’t like, taking her a prisoner because of me.” She is interned at Straubing on the Danube.

Frank also had a brother, born in 1897, who was killed in action in 1916. The only other sibling is the sister mentioned above.

Asked about his childhood, Frank replied, “It was generally a good childhood, though in the years after the first war it was difficult. Father was not rich and we lived on cabbages and potatoes. When I was twenty-three we drank malt coffee. This makes the Nazi idea understandable. The mark was worth one-billionth at the end.
³
Out of this period arose Nazism.”

We then talked of the cases against the organizations which were being discussed in the last few days in court. “Against the SS and the Gestapo they have a case. Against the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces and so forth, they can’t do it. As a political measure it’s different. But legally, as a legal measure, it can’t be done. It doesn’t matter that I’m interned or that the trials are taking place. I approve of it all — but I learned most of the history of National Socialism and its crimes during this trial.

“In Germany we heard nothing of Jewish persecution. Other nations had a free press, et cetera, while in Germany we had no free press or radio.

“This trial has one big significance because it shows that the German people are innocent.”

At this point Frank smiled broadly, in a forced manner, inclined his head forward, and in a confidential manner, ingratiatingly friendly, said: “You will have plenty to say — as a psychiatrist, who understands people. It’s a tragic place, this row of twenty-one persons who ruled a part of the world. Already you can notice preparations which might make for another war more cruel than the last.”

For instance? “The atom bomb. But I hope humanity is more sound mentally. My life is over. I have no interest. Not even in looking into
Germany. It’s like a dream. How valueless is everything politically! It doesn’t matter whether I’m judged criminal. I have a great feeling of guilt — I have a feeling that I ran after Hitler like a wildfire without reason. If I can sacrifice my life to make something good, I’d gladly do it.

“I believed that man. If I knew what I have learned in the trials, I would have protested in a different way than 1942.” What protest in 1942? “My famous speech against the concentration camps and against the SS, which I gave at Vienna, Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin.

“Before I die, I demand you read those speeches in my diary. It created a tremendous uproar and crisis, and I was relieved of all party positions and became just a plain party member. They didn’t recognize my request for transfer — they kept me there because it was the most terrible place in Europe. The SS behaved like mad. My headquarters was in Krakow, in the old king’s palace. Therefore one can say I was five years a king, but without power.

“It was just like the whole Führer state of Hitler — a façade.”

Frank was in one of his cheerful, smiling, effusive moods. He greeted Mr. Triest, the interpreter, and myself warmly and said that he was delighted to have us visit him again.

“I feel very well; I have been treated too well — it is an honor the way we are all treated. If we had fallen in the hands of Himmler, it would have been different. I only wish I had a pipe because the Americans took my pipe. I hope I can get one.”

Frank laughingly stated that when he was arrested, everything he owned was taken from him, including his pipe. After the second of his two suicidal attempts, he stated that the American doctor advised that his wedding ring be removed for “safety’s sake,” but when Frank recovered later and asked the doctor for it, the latter refused, saying that he wanted it for a souvenir. “That’s not right. It shouldn’t be done that way. There were other Americans present who said the same thing, that my ring and other possessions shouldn’t be taken. This occurred in the Augsburg military hospital.”

Frank displays emotional lability. His mood and affect changed from minute to minute. He smiled or laughed raucously at one moment, was depressed and almost tearful at the next moment.