Hans Frank, the Killer of Many Polish Jews Without Pulling the Trigger

Hans Frank served as a personal legal advisor to Adolf Hitler and was former “Generalgouverneur of Poland” a region which soon became the testing ground for the conspirators' program of "Lebensraum." Frank referred the policy which he envisioned to put into effect by declaring: "Poland shall be treated like a colony; the Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German World Empire." Frank can be considered the emblematic ‘desk perpetrator’, never personally drawing the trigger but managerially supporting the smooth organization of the killing operations and deportation of Polish Jews. The area originally contained from 2,500,000 to 3,500,000 Jews. They were forced into ghettoes, subjected to discriminatory laws, deprived of the food necessary to avoid starvation, and finally systematically and brutally exterminated. On 16th December, 1941, Frank told the Cabinet of the Governor General: "We must annihilate the Jews, wherever we find them and wherever it is possible, in order to maintain there the structure of the Reich as a whole." By 25th January, 1944, Frank estimated that there were only 100,000 Jews left. Frank was nicknamed “The Jew butcher of Cracow” Whilst Hitler’s regime was disintegrating during the spring of 1945, Frank had fled to Haus Bergfrieden, Bavaria, where he was later captured by the US 7th Army on May 4th 1945. As mentioned in previous chapter, there was no former case against the Jewish before the International Military Tribunal. However the London Charter in Article 6 (c) stated that “before crimes against humanity could be proven, crimes against peace and war crimes had to be established”
British Chief Prosecutor, Sir Hartley made this clear in Shawcross’s closing statement: ‘So the crimes against the...

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... wasn’t important enough to convict Frank on the matter of Majdanek, Treblinka or Auschwitz as they already had sufficient evidence.

When Frank was interrogated the trial had touched its one hundredth and eleventh day. The media was getting tired of all of this talk about concentration camps and war crimes; the bench it also seemed was also fed up. On numerous occasions the Tribunal judges pressed the prosecution to simplify the specifics on concentration camps as they believed the particulars were already adequately known: “(…) It is not in the interest of the Trial, which the Charter directs should be an expeditious one, that further evidence should be presented at this stage on the question of concentration camps.” The Prosecution at least were not supported by the bench to present another story of what would have seemed to be just another concentration camp.