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THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Saturday, August 1, Frank attended events to mark the anniversary of the incorporation of Distrikt Galizien into the General Government, held at the Opera House and in the Great Hall of the former parliament of Galicia. Seven decades later, when the university invited me to give a lecture about that ceremony, I spoke in the same room, standing before a photograph of Frank as he delivered one of his speeches, celebrating the transfer of power from military to civilian government, now under the control of Wächter.
When Frank spoke, the university building was draped in red, white, and black flags. To get to the Great Hall, Frank ascended the central staircase and walked to a seat at the center of the stage. He was introduced, moved to a wooden lectern garlanded in leaves, under an eagle astride a swastika. The room was packed, the speech praised in the Gazeta Lwowska as announcing the return of civilization to the city. “European rules of social order” were coming home to Lemberg. Frank thanked Governor Wächter for “superb leadership” after two years as governor of Kraków. “I came here to thank you and express gratitude on behalf of the Führer and the Reich,” Frank told Wächter, who sat on the raised platform, to his right.
Frank, Great Hall, August i, 1942
Frank told the audience of party leaders that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was justified, that Galicia was the “primeval source of the Jewish world.” Control of Lemberg and its environs allowed him to deal with the core of the Jewish problem.
“We appreciate what the Führer has given us with his gift of the district of Galicia, and I am not talking here about its Jews,” he shouted, once more too loudly. “Yes, we still have some of them around but will take care of that.” He was a fine orator, no doubt about that, able to keep the audience’s attention.
“Incidentally,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, addressing his words to Otto von Wächter, “I don’t seem to have any of that trash hanging around here today. What’s going on? They tell me that there were thousands and thousands of those flat-footed primitives in this city once upon a time— but there hasn’t been a single one to be seen since I arrived.” The audience erupted into applause. Frank had the answer to the question. The entrance to the Lemberg ghetto was no more than a few hundred meters from the lectern at which he spoke. That he knew, because his administration prepared the map “Umsiedlung der Juden” (Resettlement of the Jews) just a year earlier, with the ghetto’s seven districts in which all the city’s Jews lived. His decree meant that to set foot outside the ghetto without permission was punishable by death.
He didn’t know exactly who was in that ghetto, although he knew how to whip up the audience.
“Don’t tell me that you’ve been treating them badly?” he said. Have people finally got outraged by them? Frank told the audience that he was solving the Jewish question. No more would they be able to travel to Germany. The message was clear, his words met by “lively applause.”
Later that evening, he spent time with Frau Charlotte von Wächter, the wife of the governor. She passed a considerable part of the day with Frank, as she recorded in her diary:
Frank came for breakfast at nine o’clock and went away immediately with Otto. [I] should have come but didn’t. I am home with Miss Wickl. Afterward, I slept deeply. Very tired. At four o’clock…[I was sent] to Frank, who wanted to play chess again. I won two times. After that he angrily went to bed. Then he came back and drove away immediately.
The diary made no mention of the day’s other developments, the decisions taken by her husband under the watchful eye of Governor-General Frank and soon implemented.