FRANK WAS PROUD to be identified as a war criminal by The New York Times. Early in 1943, he announced at an official meeting, “I have the honor of being number one.” The words were recorded in the daily diary, without embarrassment. Even as the war turned against the Germans, he still believed the Third Reich would last a thousand years, with no need to show restraint in relation to the treatment of the Poles and the Jews or the words he had spoken of them. “They must go,” he had told his cabinet. “I will therefore, on principle, approach Jewish affairs in the expectation that the Jews will disappear.”
“To disappear.” The words generated applause, encouraging him to go further, because he never did know quite when to stop. They will be obliterated wherever they are found, he went on, whenever the opportunity was afforded. In this way, the unity and integrity of the Reich would be upheld. How exactly would his government proceed? “We cannot shoot these three and a half million Jews; we cannot kill them with poison,” he explained. “But we can proceed with the necessary steps that somehow or other will lead to their successful extermination.” These words too were recorded in his diary.
On August 2, Frank hosted a reception on the grounds of the Wawel Castle. This was an opportunity for party officials to reflect on developments. There had been setbacks on the Russian front, but good progress elsewhere. In March, the Kraków ghetto had been emptied, in a single weekend, under the efficient leadership of SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth (later portrayed by the British actor Ralph Fiennes in the film Schindler’s List). This was because Frank no longer wished to see its ruins from the Wawel. In May, an uprising in the Warsaw ghetto had finally been crushed, the final act being the destruction of the Great Synagogue. This was implemented by SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stoop, who described the details with pride in a report prepared for Frank. A million fewer people lived in Warsaw, causing Frank to hope the population could be reduced “even further” if the ghetto was “totally demolished.”
Yet the war was turning. In Italy, Mussolini had been deposed, arrested on the orders of the Italian king, and Polish intellectuals spoke increasingly openly of atrocities at the nearby camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Frank had hoped that the discovery of the bodies of thousands of Polish officers in mass graves at Katyn, along with members of the Polish intelligentsia murdered by the Soviets in 1940, might improve relations between the Germans and the Poles. It didn’t. Polish opinion compared Katyn to “the mass death rate in the German concentration camps,” he noted with dismay, or the “shooting of men, women, and even of children and old people, during the infliction of collective punishment.”
The party at the Wawel offered a refuge. On this bright August day, his diary recorded new lines of combat in crisp and clear words. “On the one hand, the swastika, and on the other, the Jews.” He described the progress on his territory: having “started out with 3,500,000 Jews,” his territory now contained just “a few workers’ companies.” What had happened to the rest? “All the others have, let us say, emigrated.” Frank knew his role and his responsibility. “We are all, as it were, accomplices,” he recorded with careless abandon.
His relationship with Hitler and Himmler seemed to have improved, because the führer offered him a new appointment, without irony, as president of an international center for legal studies. His position as governor secure, he had work and friends, and a cease-fire had becalmed his marriage. Lilly Grau wasn’t far away, and there was music, a new piece composed in his honor by Richard Strauss after he intervened to prevent the composer’s driver from being conscripted to the east:
Who enters the room, so slender, so swank?
Behold our friend, our Minister Frank.
I found the words and searched for the score, without success. “Disappeared,” I was told, no doubt for good reasons of reputation.
Frank appreciated the music and art with which he surrounded himself. As governor-general, he adopted a selfless policy of taking into custody important Polish art treasures, signing decrees that allowed famous works of art to be confiscated for “protective” reasons. They became a part of Germany’s artistic heritage. It was all rather straightforward. Some pieces went to Germany, like the thirty-one sketches by Albrecht Dürer, lifted from the Lubomirski collection in Lemberg and personally handed to Göring. Other pieces were held at the Wawel Castle, some in Frank’s private rooms. He produced a finely bound catalog, listing all the major works of art protectively plundered in the first six months. The catalog revealed an extraordinary range of exquisite and valuable items: paintings by German, Italian, Dutch, French, and Spanish masters; illustrated books; Indian and Persian miniatures and woodcuts; the renowned fifteenth-century Veit Stoss altarpiece installed at St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków, dismantled on Frank’s orders and sent to Germany; gold and silver handicrafts, antique crystal, glass, and porcelain; tapestries and antique weapons; rare coins and medals. All plundered from the museums of Kraków and Warsaw, taken from cathedrals, monasteries, universities, libraries, private collections.
Frank kept some of the best for his own rooms. Not everyone shared his taste. Niklas rarely entered his father’s office suite but recalled a particularly “ugly painting,” a woman with “a bandage around her head,” her hair “smooth and perfectly combed” with a straight parting. Frank used the painting as an example to his son. “This is how you should comb your hair,” he told Niklas of the woman who carried “a little white animal” in her arms, the creature that resembled a rat. She petted with one hand, looking not at the animal but into the void. “Adopt the same parting,” Niklas was told. The picture, painted in the fifteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci, was a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, The Lady with an Ermine. He last saw it in the summer of 1944.