EARLY ON THE MORNING of the first day of the trial, November 20, 1945, Hans Frank awoke in a small cell with an open toilet in the prison behind the courtroom. At about nine o’clock, he was escorted by a white-helmeted guard along a series of corridors to the small lift that took him up to the courtroom. He entered through the sliding wooden door and was then led to the front bench of the dock. Five along from Hermann Göring, he was seated next to Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s principal racial theorist. The prosecutors were seated to Frank’s right, around four long wooden tables, divided by nationality. In military garb, the Russians were closest to the defendants, then the French, then the British. The Americans were farthest away. Behind the prosecutors sat members of the press corps, chatting noisily. Above them, a lucky few were allowed to sit in the public gallery. Directly opposite Frank was the judges’ bench, still empty, behind a row of female stenographers.
Frank wore a gray suit and the dark glasses that would distinguish him through the trial. He kept his gloved left hand out of sight, evidence of the failed suicide attempt. He was composed and showed no obvious emotion. Fourteen more defendants followed Frank into the courtroom, seated to his left and on a second bench. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, former gauleiter of Vienna, sat immediately behind him. Three defendants were absent: Robert Ley had killed himself, Ernst Kaltenbrunner felt unwell, and Martin Bormann was yet to be apprehended.
Lauterpacht was in the courtroom that morning, observing the defendants, but Lemkin was back in Washington. Neither man knew what had happened to his family, unaccounted for somewhere in Poland. Nor did they have any information as to the role Frank might have played in their fate.
At exactly ten o’clock, a clerk entered the courtroom through another door, this one near the judges’ table. “The Tribunal will now enter,” he said, the words translated into German, Russian, and French, through six overhead microphones and ungainly headphones, another novelty. A heavy wooden door opened across from Frank, on the left. Eight elderly men trundled in, six in black gowns, the two Soviets in military uniform, making their way to the judges’ table. Frank knew one of them, although ten years had passed since they were last together in Berlin: Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, the French judge.
The man in charge of the courtroom, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, an English court of appeal judge, sat at the center of the judges’ bench. Bald and Dickensian, he’d been appointed just a few weeks earlier by Clement Attlee, the British prime minister. He was chosen to preside over the case by the other seven judges because they couldn’t agree on anyone else. He and his wife, Marjorie, occupied a house on Stielerstrasse, at No. 15, on the outskirts of the city, a grand house that once belonged to a Jewish toy manufacturer, later used as an SS mess.
Each of the four Allied powers nominated two judges, and the defendants did what they could to glean a little information on each. On the far left—from the defendants’ vantage point—sat Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Volchkov, a former Soviet diplomat, alongside Major General Iona Nikitchenko, a dour-faced, hard-line military lawyer who once served as a judge in Stalin’s show trials. Then came the two British judges, possibly offering some hope to Frank. Norman Birkett—who had shared a lecture platform with Lemkin at Duke University in the spring of 1942—had been a Methodist preacher, then a parliamentarian and next a judge. To his right, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, a career barrister, then the senior American, Francis Biddle, who succeeded Robert Jackson as Roosevelt’s attorney general and once worked with Lauterpacht. Then John Parker, a judge from Richmond, Virginia, still embittered by his failed effort to get to the U.S. Supreme Court. The French were seated on the far right: Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, professor of criminal law at the Sorbonne, and Robert Falco, a judge of the Paris Court of Appeal, removed from judicial office in late 1940 for being a Jew. Behind the judges hung the four Allied flags, a reminder of the victors. There was no German flag.
Lord Justice Lawrence opened the proceedings. The trial was “unique in the history of the jurisprudence of the world,” he began, offering a brief introduction before the indictment was read out. Frank and the other defendants, well-behaved men, listened politely. Each of the charges was addressed by a prosecutor from the four Allied powers. The Americans opened with the first count, the conspiracy to commit international crimes. The baton was passed to the British and the round figure of Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who addressed the second count, crimes against peace.
The third count was allocated to the French: war crimes, including the charge of “genocide.” Frank must have wondered about this word and how it made its way into the proceedings, as prosecutor Pierre Mounier became the first person to use it in a court of law. The fourth and final count, “crimes against humanity,” was addressed by a Soviet prosecutor, another new term for Frank to ponder, addressed for the first time in open court.
The charges having been set out, the prosecutors proceeded to address the litany of terrible facts, the killings and other acts of horror of which the defendants were accused. Dealing with the atrocities against Jews and Poles, the Soviet team soon homed in on the atrocities in Lvov, touching on the Aktionen of August 1942, matters of personal knowledge for Frank, but only of imagination for Lauterpacht. The Soviet prosecutor was strikingly precise with the dates and numbers. Between September 7, 1941, and July 6, 1943, he told the judges, the Germans killed more than eight thousand children in the Janowska camp, in the heart of Lemberg. Reading the transcript, I wondered whether Frank would have recalled the speech he gave in the auditorium of the university on August 1 or the game of chess he played and lost with Frau Wächter. On the newsreel, Frank showed no discernible reaction.
The first day ran long. Having set out the general facts, prosecutors then turned to the actions of the individual defendants. First Hermann Göring, then Joachim von Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg. Then Hans Frank, his role being summarized by the American prosecutor Sidney Alderman, the man who supported Lemkin on genocide. He needed but a few sentences to encapsulate Frank’s role. The former governor-general would have known what to expect because the details had been shared with his lawyer, Dr. Alfred Seidl. Alderman described Frank’s role in the years leading up to 1939, then his appointment by the führer as governor-general. He had a personal influence with Hitler, it was said, and he “authorized, directed, and participated” in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The events in Poland and Lemberg were placed at the heart of the trial.