FRANK’S LAST DAY on the stand was Good Friday, the day after the Matthew Passion was usually performed in Leipzig at the St. Thomas Church. Dodd wrote to his wife in America that he’d expected Frank to be “ornery,” given the “wicked” record in Poland, yet in the end there was no need for much cross-examination. Frank had practically admitted his guilt, one of the more dramatic moments of the trial.
“He has become a Catholic,” Dodd wrote, “and I guess it took.”
Frank was calm. He’d paid his dues, passed through the black gates, felt optimistic. The French, British, and American judges must have appreciated his candor. God was a generous host, he told Dr. Gilbert, who asked what had caused him to take the direction he chose.
A newspaper article was “the last straw,” Frank explained.
“A few days ago I read a notice in the newspaper that Dr. Jacoby, a Jewish lawyer in Munich, who was one of my father’s best friends, had been exterminated in Auschwitz. Then when Hoess testified how he exterminated two and a half million Jews, I realized that he was the man who coldly exterminated my father’s best friend—a fine, upright, kindly old man—and millions of innocent people like him, and I had done nothing to stop it! True, I didn’t kill him myself, but the things I said and the things Rosenberg said made those things possible!”
Like his wife, Brigitte, he took comfort in the belief that he’d not killed anyone personally. Perhaps that would save him.