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SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES AWAY, near the small village of Neuhaus am Schliersee in Bavaria, the younger children of Hans Frank were at kindergarten. Brigitte Frank collected them on the afternoon of the hanging.
“My mother came in flowery spring clothes to tell us that Father was now in heaven,” Niklas recalled. “My sisters and brother started to cry, and I was quiet, because I knew now it had happened. I think this was when a big hurt began, when my cold reaction from this family began.”
Years later, Niklas met Sixtus O’Connor, the chaplain who accompanied Frank to the gym. Your father went to the gallows smiling, the chaplain told him. “Even in the prison cell in Nuremberg,” he added, “your father was afraid of your mother.”
Niklas had not forgotten that day, one that he often thought about. Together we visited the empty prison wing of Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice and sat in a cell like the one in which his father was held. “The funny thing is,” Niklas said, “when they came to take my father to the gallows, they opened the door, my father was kneeling.” Niklas got down on his knees to show me. “He said to the priest, ‘Father, my mother when I was a little boy, my mother used to give me the cross every morning when I was leaving for school.’ ” Niklas made the mark of the cross on his forehead. “Please do this also now,” Frank asked the priest.
Niklas wondered whether it was a show. “Maybe it was one of those moments, very near to the gallows, to the death…he knew he will not survive the night of the sixteenth of October. Maybe it was really an honest thing, the only and last honest thing he did.”
Niklas was silent for a moment. “He wanted to go back to being an innocent child again, what he was when his mother made the sign on him.” He paused again, then said, “It’s the first time I think about it. I think he wanted to be a little boy again who had done nothing of all those crimes.”
Yet Niklas had no doubts about the lack of sincerity in his father’s partial expression of guilt in the courtroom and no reservations about the hanging of his father. “I am opposed to the death penalty,” he said without emotion, “except for my father.” During one of our conversations, he recalled the letter his father wrote to Dr. Seidl, his lawyer, the evening before the execution. “He wrote, ‘I am not a criminal.’ ” Niklas spoke the words with disgust. “So really, he took back everything he confessed during the trial.”
As we talked of their last meeting, the conversation with the chaplain, the silent fortitude of his mother, Niklas put his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a leather wallet. “He was a criminal,” he said quietly, removing from the wallet a small black-and-white photograph, worn and faded. He handed it over. An image of his father’s body, laid out on a cot, lifeless, taken a few minutes after the hanging, a label across his chest.
“Every day I look at this,” Niklas said. “To remind me, to make sure, that he is dead.”
Hans Frank, hanged, October 16, 1946