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BY THE SUMMER of 1942, Frank had enemies in high places and needed to be on his guard. In June and July, he delivered four big speeches on the rule of law and its importance. They were directed against Himmler, who was by now actively engaged in leading the plans to exterminate the Jews and with whom he was in open conflict on the exercise of power on occupied Polish territory. Frank stressed the need for a legal system that recognized a rule of law, with proper courts and independent judges. Speaking at the great universities in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich, he was responding to pressure from senior judges, concerned that justice in the Reich was being undermined. Frank wanted a Reich under the law.
“The legal mind will always recognize that war takes precedence over everything else,” he told the audience in Berlin on June 9. Nevertheless, even in times of war there must be legal security, because people needed a “sense of justice.” There was a striking absence of irony, given the actions he was overseeing in Poland. He had his own ideas about justice, organized around two distinct themes, “authoritarian governance,” on the one hand, and “judicial independence,” on the other. The law must be authoritarian, but it had to be applied by independent judges.
The four speeches were not well received by Himmler, who complained to Hitler. Perhaps Frank should have been more judicious in his choice of words. A strong reaction against the speeches was not long in coming. First he was questioned by the Gestapo, then, on a visit to the Schoberhof, he received a personal telephone call from Hitler, who told him he was stripped of all his roles, bar one.
“Brigitte, the Führer has left me the Government General,” he told his wife. Frau Frank was relieved he kept his position, according to Niklas.
If Frank had real concerns about the direction of the Reich, which Niklas doubted, they were as nothing compared with the other problem in his life. Politics took second place to matters of the heart: Lilly Grau reemerged unexpectedly from the past, the childhood sweetheart he had wanted to marry. She arrived in the form of a letter, telling Frank that her only son was missing on the Russian front. Could he help? The request provoked a strong reaction and an overwhelming desire. He visited Lilly at her home in Bad Aibling in Bavaria, the first time they’d seen each other in nearly two decades.
“Immediately we burst into uncontrollable flame,” he recorded in his diary. “We were reunited once more, so passionately that now there is no turning back.” A week later, they met in Munich, Frank managing to escape from Kraków for long enough to give her a day and a night of personal attention. “A solemn and transfigured reunion of two human beings who ignited one another and whom nothing could restrain for long,” he wrote. The passage made me laugh out loud when I first read it.
Frank decided to extricate himself from a loveless marriage with Brigitte to be with Lilly. A week after the Munich conflagration, he concocted the most original and terrible of plans to free himself from Brigitte, invoking the decisions taken at the Wannsee Conference to get himself a divorce. As Malke Buchholz prepared to be transported to Treblinka, as the Lauterpachts were rounded up in Lemberg and the Lemkins herded out of the Wołkowysk ghetto, Hans Frank invoked matters of that kind to tell his wife that he was deeply implicated in criminal actions—“the most gruesome things”—and that she should distance herself from him to protect herself. He gave her the details of a matter that was secret and terrible, to be known as the Final Solution. The horror offered a path to personal happiness, a way out of daily life with an overbearing, greedy wife. To save herself from association with the governor-general, he was willing to offer her “the greatest sacrifice,” a divorce, so she could avoid being tainted by the Final Solution. Mass extermination offered a path to Lilly and happiness.
Brigitte Frank did not take the bait, any more than Hitler or Himmler were willing to accept the ideas Frank had set out in his four speeches. The queen of Poland enjoyed an opulent lifestyle of castles and guards, and she wasn’t about to throw it away. She preferred to take the risk, pay the price, hang on. “I prefer to be the widow of a Reichsminister than a divorced wife!” she told her husband. Niklas shared the details, set out in black and white in her diary. Hans has told me the “most gruesome things,” Brigitte wrote, matters not to be talked about openly. One day she might share them, “details later but only in private.”
A few days later, Frank changed direction. He summoned Brigitte into the music room at the Wawel Castle to tell her that Karl Lasch had shot himself. She was surprised by her husband’s reaction. “He declares that the divorce is now no longer necessary,” she recorded. The evening was “harmonious,” the change of direction “totally incomprehensible.”
The roller-coaster summer wasn’t over. Two weeks later, Frank again asked to end the marriage, blaming Brigitte for his unhappiness. “Someone had told him I was not a good National Socialist,” she wrote, “and he made it look as if they had advised him to get divorced.”
The next day all was fine again. Frank brought her an item of jewelry, a talisman to compensate for the suffering he’d caused. But within a month, he had changed direction again, renewing the demand for an immediate divorce.
“There is nothing physical left between us,” he told Brigitte. His needs were being taken care of by Lilly (and apparently also by another lady, named Gertrude).
Brigitte maintained an admirable composure through this difficult period, perhaps because her control over Frank was total. According to Niklas, she wrote to Hitler, begging him to intercede to prevent a divorce. She sent the führer a photograph of the happy family, a matriarch protective of her three sons and two daughters, a true and model Nazi family.
The photograph must have helped. Hitler intervened to forbid Frank to divorce. Brigitte Frank had quite a hold over her husband. “My father loved the führer more than he loved his family,” Niklas explained with a chuckle.