Introduction: Hans Frank and the Biographer’s Trade

Abstract

The Governor General was not a direct participant in the Holocaust, but he certainly helps us understand how it happened. He headed the civil administration for the territory which was home to places such as Maidanek, Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. How he managed this important corner of Adolf Hitler’s Lebensraum empire is an interesting story in its own right. For instance, it tells us about a new kind of economics in which productivity was unfettered by traditional moral standards. But when Hans Frank fashioned the Government General’s politics, he did so both in the desire to develop a distinctive racial policy himself and in the awareness that he was engaged with those institutions most closely involved in solving the Jewish Question. As a result, his career helps us understand how the Holocaust became possible. It illustrates why the organisations surrounding the SS did not simply refuse co-operation and choose to disrupt the most murderous of initiatives. Despite an academic grounding in law, in the Governor General we discover someone who lost sight of conventional values to such an extent that he actually became compromised by sets of atrocities, the like of which he had once objected to. In the end, his life is a testimony to the self-deception and desperation generated by conceit.