Karl Hermann Frank

Karl Hermann Frank was a Sudeten German Nazi politician, leader of the radical wing of the Sudeten German Party and close associate of Himmler. An Austrian army veteran of World War I, he became a bookseller in his native Carlsbad. In 1933, he entered local politics as propaganda chief to Konrad Henelein and later a Sudenten German Parliamentary delegate. In March 1939, he was appointed secretary of state to Reichsprotektor Constantin von Neurath in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.

After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Frank unleashed a wave of repression against the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia that culminated in the destruction of the town of Lidice. One hundred ninety-two men and boys and 71 women were murdered. The surviving women were sent to concentration camps. The children were dispersed, some to concentration camps, although a few who were considered sufficiently Aryan were sent to Germany. The SS then razed the town and tried to eradicate its memory. The name of Lidice was expunged from all official records.

With the appointment of Wilhelm Frick as Reichsprotektor, Frank was nominated minister of state (1943) and became the virtual dictator of the Protectorate. As SS and police officer with the rank of lieutenant-general, he was one of the persons mainly responsible for the annihilation of the Protectorate’s Jewish population. Frank was hanged after the war (1946) by the verdict of a Czechoslovak court.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Wrighton, Heydrich… (1962), index; IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 24 (1949), index; E. Davidson, Trial of the Germans (1967), index.