The 15th of March 1939.

Six months after the
annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany, in flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement,
invades and occupies the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.

Adolf Hitler himself
arrives in Prague and on the 16th of March, by a proclamation from Prague Castle,
establishes the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Konstantin von Neurath, the former
Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, becomes its Reich Protector but because the Führer feels that
his rule is too lenient and his “soft approach” to the Czechs has promoted anti-German sentiment
and encouraged anti-German resistance via strikes and sabotage, in September 1941 he dismisses
von Neurath and appoints Reinhard Heydrich as new acting Reich Protector.

Heydrich’s Secretary
of State and chief of police in the Protectorate is a man with whom the Nazi architect of
the Holocaust launches reign of terror, arresting and killing opponents and ramping
up the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

After Heydrich’s assassination in May
1942, this man will conduct brutal reprisals against the Czechs, killing over 1,300 men, women
and children.

His name is Karl Hermann Frank.

Karl Hermann Frank was born on the 24th of January
1898 in Carlsbad, today’s Czech Karlovy Vary, then part of Austria-Hungary.

His father Heinrich
was an elementary school teacher and ardent German nationalist who brought up his son steeped in
the German nationalist movement.

When Karl was 9 or 10 years old, he was hit right in the eye
by a rock while playing with other children.

When the First World War began on the 28th of
July 1914, Frank was 16 years old.

He attempted to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian Army but was
rejected due to the blindness in his right eye caused by the aforementioned injury.

In
1918, even though the doctors tried to fix his eye for a long time, they eventually had
to take it out and replace it with a glass one.

In October 1918 the Czechoslovak National
Council in Prague proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia.

50 percent of the
Czechoslovak population consisted of Czechs.

Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22 and
16 percent respectively.

Karl Hermann Frank was a Sudeten German, which was a name for ethnic
Germans living in Czechoslovakia and he became an extreme advocate of the incorporation
of the Sudetenland, where he lived, into Germany.

In 1919, he joined the protofascist
party of Germans in Czechoslovakia named the German National Socialist Workers’ Party.

6 years later in 1925, Frank opened a bookstore which specialized in
National-Socialist literature.

From 1933, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party
came into power, the Nazi Regime began not only to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews
– establishing the first concentration camps, but it also demanded the “return” of
the Sudetenland, to the German Reich.

When over three days between the 11th and 13th
of March 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich, the
failure of the British and French to take action against him for violating the Versailles
Treaty emboldened him toward further aggression.

In late summer 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash
a European war unless the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany.

This part of Czechoslovakia also
contained the Czechoslovak Army’s defensive positions in event of a war with Germany.

The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany held a conference in Munich between
the 29th and 30th of September 1938.

In what became known as the Munich Agreement, they agreed
to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler.

The Czechoslovaks were not even invited to the conference and felt they had been betrayed
by the British and French governments.

However, many Sudeten Germans welcomed the German
annexation and Karl Hermann Frank was one of them.

He was appointed deputy Gauleiter
or regional leader of the Nazi Party of the Sudetenland and on the 1st of November
1938 he joined the Nazi party and the SS.

On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months
after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the remaining parts
of Czechoslovakia establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia which by contrast to the
Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.

Immediately after the Nazis started to occupy
the whole country, they passed new anti-Jewish laws which were designed to exclude more
than 118 000 Jews, that were living in the Protectorate, from society and restrict their
livelihood.

Their bank accounts were frozen, and they were forbidden to sell companies and
real estate which were confiscated and taken over by the Germans.

In all, the Germans seized about
a half-billion dollars, an equivalent to 11 billion USD today, worth of Jewish property,
in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

After the occupation of the Czech lands,
Frank was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer which was a rank equivalent to Major General
and appointed Secretary of State of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under
Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath.

At the end of April 1939, Heinrich
Himmler, the leader of the SS, also named Frank the protectorate’s Higher
SS and Police Leader.

In this position, Frank wielded great power in the protectorate
as he controlled the Nazi police apparatus, including the intelligence service
– the SD and the Security Police, which consisted of Gestapo and the
Kripo, which was a Criminal Police.

The Second World War began on the 1st
of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.

On 17 February of the following
year Frank divorced his wife Anna Müller.

They married in January 1921 and had 2 sons.

Two months after his divorce on 14 April 1940 he married Karola Blaschek.

His new wife was
a doctor who was 15 years his junior.

Their marriage produced 3 children: daughters
Edda and Holle and a son Wolf-Dietrich.

2 years after the war began on 23 September 1941,
Hitler relieved Neurath of his active duties and stripped him of his day-to-day powers.

The reason
was that despite the persecution of Czech Jews and the harsh crackdown on those who turned to acts
of resistance, his rule overall was too lenient by Nazi standards.

Neurath, who even tried
to restrain the excesses of his police chief, Karl-Hermann Frank, still remained the Reich
Protector on paper, but the real power was held by Reinhard Heydrich, who was named his
deputy on the 29th of September 1941.

Adolf Hitler gave Heydrich a mandate to enforce
policy, fight resistance to the Nazi regime, and keep up production quotas of Czech motors and
arms that were extremely important to the German war effort.

After Heydrich arrived in Prague,
he told his staff: “We will Germanize the Czech vermin“ and demanded racial classification of
those who could and could not be Germanized.

Although the working relationship between Heydrich
and Karl Hermann Frank was initially tense, the two men, both being ambitious and brutal, became
an effective duo in treating the Czechs harshly.

In October 1941, just 1 month after Heydrich’s
arrival, the systematic deportation of Jews from the territory of the Protectorate
started with the transports to the Łódź Ghetto which was located in German-occupied
Poland.

By the 3rd of November the same year, 5000 Jews were deported to the
ghetto.

Only 277 out of 5000 Jews deported to the Łódź Ghetto survived.

In November 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, established the Theresienstadt Ghetto which was
located in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The first
transport of Czech Jews arrived in the same month.

Heydrich and Frank launched a reign of terror in the Protectorate.

According to Heydrich’s
estimate, between 4,000 and 5,000 people were arrested and between 400 and
500 were executed by February 1942.

On the 27th of May 1942, Reinhard Heydrich
was in his convertible Mercedes when he was wounded by the Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef
Gabčík and Jan Kubiš.

Even though Heydrich had an infection and was in great pain, on 3 June
he was able to eat his midday meal sitting up.

However, a few hours later, he
collapsed dying the next day.

Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin was attended by
all the high-ranking Nazi officials including his superior Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler
himself who spoke at the funeral and promised revenge.

The Nazi authorities in the Protectorate
were preparing for this revenge from 27 May 1942 when Heydrich was mortally wounded.

On that
day, Karl-Hermann Frank proclaimed a state of emergency and placed a curfew in Prague.

Anyone who helped the attackers was to be executed along with their families.

A search
involving 21,000 men began and 36,000 houses were checked.

By 4 June, 157 people had been
executed as a result of the reprisals but the assassins had not been found and no information
was forthcoming.

On June 9, the day of Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin, Frank reported from
Berlin that the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village found
to have harbored Heydrich’s killers: -Execute all men
-Transport all women to a concentration camp – Gather the children suitable for Germanisation,
then place them in SS families in the Reich and bring the rest of the children up in other ways
-Burn down the village and level it entirely One such village became Lidice, which had been
named in a love letter found during the first days of the SS and police investigations into
the attack on Heydrich.

Though there was no real evidence connecting the people of the town with
the assassins, the Nazis used even the smallest pretext to take revenge for Heydrich’s death and
singled out Lidice as the site of retaliation.

Karl Hermann Frank played a key role in the
following destruction of the village and the execution of its citizens which were conducted
on Hitler’s direct order on 9 and 10 June 1942.

To revenge Heydrich’s death, Frank ordered
the shooting of all the men in Lidice, sending all the women to the concentration camps
and placing those children considered worthy of Germanization in the care of SS families.

Children
not worthy of Germanization were also murdered.

On the morning of 10 June 1942, Frank was seen
personally coming to inspect the destruction of the village and was said to be satisfied with the
results.

In total 340 inhabitants of Lidice were slaughtered – 192 men, 60 women and 88 children.

All the men and boys were shot and buried in one common grave and children were murdered in
gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp.

4 pregnant women were forced to undergo abortions
in the same hospital where Heydrich died.

However, this was not the end.

Two weeks after the
massacre at Lidice, the small Czech village of Ležáky was destroyed when Gestapo agents found
a radio transmitter there that had belonged to an underground team who parachuted in with
Kubiš and Gabčík, who had killed Heydrich.

All 33 adults – both men and women – from the
village were shot and the children were sent to concentration camps or “Aryanised”.

The death toll
resulting from the effort to avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at over 1,300 people.

This
count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty
and random victims like those from Lidice.

In June 1943 Frank was promoted to
SS-Obergruppenführer which was a rank equivalent to a lieutenant general.

He was also made General
of Police in Prague and General of the Waffen-SS, which was the military branch of the SS.

In
August 1943, Frank was made Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia and was granted cabinet
rank and status, but without the formal title of Reichsminister.

The Czechs nicknamed their
Nazi Minister of State “Bloody Dog Frank”.

In 1944, Frank personally conducted anti-partisan
warfare in Moravia aimed at destroying the Jan Žižka partisan brigade which was the largest
partisan unit in the Protectorate.

On the 3rd of November, Frank ordered the summary executions
of suspected partisans along with those suspected of helping them.

The bodies of the executed
suspects were to be hanged in public for 48 hours.

Despite these executions and deployment of
13,000 soldiers, the Germans were unable to destroy the partisan brigade which
remained active until the end of the war.

In April 1945 when Karl Hermann Frank saw that
his reign of terror was over, he decided to flee from Prague and surrender to the Americans as
he was afraid of being captured by the Russians.

On the 9th of May 1945 Frank was arrested by the
US army troops but his plan did not work out as he was extradited back to Prague where from March
to May 1946 he was tried by the People’s court.

Although no attorney wanted to defend him,
he did eventually get one.

His name was Kamill Resler and for defending Frank he was
nicknamed “ the devil’s advocate”.

Despite a definite death penalty outcome, he proceeded
to defend Frank honorably and nobly.

During the trial Frank claimed that he did not feel guilty
but co-responsible because he had just followed the orders he had been given and had represented
only a small part of the criminal Nazi regime.

He denied personal responsibility for the
executions, although he admitted before the tribunal that they could be “regarded according
to human feelings and human laws as a murder.

” His lies however died no help him escape justice
and on Tuesday the 21st of May 1946 the People’s court in Prague sentenced Karl Hermann Frank to
death by hanging for treason and the massacre of civilians of the Czech villages of Lidice and
Ležáky.

Jaroslav Drábek, the prosecutor during the Frank trial, later said: “I, who had to watch
helplessly as Hitler systematically killed my nation and murdered my dearest friends, gained the
power overnight to make those who caused it all pay for their crimes.

In Prague, as prosecutor, I
brought to the gallows Karl Hermann Frank, Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Kurt Daluege and
many other scoundrels, traitors and murderers.

” Even though Karl Hermann Frank had never
shown mercy to any of the Czech people, he appealed to Czechoslovak President Edvard
Beneš for leniency.

Frank wrote to Beneš: “I believe that as a victor you will
show mercy and grant me life”.

However, he was wrong.

There was no
reply to his telegraphed appeal.

Frank’s execution was held publicly and became
a theater of horror.

More than 5000 people, including 7 surviving women from Lidice who sat
in the front row, gathered in Pankrác prison in Prague to witness the execution of the most hated
man in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

When Karl Hermann Frank was hanged on
Wednesday 22nd of May 1946, he was 48 years old.

At 1:37 PM he was lifted up to the top of the
pole by a sling and then dropped about a meter, the hangman covering Frank’s face with his
hand.

An avowed Nazi until the bitter end, his last words were: “Germany must live even
if we die.

Long live the German nation.

Long live the German spirit.

” Normally, a condemned
man executed in this way hung on the gallows for half an hour.

Frank however remained
hanging on the rope for 15 minutes longer.

Karl Hermann Frank was then buried in an
anonymous pit at Ďáblice Cemetery where the bodies of Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík
– the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 – had secretly been buried in a mass grave.

Frank’s family did not fare any better.

His
second wife Karola was arrested, taken to the Soviet Union and sentenced to a twelve-year
imprisonment.

In the end, she spent 10 years in Kazakhstan’s Gulag performing forced labor.

She was released in 1955 and moved to West Germany where it took her 4 years to find her 3 children
who had grown up in new families under new names.

There were no tears shed for Karl Hermann Frank.

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