Thus, by 1943, it must have been clear to high-ranking Nazi officials like Frank that unless Germany developed some revolutionary weapon like the nuclear bomb they were trying to build, the war would inevitably end in German defeat and the fall of the Third Reich.

As the war effort fatally turned against Germany, the level of unrest and resistance within Poland and the territory of the general government grew proportionally.

There had always been a large resistance movement in Poland, supported by a government in exile in London.

But starting in 1943, this movement began to receive increasingly more supplies from the Soviets as they advanced westward, entering Ukraine and eastern Poland.

These resistance movements united under the banner of the Polish secret state, which began assassinating hundreds of Germans in the general government area.

Then at the end of 1943, they began planning an assassination attempt against Frank, inspired in part by the killing of Reinhard Hydrich, the acting governor of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in present-day Czech Republic, which occurred in early summer 1942.

They acted on January 29th, 1944 when a bomb was placed on a train on which Frank was traveling from Kraov to Olviv, the largest city in the Ukrainian part of eastern general government territory.

The bomb detonated beneath the train 22 km from Koff at 11:17 p.

m.

, tearing off the rear axle of Frank’s car.

Although the train derailed, he emerged unscathed.

The next day, he continued his journey by plane, flying at low altitude under terrible weather conditions.

Polish prisoners were executed by Frank’s order in retaliation, and security measures were reinforced throughout the general government.

The assassination attempt was merely a prelude to the emergence of a much more intense resistance.

In the spring of 1944, the Polish secret state began preparing for a major uprising against the German occupation as the Red Army advanced further into Poland.

The symbolic focus would be the city of Warsaw.

And the goal was to divide German forces between fighting the Russian advance in the east and suppressing the insurrection within the general government in order to ensure the revolt’s success and accelerate Poland’s liberation from Nazi rule.

This was not just impatience.

In 1944, with the war entering its final stages, the Nazi regime became especially cruel, seeking to murder as many of its racial, ideological, and political enemies as possible before losing control of certain regions.

More than 400,000 of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews would be killed in a span of just 6 months that year after the Nazis took direct control of the country.

Thus, although it was later criticized as a premature uprising, the Polish resistance launched its revolt in Warsaw on August 1st, 1944.

It would last 2 months, but ultimately be unsuccessful as both the Western Allies and the Red Army, the latter being best positioned to help, failed to provide adequate support to the uprising.

This happened despite British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s belief that it was essential to aid Britain’s Polish allies.

Although the Warsaw Uprising failed in the fall of 1944, the liberation of the general government would not take long.

After initial resistance during the autumn months, German defenses in Poland began to collapse in the winter as Hitler concentrated Germany’s military efforts on one last major campaign against the Western Allies in the Ardan region of Luxembourg and Belgium near the French German border.

As a result, the general government was largely overtaken by the Red Army between December 1944 and January 1945.

There wasn’t much left to liberate in Warsaw as the city had been virtually leveled in the weeks following the uprising.

In mid January, Russian troops surrounded Kov.

Frank’s wife, Breijgit, and his children had already left for Germany in December, and he decided to flee back to the Reich just before noon on January 17th.

Air raid sirens had been sounding all morning in downtown Kraov, and Frank had received word that Russian tanks had broken through the city’s outer defenses.

Thus he fled in haste from the capital of the general government which he had ruled for over 5 years at noon that day in a convoy of cars with his top administrators.

Kov fell just 24 hours later.

Interestingly, Frank’s offices were filled with documents and evidence of his administration’s activities which they had neglected to destroy.

It was noted that the offices were littered with empty liquor bottles, a common sight in areas the Nazis fled from between late 1944 and early 1945.

In the following weeks, Frank traveled back to Germany, but his destination was not Berlin, but Bavaria, where he had spent much of his career in the 1920s and 1930s.

He arrived there in early February and sent a message to Berlin stating he was ready to continue serving the regime in whatever way necessary.

However, Frank had been stripped of his positions within Germany in 1942 and with the general government now effectively dissolved after the Russian occupation, he no longer held any position or authority.

On one occasion when he tried to give orders to a subordinate officer, the man simply walked away while Frank was speaking.

Thus, the former governor spent the final months of the war as a powerless ex official.

It was in this irrelevant state that he learned in the early days of May that Hitler had committed suicide on April 30th in Berlin.

As the Russians advanced into the city center, his appointed successor, propaganda minister Ysef Gerbles, imitated his leader on May 1st and then German forces surrendered in Berlin.

The war officially ended on May 8th, by which time Frank was already in custody.

On May 4th, 1945, Frank was captured by American troops in Tigern in southern Bavaria.

The troops who arrested him were the same ones who had liberated Dhaka 5 days earlier and had witnessed the atrocities of the Nazi regime firsthand.

After his capture, Frank was forced to walk through a corridor of American soldiers, all of whom assaulted him.

Frank collapsed under this pressure, unable to bear the thought of even harsher treatment, and attempted suicide.

When that attempt failed, he tried again just 48 hours later, unsuccessfully slitting his left wrist.

He would later say, “I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler, and that man we sacrificed everything for left us alone.

” As his son Nicholas told us, his father tried to kill himself because he didn’t want to be treated the way he had treated others.

Bridget Frank also faced a difficult time.

All her friends had left and no one wanted anything to do with them.

To buy food, she had to sell all her possessions, including jewelry stolen from dead Jews and paintings taken from Kov.

What remained was confiscated.

However, she still hoped her husband would be released and even planned to have another child with him.

But instead, Hansf Frank was tried in the Nuremberg trials, which were held against representatives of defeated Nazi Germany.

He faced three charges: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

At the beginning of his testimony, Frank declared that he felt a terrible guilt for the atrocities committed in the occupied territories.

But his defense was largely dedicated to trying to prove that he was not truly responsible, that he only ordered the necessary pacification measures, that the excesses were due to police activities outside of his control, and that he never knew about the activities of the concentration camps.

As Nicholas Frank confirmed, his parents knew everything about the extermination camps.

During the Nuremberg trials, Bridget Frank was visited several times by the Jewish journalist Gaston Ulman, who wrote daily about the trial proceedings.

He sometimes brought chocolate for Frank’s children, and Breijit mentioned Ulman in a letter to her husband, saying, “He is Jewish, but I think he has a human heart.

” During the trial, Hansfrank converted to Roman Catholicism and claimed to have had a series of religious experiences.

He also accused the Allies, especially the Soviets, of their own atrocities during the war, and he and Albert Spear were the only defendants to show any degree of remorse for their crimes.

He also said, “I myself, speaking from the depths of my feelings and having lived through the five months of this trial, want to say that now, after having gained a full view of all the horrible atrocities that were committed, I am possessed by a profound sense of guilt.

Those of us who are guilty must pay the price.

” Hans Frank and he paid.

On October 1st, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Hans Frank guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging.

According to the verdict, Frank was a conscious and willing participant in the use of terror in Poland, in the economic exploitation of Poland in a way that led to starvation deaths of large numbers of people, in the deportation to Germany of over a million Poles as slave laborers.

And in a program that involved the murder of at least 3 million Jews after receiving the death sentence, Frank said, “Death by hanging.

I deserved that and expected it.

” Hans Frank was executed by US Army Sergeant John C.

Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as an executioner.

It is believed he was deliberately bad at his job to make the 10 Nazi war criminals he executed that day suffer.

As all died a slow and agonizing death, the Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with an insufficient drop to break their necks, resulting in death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes.

In addition, the trapoor was too small, causing head injuries to several of the condemned as they fell.

On October 16th, 1946, the day of his execution, Hans Frank was the fifth of the Nuremberg defendants to mount the platform.

He was the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with a smile on his face.

After saying his final words, “I am grateful for the treatment received during my captivity and ask God to receive me with mercy.

” Frank was hanged, but since he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to break his neck, his horrible convulsions lasted 11 long minutes before he died.

He was 46 years old.

After that, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Isar River.

Sergeant Woods later insisted not only that he had carried out all the executions properly, but also stated that he was very proud of his

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