Hans Frank

Okay.

So this idea that one day Adolf Hitler or Reinhard Heydrich, or, you know, um, Hans Frank just like randomly decided he hated Slavs.

That's asinine.

Um, you know, it's such that, uh, such that that was like a real prejudice.

They categorically removed themselves from the European moral consensus even had they been party to it previously.

And I don't think they were.

So it's all of those reasons, but the test case, uh, if you will, for what became racial policy in the East, it started in, um, Bohemia, Moravia, and then the Polish general government under Hans Frank, because, uh, you know, um, Poland had to be, uh, Poland was slated for annihilation, not just on the, you know, convenience of geopolitics and, and, you know, and imperatives therein, but also because, uh, there was, there was genuine ethnic hatred between the Poles and the Germans, you know, and, uh, Hitler wanted to punish the Poles.

There was a deliberate violence behind that, and it went beyond the fact that, you know, settlement of the Danzig corridor and the fortification of it, you know, and made no mistake, like when the Reich invaded, the people at Danzig rose up and you know, they, they viewed themselves almost like, uh, almost like, uh, white Zimbabwe did as this beleaguered, uh, population that, you know, was hated by this super majority.

Hitler under...

Well, plus he had a really good lawyer, Hans Frank, his private law-- He was his personal attorney, represented him in 140 s- um, lawsuits, mostly for libel and defamation.

But, um-

Yeah

...

he had Hans Frank advising him on sort of the how to manipulate the, the legal system.

Um, but what you-- The f- in his first week in office, so Hitler's, um, you know, chancellor on a Monday, by Friday, he's gone after the opposition press.

You know, Völkisch is, the publication of Völkisch is banned.

So they were very canny about the politics, very calculated in what they were doing.

The other person that I should mention is Hans Frank, who is best known as the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland during the war a central figure in the Holocaust, hanged at Nuremberg for his crimes, but was Hitler's personal lawyer as well as the legal advisor for the Nazi party.

Frank represented Hitler in more than 140 cases and is mostly for libel and slander.

So Hitler was taking Frank is the one who once again engineered the strategy.

It gets more oppressive as things go along, but nevertheless, you have this constant battle on your right.

I mean, it was, he wrote in Mein Kampf, this was his political playbook that, and this is once again, his understanding of how democracies functions.

This is Hans Frank saying Hitler understood the points you needed to attack.

One of them was the press.

The system of checks and balances actually working.

Hitler's private lawyer, Hans Frank, who was hanged at Nuremberg for his role in Nazi atrocities, recalled that he had gone, most of the time Hitler was in court, was basically for suing newspapers for libel.

He sued a lot.

He sued a lot, 140 times.

You see photos of him with all of these, either Hugenberg, the industrialist, one of the wealthiest men in Germany, von, as you mentioned, von Papen, there were, one aristocrat after another, and they figured they had him boxed in.

Keep in mind, Hitler was only given two...

There was Hitler in the cabinet, and he had Hermann Goering, and he had Frick, who was a lawyer.

So they had three people, and they figured they had him boxed in.

Hitler believed that Jesus was an Aryan in opposition to Jewry, which is what he was in reality.

This is also confirmed by Hans Franks, who when he went to Rome in 1938, he saw one of the oldest depictions of Christ.

And he said that this statue proved that Jesus was not a Jew.

Goebbels in 1937 likewise says that Jesus was against

Hitler declared him insane and blamed the occultists for scrambling his mind.

Hans Frank was also briefly a member of the Thule Society.

He joined in 1918, fought the Council Republic with a Freikorps unit, and drifted away in 1919.

He eventually became Nazi governor general of occupied Poland, one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, and was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

Uh, even Hitler's rise to power was far more contingent than most historians have allowed.

Consider this observation at the post-war Nuremberg trial by the Nazi legal strategist Hans Frank.

"The Führer was a man who was possible in Germany only at that very moment.

He came at exactly this terrible transitory period when the monarchy had gone and the republic had not yet, uh, was not yet secure." Close quote.