The Nuremberg Interviews (11 page)

“The court would weigh this argument and answer and label it as nonsense and throw it out. There is, of course, no possible argument to justify it. The whole idea of mine to defend Hitler is just an answer to a psychological problem of combating any possibility of a Hitler legend.

“Of course, one can say there’s no use discussing these things. They are criminal and require no discussion. But the Allies removed such an argument themselves when they started these very trials. There is a good possibility of a Hitler legend. The trial drags on, world history continues, and the golden age hasn’t yet arrived. The German people are in terrible need.

“In the course of this trial, I collected forty-four degrading names which had been applied to Hitler, calling him a mass murderer, and so on. I have them here in my cell in my notes. These names came not from the prosecution but from the defendants and the defense counsels. Now one must ask himself how Adolf Hitler would defend himself against these accusations. I would try to collect all the arguments, even the most far-fetched ones, which Hitler might try to use.

“I shall consider it further, as to whether I shall put this business in my final speech. Of course, I shall do it with the explanation and introduction I just gave you. I don’t know if this is possible in my case. But it should be because I have nothing much to say in my final speech since I told the court quite openly about my guilt and I hid nothing.

“But it’s a terrible task to even seek for words of excuse for Hitler. Even in art, there is no light without shadows, and no shadows are cast without some light. Even the shadow of Adolf Hitler is accompanied by some light. I would tell the court that as Hitler’s old attorney from 1927 to 1933, I will defend him. Then I would say that all my arguments were not sufficient as a human being and there is no defense except words. Meaningless words.

“I believe this would combat the legend of Hitler. It would answer all the thoughts which the thousands of hidden followers of Hitler still hold. You would have to say, for example, that the Poles have murdered thousands of Germans. That there was hatred and jealousy against Hitler. The answer would be simple and more important than the argument. But Auschwitz remains! That is the answer. One-thousandth of the answer, but enough.”

We seemed to have expended the subject of Frank’s bright idea of defending Hitler, and his reasons for so contemplating. I asked him if he had any other thoughts recently and whether or not he cared to talk about something in particular.

He said that his mind was constantly “working,” but that he had reached a state of being “at peace with the world.” I asked him about his family again. His face darkened, then he said lightly, “My mother is still alive, as you know. I’ve often thought about her here. She is a wonderful woman. All my battling spirit I derive from her. My father was a lawyer, but a weak one, who had much trouble with his practice.

“In 1925 he was disbarred, because he took both sides in a divorce case. He was representing the husband, when the wife appeared before
him with tears in her eyes, so he advised her, too. The local court found out that he was acting against the rules, representing both parties, so he was disbarred. But three years later, in 1928, he was reinstated and continued to practice law until his death, on January 15, 1945. That event in 1925 was not the only difficulty my father had with his practice. It was one of many such details. But he was not a criminal or anything like that. It was simply that he wasn’t cut out for the practice of law.

“Father came from an old Rhineland family, in the region of the Palatinate. The Franks are a very old family and the blood is worn thin. If I didn’t have my mother’s battling spirit I would have been like my father, an indecisive man, never amounting to much. But Mother was different. She was a fine woman. Mother and Father never got along well. They remained married until I was ten years of age, when Mother left home and went back to her family to live. Father remarried when I was in my twenties, to a nice old lady who made his life comfortable for him in his declining years. Mother never remarried.

“In later years, Mother was not as bitter toward my father as she had been. Age mellowed both of them, I suppose. Mother used to talk about Father in recent years, before his death, recalling his good qualities. Previously she couldn’t stand him. This, of course, made my childhood rather unhappy. I graduated from the gymnasium at age sixteen, then spent a year going to school in Prague, and at eighteen years of age, I joined the army toward the end of the First World War. I was never on good terms or intimate with my father. You might say that since the age of ten, I had no family life. My mother was out of the picture, having taken my younger sister with her to her folks’ home to live, and I remained, together with my brother, who was eight years older than I, with my father. Most of the time I went to the Maximilian Gymnasium in Munich, with the exception of the year in Prague and the short time in the army in 1918. I have few tender recollections of my early life. I really began to know my mother and realize what a fine woman she was after I had grown to adulthood and was independent. I was more or less independent all my life, at least from the age of ten, when my parents were divorced.”

Frank then embarked on an idea that most of the family difficulties within Germany were a reflection of the unhappy life which was caused by a lack of living space and the large increase in city population as compared to rural from 1870 until 1933.

“I’m positive that the high divorce rate, the great incompatibility between married persons, the unsettled family life in Germany during those years was the result of crowded city conditions and lack of opportunities to develop. My own case is an example. When I was minister of justice I received thousands of letters asking for assistance in obtaining divorces.
⁹
Hitler was against making a divorce easy to obtain. I was in favor of it, but could do nothing about it. Hitler forbade me to divorce my own wife, with whom I was very unhappy, as I told you previously.

“I think that Hitler was abnormal in his sexual needs. That is, he needed too little from the opposite sex. He considered women as objects of beauty, and he often talked with affection about his own mother. I obtained the impression that he disliked his father, because he never mentioned him. But it is a bad thing if a man has too little Eros in him. It makes him insensitive, and probably leads to cruelty. Freud, Sigmund Freud, the last of the great German psychiatrists, who died in England, pointed out the relationship between frustrated love and cruelty. I believe it is what you psychiatrists term sadism. I’m convinced that a man who does not need the love of a woman, and thinks he can forgo it, or who does forgo it, can turn to cruelty and sadism as a substitute.”

Had Frank ever read the works of Freud? “Not his works, no books of his, but I have read many articles about what he said and about his work. Have you ever seen the correspondence between Albert Einstein and Freud between the years 1928 and 1933? It is worth reading. Einstein probably has copies of that correspondence, which I was privileged to read. Freud predicted almost exactly what would happen in the future, and what actually did occur as far as the atrocities and mass murders. He was a great mind. He saw the inherent sadism and cruelty in Hitler and in Hitlerism. Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered.”

Frank sighed. “What a horrible system we had. How blind we were.”

Wilhelm Frick
1877–1946

Wilhelm Frick was minister of the interior from 1933 to 1943. Found guilty at Nuremberg of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, he was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Wilhelm Frick is sixty-nine years old, with close-cropped gray hair. He is neither hostile nor friendly in attitude, speaks with a clipped, precise speech which has appropriate pauses, and rises and falls, but is apparently quite automatic, and practiced. He was interviewed this afternoon in his cell, Triest translating. He speaks little English. His German is easy to follow. He sounds consistently as if he were making an informal speech, whenever asked about anything regarding National Socialism, his role in it, and so forth. He does not look quite his age, is erect, not very wrinkled, and physically hardy. He is of slender build, medium height, moderate weight, inclined toward leanness rather than the opposite, but not thin.

Asked if he had any complaints, he said that his only complaint was the noise made by the guards at night, but that he realized it was difficult to keep young people quiet. His only physical ailment is an occasional sore throat “caused by the weather,” which occurs two or three times a year at change of seasons.

Previous Illnesses:
“Lung trouble” (probably mild bronchitis, from his description of the symptomatology) from ages six to twelve years. “Chronic bronchial catarrh” until the age of thirty. No other illnesses.

Education:
Elementary school, four years, in Kaiserslautern, followed gymnasium from 1887 until 1896 in the same town. (He was born in Kaiserslautern on March 12, 1877.) He then attended the Universities of Göttingen, Berlin, and Munich, mainly the last, for three years. He received the degree of doctor of jurisprudence in 1901 from the University of Heidelberg.

Career:
He practiced law in Kaiserslautern from 1900 to 1903. In 1903 he took a state examination and went to Munich as a state employee, working in the office of the district magistrate. From 1907 to 1917 he was in the administration of Pirmasens (Bavaria). From 1917 to 1919 he was in the police director’s office in Munich, in charge of profiteers, “rackets,” and so forth.

In 1919 he assumed charge of the political section of the police department, particularly against Communists. “After the signing of the peace, the kaiser was to abdicate and the Social Democrats were to take over. Then the government became more leftist. There was a Communist government for four weeks in April 1919, the Councils Republic.” Frick helped to overthrow that. “That government was concentrated in Munich, where the Russian Jews were thick.”
¹
He remained in charge of the political section of police in Munich until 1923.

In November 1923, the Munich putsch occurred and Frick was arrested and imprisoned for four and a half months. He first met Hitler in 1923, “because every public gathering had to be applied for through my section of the police.” He became a party member in 1923 soon after meeting Hitler. After the Nazi Party was banned, he rejoined as soon as the party was legalized again in 1925.

He was in prison from November 1923 until April 1924. On April 6, 1924, he became a representative at the German Reichstag. Until the end of the war, he remained the Reichstag representative of upper Bavaria, always on the National Socialist ticket. It was called, at times, the Völkischer Bloc. “I was in prison in Munich four and a half months, whereas Hitler was in Landsberg prison nine months,” he observed casually. During his prison term, he spent his time writing about his experiences in the putsch for his defense. After his trial, he received a fifteen-month sentence, Hitler a five-year term, but both were released in the times stated above.

His career in the Reichstag was that of “party whip,” or “fraction leader.” There was a split in the northern and southern German parties. There was the so-called November Party, also called the Northern Liberation
Movement. At first there were thirty National Socialists in the Reichstag, but in subsequent elections, they lost ground. By 1925, there were but seven Nazis in the Reichstag. The others went over to the Liberation Party.
²

In 1928 the Liberation Party disappeared and the number of National Socialist Reichstag seats grew to twelve. There were four to five hundred seats in the Reichstag.

“In 1923 the party made the putsch instead of participating in the elections. After that failure, Hitler said we would have to choose parliamentary methods to gain a majority.”

In January 1930 Frick became minister of interior and education for Thuringia, in Weimar. At that time, Thuringia had fifty-three seats in the Reichstag, only five or six of which were held by National Socialists. The Nazis “were between the Communists on one side and the bourgeois on the other side. We formed a coalition government with the bourgeois.” In that way, Frick became minister of interior of Thuringia until April 1, 1931, at which time he was “urged to leave” the coalition government. He reverted to his old position of Reichstag representative.

“The years 1930 to 1931 in Thuringia meant a lot to us, because people always said that Nazis can talk but not govern. Hitler had appointed me to the position of minister of interior in Thuringia and people saw that I accomplished much good.”

So in September 1930, “as a result of my work in Thuringia,” the Nazi strength in the Reichstag jumped from a mere twelve seats to 107, making the National Socialists the second strongest party in the Reich. In 1930 there was actually a National Socialist vice president of the Reich, one Franz Stoehr, who has since died. “Stoehr retired from that position, however, because it didn’t work out, in view of differences with other parties.