Execution of Karl Hermann Frank
- Nazi Minister of State of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

16 September 2022

Category: High Ranking Nazi Representatives

Karl Hermann Frank was 16 years old when the First World War began on the 28th of July 1914. He attempted to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian Army but was rejected due to the blindness in his right eye. 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.

In the new country of Czechoslovakia, Frank became an extreme advocate of the incorporation of the Sudetenland, where he lived, into Germany. From 1933, when Hitler 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.

On the 1st of October 1933, Konrad Henlein, a leading Sudeten German politician in Czechoslovakia, created the Sudeten-German Homeland Front which Karl Hermann Frank joined the same year and he also helped to organize it. In April 1935 the party was renamed the Sudeten German Party or SdP. In 1938, the party had over 1.3 million members which accounted for 40.6% of ethnic-German citizens of Czechoslovakia and became one of the largest fascist parties in Europe at the time. In late summer 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland was ceded to 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. 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.

After the occupation of the Czech lands, Karl Hermann Frank was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer which was a rank equivalent to General lieutenant and appointed Secretary of State of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath. The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. On the 23rd of September 1941 Hitler relieved Konstantin von Neurath of his active duties and stripped him of his day-to-day powers. Reinhard Heydrich was named as his deputy on the 29th of September 1941.

Execution of Alois Eliáš - prime minister

One of the arrested and executed Czechs during the Nazi occupation was Alois Eliáš who served as prime minister of the puppet government of the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from the 27th of April 1939 to the 27th of September 1941 when he was arrested because of his participation in the anti-Nazi resistance. Eliáš was the only head of government who was murdered by the Nazis during World War II. He was executed on the 19th of June 1942, less than one month after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

Heydrich was in his convertible Mercedes when the Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš mortally wounded the Nazi architect of the Holocaust on the 27th of May 1942. Heydrich contracted an infection and died 8 days later. Karl Frank and new deputy director of the protectorate Kurt Daluege played a key role in the civilian massacre and destruction of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky which occurred on the 9th of June 1942.

Face to justice

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. In April 1945 when 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 Karl Frank was arrested by the US army troops but his plan did not work out as he was extradited back to Prague and tried by the People’s court in 1946. Karl Hermann Frank was hanged on the 22nd of May 1946 at the age of 48.

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