1. The Governor-General and the Jews
As ruler of rump Poland, Hans Frank instituted a reign of terror, featuring the segregation of Jews into ghettos. Then their wholesale extermination. It did not matter that he fathered five children. Frank reconciled affection towards his own kids with coldhearted indifference towards the murder of thousands of other people’s children. In December of 1941, he instructed his subordinates.
“Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible”.
Under Frank, the mass murder of Jews morphed from ad hoc massacres to deliberate policy. Of the Holocaust’s six extermination camps, four were located in Frank’s General Government. After the war, he tried to pretend he knew nothing about the millions of Jews killed in his territory. But documentary evidence exposed the lie in that claim. Captured by US troops in the war’s closing days, he faced trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Convicted, and sentenced to death, he was hanged on October 16, 1946.
_________________
Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Alliance for Human Research Protection – Operation Paperclip Nazi Rogues
All That is Interesting – Why Isn’t Belgium’s King Leopold II As Reviled As Hitler or Stalin?
Badass of the Week – Ranavalona the Cruel
Biography – Idi Amin, Facts, Life, & Uganda
Clements, Barbara Evans – Bolshevik Women (1997)
Encyclopedia Britannica – Massacre of Amritsar
Encyclopedia Britannica – Hans Frank
Futurist Dolmen – Rozalia Zemlyachka: An Incomplete Biography
History Things – History‘s Nutcases: The Zhengde Emperor
JSTOR – Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa
Murderpedia – Georg Karl Grossmann
Ranker – The Untold Story of Peter Niers, The Cannibal Magician Who Killed 500 People
Tovar, Diana, UC Santa Barbara – Stella: the Story of Stella Goldschlag
War History Online – Japan‘s Dr. Mengele: Medical Experiments on POWs at Unit 731
Weiner Library For the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide – Commandant Rudolph Hoess