First off, a mea culpa, the lecture tour was 1942, not 1943, and I have corrected it. But apologies, I should have caught that.

Hans Frank's midwar activities were rather strange and unusual. He had already staked out his defense of the law in a May 1941 Deutsches Recht, the National Socialist jurist magazine of which he was editor, in the article "Das Recht im Kriege. Einige Betrachtungen" (The Law in Wartime: A Meditation). He followed this up with a lecture tour in Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, the Technical High School in Munich, the New University in Heidelberg and the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. All of these were prestigious legal and academic institutions with established pedigrees. What was going on with Frank's lecture tour and public persona in the Reich proper was two separate, but interrelated processes.

The first process had to do with the rather chaotic administration of the Third Reich. Rather hewing to an image of a well-oiled totalitarian machine, historians tend to characterize the Third Reich's administration as polycratic, with multiple power centers jockeying for power and position within the state hierarchy. Power thus did not flow along established lines but rather through an internalized radicalization (ie "working towards the Führer in Ian Kershaw's memorable phrase) and direct access to Hitler. This sort of anti-state tended to reward internal corruption and cronyism among those with privileged access. The polycratic state barely functioned, but by 194142, it was clear that one of the state agencies was assuming an inordinate amount of power: the SS. The SS's portfolio of responsibilities expanded as it became more responsible for the Jewish question and internal security, and it began to involve itself in the various internal fiefdoms of other state agencies like Frank's General Government.

Things hit Frank close to home when the SS investigated and detained Frank's close friend, Karl Lasch, in January 1942. Lasch was the Governor of Radom and one of Frank's chief procurators of stolen goods and luxury merchandise and the SS investigated on his corruption. But as with the rest of the Third Reich's leadership, such corruption was an everyday occurrence and Himmler detained Lasch in the hopes of getting dirt on Frank to expand the SS's power in the General Government. Other rivals in the state hierarchy like Bormann blocked Frank's ability to make direct appeals to Hitler. Lasch's interrogation revealed his negative assessment of the SS and its increasing role in the state. Lasch's death in protective custody in May, as well as the SS officials usurping Frank's authority in the General Government forced him to counterattack.

While the polycratic state enabled the ascendancy of the SS, it also had enough flex to give Frank a degree of cover in his counterattack. Himmler simply could not silence or arrest such an alte Kämpfer like Frank without direct proof of treason. Additionally, Frank found that other agencies and groups were receptive to his calls for the primacy of law, most notably the Third Reich's jurists. The impending implementation of the Volksgesetzbuch (people's law) which would replace existing civil law with a legal code that was more National Socialist in ethos shocked many German jurists. Not only would it upend a century of traditional civil law, but it showed that ideology was creeping into this corner of the Third Reich's professional world. Frank thus found he had a cohort of ready allies among jurists and other legal professionals. He framed his lecture tour as a defense of the law, citing the SS's arbitrary use of power against Germans as evidence that the SS was undermining the principles of the Volksgemeinschaft. His lecture tour also reached out to more moderate elements within the Foreign Ministry and the military which saw the extreme Germanization pushed by the SS as counterproductive to winning the war. At his Vienna lecture, he asserted that the rights of smaller European powers needed to be properly shepherded by German suzerainty, and not plundered. In keeping with the principles of the polycratic state, Frank always made sure to defend Hitler and Führerprinzip and assured his audiences that SS abuse of power was not the same as Hitler's guiding leadership.

This attack on arbitrary police power and Hitler's brand of dictatorship was a contradiction, but it made a certain degree of sense in the warped Weltanschauung of National Socialists and their fellow travelers, which is the second process at work in this curious interlude. Much of the German legal profession by 1942 had been thoroughly Nazified and the tenets of National Socialism meshed well with existing conservative precepts common in the profession. For these people, legal rights and other dignities were the natural rights of Aryans who had not betrayed the Volksgemeinschaft. The arbitrary powers of the National Socialist state were not supposed to be directed against the Volk in this formulation. Lasch's arrest and death was a transgression of what a not insignificant number of Germans of the social compact with the dictatorship.

Of course, Germans who betrayed the Volk were exempt from protection of the rule of law and civilization. Frank's defense of smaller European powers took it as a given that these would be racially-compatible with Aryan Germany; Poles were still something of a Helot race in this vision of the New Order and Jews were obviously not welcome. The lecture's linked the principles of European humanism to National Socialism with assertions like:

more humane a state, the more German it is, – the more just a state, the more indestructible it is.

This amalgamation of German chauvinistic nationalism and more elevated values like humanism was one of the glues of the Gleichschaltung (coordination) that made the NSDAP's rise to power much easier. While many professional Germans had little live for the Party and its cronies, a number found that they could amalgamate elements of National Socialism to preexisting ideas and ethea. This allowed for the radicalization of a number of professional Germans, but also allowed them to maintain a degree of separation from the worst of the regime.

Most SD reports on Frank's tour indicate he received widespread applause and approval from his audience. The reports also castigated his defense of the law as "outmoded liberalism" and Hitler was incensed over the lectures. Rather than bringing SS abuses to Hitler's attention, it had the opposite effect for Frank and he lost most of his titles, but, in a move not uncharacteristic for the polycratic state, Frank kept his position in the General Government. He continued to be something of an anemic loyal opposition in this position, belatedly trying to soften the anti-Polish rhetoric and policies of the General Government as it became clear that the Red Army was pushing German forces back into Poland. In a pattern of poor judgement, Frank believed that his diaries and lectures would vindicate him in the postwar period and dutifully asked to bring them with him when he was arrested in May 1945. At Nuremberg, his defense counsel Alfred Seidl brought up the lectures in Frank's testimony:

Seidl: Witness, I now come to one of the most important questions. In 1942, in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich, you made speeches before large audiences. What was the purpose of these speeches, and what were the consequences for you?

Frank: The speeches can be read. It was the last effort that I made to bring home to Hitler, by means of the tremendous response of the German people, the truth that the rule of law was immortal. I stated at that time that a Reich without law and without humanity could not last long, and more in that vein. After I had been under police surveillance for several days in Munich, I was relieved of all my Party offices. As this was a matter of German domestic politics under the sovereignty of the German Reich, I refrain from making any more statements about it here.

But Frank's professed love of law could not hide the fact that he was guilty of war crimes. In his mentality, the law only applied to Aryans and those the Third Reich saw fit to include in this privileged order. It was a self-serving and rather pathetic defense of an legal order predicated upon terror and arbitrariness. But in a pattern similar to other defenders of police states, Frank's defense was all too typical: police states do not become police states until state power turns its attentions on the privileged.

Sources

Housden, Martyn. Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Winstone, Martin. The Dark Heart of Hitler's Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government. London: I. B. Taurus, 2014.