Hans Frank was one of the more curious personalities within the leadership of the Third Reich. As head of the General Government, he was one of the more venal members of the Third Reich, which was an accomplishment given such competitors like Göring and Albert Forster! As head of the General Government, Frank lived in palatial style in Wawel Castle in Krakow and enriched himself and his entourage off of expropriated Polish and Jewish property. Nonetheless, Frank was also the Third Reich's foremost defenders of a Rechtstaat (a state ruled by laws) and this culminated his 1942 lecture tour in which he claimed that if Germans did not watch out, they would find themselves living in a police state. Frank's fall from grace in 1942 was related to these contradictory elements of his rule.

Frank's corruption only became a major liability for him in office once he had run afoul of Himmler and the SS's state within a state. As the SS began to assume total control over the Jewish question and the course of race and resettlement, there was increasing friction between the General Government and the SS. Like the Polish Reichsgaue, the General Government saw its Jews and Slavs as its resource to spend and exploit. The SS's decision to liquidate ghettos and exterminate Jews ran counter to the economic plans of Frank to use Jewish labor to enrich the General Government. Moreover, liquidation also entailed the SS gaining greater control over the General Government's security apparatus, which would further diminish Frank's own power. 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.

The response of Hitler to Frank's lecture tour was the opposite of what Frank had hoped. Hitler dismissed Frank's concerns about Himmler and stripped Frank of his NSDAP titles. But the very nature of the Third Reich's method of rule provided Frank a degree of cover from the fallout of his lecture tour. 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 1941/42, it was clear that one of the state agencies was assuming an inordinate amount of power: the SS. But 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. 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.

Although Frank pleaded for Hitler to accept his resignation, the Führer did not relent. Hitler's motives in this denial are still unclear and there are several plausible explanations. One theory is that after chastening Frank, Hitler did not want to embolden Himmler too much by deposing an internal rival. Frank was not the only Reich leader who clashed with Himmler and the SS state and Frank's removal would set a dangerous precedent. Alternatively, while Hitler was not inclined to remove Frank, neither was Himmler. Lasch's arrest and the failure of Frank's lecture tour to galvanize support around Hitler's entourage showed that Himmler had basically won this internal squabble. Himmler's SS representative in the General Government, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, retained his position despite the latter's antipathy to Frank, and even though Frank was able to get Krüger reassigned in 1943, the SS had won primacy in security matters in the General Government. The designation of the General Government as a partisan zone gave the SS broad authority that was not under the purview of Frank and the General Government.

Finally, another explanation for Frank's continued tenure at the helm of the General Government was that this was just how that state organization of the Third Reich simply functioned. Counter-intuitively, the Third Reich had a very small cohort decision-making elites to run what briefly became a European-wide German empire. This leadership soon found that their expanding portfolios also meant they had to manage their responsibilities. Removing Frank meant that Hitler would need to find a replacement, and this was never easy in the Third Reich. Internal rivalries between fiefdoms discouraged the movement of personnel as many within the state's leadership saw power as a zero-sum game. Compounding this problem was that the self-styled maverick qualities of the NSDAP meant its leadership was comparatively young and often inexperienced for the escalating complexity of their tasks. The RSHA never fully recovered from Heydrich's assassination and never found a replacement that could manage his wide-ranging responsibilities and this was one example of the decline in wartime leadership. Even though compromised by his lecture tour and defanged by Himmler, Frank at least was a known quantity and the path of least resistance for Hitler was to keep him in Krakow.

The fight between Himmler and Frank was perhaps inevitable given the internal competition and dysfunctional nature of the Nazi state. Hitler's demand on absolute loyalty for carrying out various ill-defined tasks was a recipe for disaster given the deficiencies of the Third Reich's state structures. The General Government's de-evolution as a functioning state was emblematic of the problems of leadership within the Third Reich. The state's ideology encouraged grandiose projects and decrees with comparatively little thought given how to implement them. Faced with having to do too much with too little not only encouraged radical solutions, but also exacerbated pre-existing tensions between rivals. In the end, violence-based solutions to complex problems were much easier to implement than more nuanced policies that might have proven more productive. Effective management of occupied areas was not really a long-term option option within the wider context of Third Reich.

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.