Niklas Frank, Son of Hans Frank, Governor of Nazi Occupied Poland (1939 - 45) HARDtalk

Now on BBC News, it's time for HARDtalk.

Welcome to HARDtalk.

I'm Stephen Sackur.

Today I'm in rural northern Germany.

Stable, prosperous, 21st century Germany.

But I'm here to talk about the past and its relationship to the present.

My guest is the writer, journalist and son, Niklas Frank.

Now, his father was appointed by Hitler to be the governor general

of Nazi-occupied Poland.

He was intimately involved in the murder of millions of people.

So, how has this German son dealt with the terrible crimes

of his father?

Niklas, I'm wondering why you have chosen to make your life in the very

far north of Germany.

Is it because you wanted to get as far away as possible

from your family background in Bavaria?

No, I still love Bavaria.

And every year we have about many weeks in Bavaria,

in the same village where I grew up.

But it was my profession as a journalist at Stern magazine,

which I worked for 23 years, was based in Hamburg.

So, I had to lure my wife, she was attached to Munich,

because she is a big gardener, to her house with a big garden,

so we've lived here for 33 years.

This place where you now live is extraordinarily peaceful.

Yes, it is.

Would you say it has helped bring you some sort of peace of mind?

Ah, no.

No, I don't think that it depends on the country I am living in.

It is...

In myself I have found peace, because I acknowledge

what my father has done.

That I think is the first and most important step.

Thinking of my father is thinking first about his victims.

There is no German around who has not certain pictures of corpses

in his mind.

And those pictures always remind me of my father,

what he did.

And especially when I look at him...

That's the leather coat of my father.

It's a scarecrow.

In German, you call it vogelscheuche.

And this scarecrow is the most expensive one in Germany,

I would say, because I bought it from a soldier who had stolen it.

The coat, you mean?

The coat, yes.

And someone gave me a call and asked it if I was interested

in the coat of my father and I said yes.

She wanted $500 and I paid it.

You mean this old military greatcoat, leather coat,

is actually your father's old coat?

Yes.

What I have to admit, since the scarecrow is standing

here, I have got a stronger connection to my father.

It's very strange.

And always, when I'm sitting in our living room,

looking at him and say, "This you have earned,

Father, being a scarecrow in the end."

That's your fault.

Niklas, I want to hear more about your family history.

I want to dig deeper into your relationship

with your father.

But I also want to get out of the cold north German wind.

That is a good idea.

Why don't we head back into your home?

OK, that's great.

Bye-bye, scarecrow.

Niklas Frank, welcome to HARDtalk.

Thank you.

Do you feel that you have some sort of a duty to your country to speak

about your past?

I think so, yes.

I think I have the duty because, by chance, I was born in this family

and I could tell the people...

Ah, how to behave with parents like I had.

When do you think you first began to feel that you must speak out

as volubly, as publicly as possible about your father

and about your feelings toward your father?

It was a growing wish, because of the silence in Germany.

Families, all the families of my friends, everybody was silent.

And they didn't talk about the past.

And this I couldn't endure, because I always wanted to know how

is it that society behaves if it changes to a dictatorship.

And I always have a feeling that Germany is still prepared

to do this.

And so I looked closer towards families and friends

and connectedness, and I found out that still there is something

in the German people which makes me fear them.

Fear, your own country and your own people?

Yes, I would say so.

Well, I want to pick up on that, because that's a pretty remarkable

thing to feel and to say.

But before I get to your thoughts on the country, on Germany,

I do want to stay with the personal.

Because it seems to me in that period you're talking about,

after the end of the war, and for decades afterwards,

many families of senior, top Nazis still felt a vestigial

loyalty to their kin, to their blood.

Did you never feel that?

No.

Especially not for my father.

It's slightly different with my mother, because I have

experienced my mother as a really fighting mother for us.

But she was a Nazi too.

She wasn't a Nazi.

Was she not?

She was never a member of the Nazi party, nor was she a Nazi.

She hated all this screaming of her husband when he was

delivering a speech.

And she hated this kind of stuff.

But she very much liked the luxury she found through the position

of her husband.

She was a very cold and inhuman woman.

In terms of your father, I want you just to look at this

picture with me.

That is your father in his Nazi uniform.

When you look at him, do you feel anger, rage,

what do you feel?

Anger and rage, anger and rage.

And the next thing was I always...

The word which for me is always sticking to my father is,

what a coward you are.

What a coward.

And that feeling isn't just a memory feeling,

it is something that is very alive in you.

It's very alive, it's very alive.

It is still as if he is sitting in your place.

I despise him, really.

He died, he was hung, after the Nuremberg trials,

when you were seven years old.

So I'm just wondering how strong your memories can be of him

when you were in that castle in Krakow, his headquarters,

the headquarters of the Nazi force in Poland, do you really remember

what it was like and what he was like?

No, I didn't remember what kind of profession he had.

I only knew Poland was ours.

And the castle was ours.

And the other castle outside of Krakow was ours.

And there were our properties.

It was almost like you were part of the royal family.

Yes, it was, it was.

And this I enjoyed very much, like my mother.

I enjoyed it.

What about the truth of the unimaginable crimes

and cruelty as a young boy growing up from the age of,

well, from being a baby to being six years old.

Did you have any awareness of what was happening?

No.

The only thing was, when I accompanied my mother

into the Krakow ghettos, when she was shopping,

maybe it was one visit, maybe more, but I remember especially this one

visit, there was a lot of people, everybody was looking very sadly.

And this was the only memory.

But I didn't know where it was.

Later on I talked to my mummy, my beloved Hilda, and I told her

the flashes of my memory.

And she told me it was Krakow and we were together

and I remembered her sitting beside me in the car.

We now associate your father with the Holocaust.

He was instrumental in delivering millions of Jews and others

to their deaths, and he seemed to be enthusiastic about it.

Was there any way that anybody else in your family could have known

exactly what was happening?

Exactly knew it, um, his wife, my mother.

Your mother?

She knew exactly.

You have to imagine this castle in Krakow, it was really

like a kingdom.

Everybody knows each other, yes.

Everybody talked to each other.

They knew exactly what was going on in the death camps

and what was going on day by day.

You have said, I think, that you have no doubt

that your father loved Hitler more than he loved his own family.

Yes, that's for sure.

And you use that word love advisedly.

You really mean love.

Really love, real love.

It is something of a homosexual kind of love.

Tell me about your last encounter with your father.

He, of course, was tried at Nuremberg as one of the top Nazis

to be held responsible for the genocide, for the war

crimes, crimes against humanity.

But before he was executed, you saw him one last time.

Yes.

Sitting on my mother's lap, it was a big room

on the other side...

I will always remember I was sitting behind this window with small holes

to understand each other.

I was sitting on my mother's lap.

And knowing that will be my last visit to him.

And he smiled at me and laughed.

Do you have a picture of him at Nuremberg?

It is here, during his...

This is during the trial.

During the trial, yes.

So, he smiled.

And what did he say to you, what was his last message to you?

The last message to me was a big lie.

I knew that he would be hanged and he told me,

"Hi, Niki," which was my name in the family, "Heil,

Niki, we will soon celebrate Christmas at our house,"

and I was really thinking, "Why is he lying, why is he lying?"

Let's move forward and think about the impact of all this

on your family.

You have siblings, two older sisters and I think two brothers.

Yes.

Could you, in the years that followed, talk to them,

share feelings with them, actually have the same sort

of understanding of what your father had done and what it meant

to you as a family?

I was living in a boarding school until I finished school.

We were separated in different places.

But whenever we came together, after a short "Hi,"

we were discussing our father.

And then very slowly I found out the very different approaches

to my father especially.

And this separated me.

Because your sisters, what, they...

Three of my sisters defended my father as innocent victim of Hitler,

Himmler and the justice of Nuremberg.

I would say it cost them their lives.

They died very early.

My next oldest sister, Frigita, called Kitty,

she wrote in her diary when she was a teenager,

she said that she would not become older than our father

and she committed suicide at 46, the same age my father

was when he was hanged.

My next older brother, a really great looking guy,

very sporting, a very funny guy he suddenly started to drink milk,

litres a day and became fatter and fatter and died of all that

follows when you are too fat.

He was alive when my book came out and he attacked me in public.

It sort of destroyed your family.

Yes, certainly.

What about forgiveness?

There are many people who hear your story and the rage

and the anger you acknowledge to this very day.

They say there is something inhuman about it, because humanity is full

of the deepest failings and flaws and in the end,

part of humanity is to find forgiveness.

I am an inhuman being.

I will never forgive him.

Looking around in Europe and also in other countries,

such as America, wherever, I find a lot of families

have fathers who have killed a part of that family.

I cannot forgive that.

Never.

Do you ever wonder if you may have had a better, happier,

more positive life if you had found a different way to deal

with what is, after all, your father's terrible crime?

Not yours?

Yes, but these crimes, you can say it was my father,

but it comes out of demolishing society

and demolishing families and killing innocent children.

They were the victims, not my father.

My father did it, he gave the signatures for death penalty

and that sort of thing.

He was responsible by German law, he was the deputy

of Hitler in Poland.

Every death camp, he was responsible for.

The true power, certainly it was with Himmler,

but he was responsible.

With you talking to me, asking me this question,

maybe you can see my face going red, I become furious again

because it was unbelievable in which he was involved.

But that is...those red cheeks, the fury that you feel,

you are allowing your father to define you.

Define me exactly?

You are giving your father another form of enormous power.

He wielded this terrible power over so many millions in Poland

and still over you.

I think you once called yourself a puppet on a string.

Why not cut those strings?

Do not allow your father, even in death, after so many years,

to pull your strings.

Too many victims.

Too many victims.

Let's not just talk about you.

Let's also talk about Germany.

You introduced that topic earlier and I would like to return to it.

It seems to me that you feel, I think you used the word fearful,

still, of your own country and your own people.

Today, 72 years after the

liberation of Auschwitz.

Why?

You don't know my people as I do.

I do not trust them.

Nobody spoke, a normal German family never really spoke

about what our fathers, mothers, grandfathers,

grandmothers have really seen.

Whether they were cowards, whether they were actively involved

in the system.

They are silent.

This is like a swamp.

That swamp was never drained.

So here and there in Germany you find nowadays, you find these

poison flowers coming up.

Meadows full of them.

But when you say there is suddenly a meadow full of poison flowers,

that is where I wonder whether that is fair.

This interview is being filmed by three young German men

in their 20s and 30s.

Why should they have to bear any sense of guilt

or shame or responsibility?

No.

No guilt, no shame.

Acknowledge.

Really acknowledge.

If you talk to these youngsters, really, you will find out a lot

of uncertainty, or not really wanting to talk about it.

They say why should we be taking high school trips to Bergen-Belsen?

Why should we have to, as kids, be fed this sense

of our collective responsibility?

The responsibility, for me, it's a dead word.

You have to know your history, the history of your people.

It hurts to admit that there was a time in Germany where we left

a family of people all around the world, and we killed millions

of innocent people in a system which was really a difficult system.

And to be against the system then was to have a very brave character.

But this hurt, you can endure, like I endured and I still love

Germany.

I love being world champion in football, for instance.

Really.

I am a nationalist.

I also love very when Merkel said she will do this refugees,

now it may be thrown out, but that was a good thing.

You can especially see with Merkel, everything changed

because we are treating them as if they were Jews again...

That swamp is coming.

You really feel that, you feel so insecure

about your Germany today?

Don't trust us.

Especially, I was very happy when the European community suddenly...

Suddenly we were watched countless all over Germany,

we have very determined centrists, so that what gave me a happy feeling

- now England is leaving, Poland is like a dictatorship,

Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, who is the strongest left?

The Germans.

But the Germans, as you painted, Germany today is a bulwark

of moderation, of tolerance, compared to so many messages coming

from Hungary or Marine Le Pen or from so many people

in so many corners.

As long as our economy is great and as long as we make money,

everything is very democratic.

But let's wait and hopefully not see if we have five to ten years heavy

economic problems and the swamp is a lake, it is a sea

and we are swallowed again.

I swear it to you.

I don't trust it.

It always makes me...

Thinking and feeling exactly...wait a minute,

there is something else.

You can lead a happy life, but there is something

else around you.

Yeah, it hurts but, on the other hand, because I have had

a really happy life.

Ask my grandchildren.

Niklas, what a nice way to end, and we must end.

Thank you for being on HARDtalk.

Thank you for being on HARDtalk.

Hi there.

It felt pretty chilly at times yesterday, didn't it?

It was even cold enough for some snow on the ground up

in the Highlands of Scotland.

Not bad going for late April.