Editing Hans Frank (section)

==Memoirs==
[[Image:Dead hansfrank.jpg|thumb|210px|Hans Frank's corpse after his hanging|left]]
While awaiting execution, he wrote his memoirs, ''Im Angesicht des Galgens'' (In the Face of the Gallows), later published by his widow.<ref name=":0" /> In the capacity as his attorney, Frank was privy to personal details of Hitler's life. In his memoirs, Frank made the sensational claim that Hitler had commissioned him to investigate Hitler's family in 1930 after a "[[blackmail]] letter" had been received from Hitler's nephew, [[William Patrick Hitler]], who allegedly threatened to reveal embarrassing facts about his uncle's ancestry. Frank said that the investigation uncovered evidence that [[Maria Schicklgruber]], Hitler's paternal grandmother, had been working as a cook in the household of a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger before she gave birth to Hitler's father, [[Alois Hitler|Alois]], out of wedlock. Frank claimed that he had obtained from a relative of Hitler's by marriage a collection of letters between Maria Schicklgruber and a member of the Frankenberger family that discussed a stipend for her after she left the family's employ. According to Frank, Hitler told him that the letters did not prove that the Frankenberger son was his father but rather his grandmother had merely [[extortion|extorted]] money from Frankenberger by threatening to claim his paternity of her illegitimate child.{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|pp=21-22}}

Frank accepted this explanation, but added that it was still just possible that Hitler had some Jewish ancestry. But he thought it unlikely because, "from his entire demeanor, the fact that Adolf Hitler had no Jewish blood coursing through his veins seems so clearly evident that nothing more need be said on this."<ref>Translated from Frank's memoirs published posthumously: Frank, Hans (1953). ''Im Angesicht des Galgens. Deutung Hitlers und seiner Zeit aufgrund eigener Erlebnisse und Erkenntnisse''. Friedrich Alfred Beck. p. 330 (in German).</ref>

Given that all Jews had been expelled from the province of Styria (which includes Graz) in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until the 1860s, scholars such as [[Ian Kershaw]] and [[Brigitte Hamann]] dismiss as baseless the "[[Frankenberger thesis|Frankenberger hypothesis]]", which before had only Frank's speculation to support it.{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|pp=24–25}} More recent scholarship by [[Leonard Sax]] points out that many Jews lived in places without official sanction and demonstrated the existence of a settled Jewish community in Graz before the law formally permitted their residence.<ref>Sax, L. (2019). ''Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather.'' Journal of European Studies, 49(2), 143–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244119837477</ref> Nevertheless, there is no evidence outside of Frank's statements for the existence of a "Leopold Frankenberger" living in Graz in the 1830s, and Frank's story is inaccurate on several points such as the claim that Maria Schicklgruber came from "Leonding near Linz", when in fact she came from the hamlet of Strones near the village of [[Döllersheim]].{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|p=21}} Some suggest that Frank (who turned against Nazism in his defence after 1945 but remained an anti-Semitic fanatic) made the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry as a way of proving that Hitler was really a "Jew" and not an "Aryan", and in this way "proved" that the Third Reich's crimes were the work of the "Jewish" Hitler.{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|pp=21, 30-1}} The full anti-Semitic implications of Frank's story were borne out in a letter entitled "Was Hitler a Jew?", written to the editor of a [[Saudi Arabia|Saudi]] newspaper in 1982 by a German man living in Saudi Arabia.{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|p=30}} The writer accepted Frank's story as the truth, and added since Hitler was a Jew, "the Jews should pay Germans reparations for the War, because ''one of theirs'' caused the destruction of Germany".{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|p=31}}

But Jewish-American author [[Ron Rosenbaum]] suggested another reason for Frank's story:<blockquote>On the other hand, a different version of Frank emerges in the brilliantly vicious, utterly unforgiving portrait of him by his son, Niklas Frank, who (in a memoir called ''In the Shadow of the Reich'') depicts his father as a craven coward and weakling, but one not without a kind of animal cunning, an instinct for lying, insinuation, self-aggrandizement. For ''this'' Hans Frank, disgraced and facing death on the gallows for following Hitler, fabricating such a story might be a cunning way of ensuring his place in history as the one man who gave the world the hidden key to the mystery of Hitler's psyche. While at the same time, revenging himself on his former master for having led him to this end by foisting a sordid and humiliating explanation of Hitler on him for all posterity. In any case, it was one Frank knew the victors would find seductive.{{sfn|Rosenbaum|1998|p=25}}</blockquote>