Editing Hans Frank (section)

==Family==
On 2 April 1925, Frank married 29-year-old secretary Brigitte Herbst (29 December 1895 – 9 March 1959) from [[Forst (Lausitz)]]. The wedding took place in [[Munich]] and the couple honeymooned in [[Veneto|Venetia]]. Hans and Brigitte Frank had five children:
* Sigrid Frank (born 17 March 1927 and died in South Africa)
* Norman Frank (3 June 1928 – March 2009)
* Brigitte Frank (13 January 1935 – 1981)
* Michael Frank (15 February 1937 – 1990)
* [[Niklas Frank]] (born 9 March 1939)

Brigitte Herbst had a reputation for having a more dominant personality than her husband: after 1939, she called herself "a queen of Poland" ("''Königin von Polen''"), which began as a jest from her husband at the time of his nomination. The marriage was unhappy and became colder from year to year, with Brigitte having many affairs, which weren't unknown amongst her children, including resulting rumours on [[Paternity fraud|there being different fathers]]. Frank sought a divorce in 1942, after meeting and falling in love with a former childhood acquaintance who was looking for her son, a soldier who had gone missing on the Eastern Front. Brigitte made great efforts to save their marriage in order to remain the "First Lady in the General Government". One of her most famous comments was "I'd rather be widowed than divorced from a Reichsminister!" Frank answered: "So you are my deadly enemy!"<ref>"Hans Frank – Pre-war career, Wartime career, Quotation, Fiction and film," in ''Cambridge Encyclopedia'', '''32'''. Retrieved 20 January 2008.</ref> Besides making her children intercede for her with their father, she would go on to contact Himmler and [[Magda Goebbels|Mrs. Goebbels]], who would get Hitler to personally forbid Frank from divorcing his wife.<ref name=":0" />

Contrary to Hans's later stance on the concentration camps and ghettos, the children were not isolated from them, despite their parents not discussing them directly with them. The youngest, Niklas, was often taken to a concentration camp by Hilde, their nanny. On one occasion, for Niklas and his brother Norman's enjoyment, the guards made undernourished prisoners sit on a donkey, which would then be made to jump and throw the compulsed riders to the ground. Niklas would also be told that a sad prisoner was a "witch", but one whom he did not have to worry about, since she would "die very soon". At another point, a Polish servant soiled bed sheets with soot, and his mother screamed that he would be sent to the camps. Niklas, who had befriended the Pole, heard this and began to cry, which made his mother stop scolding the man and start comforting her son. In the end, she let the matter go, and after the war, the man and his wife would credit Niklas with saving their lives.<ref name=":0" />

All but Niklas would grieve their father at the time of his execution, feeling he was "innocent". Niklas Frank had been shunned early on by his parental figure, because of his father's belief he was instead the son a former family friend, [[Karl Lasch]],<ref>{{Cite web |last=Swart |first=Mia |title='I knew my father would be hanged': Remembering Nuremberg |url=https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/11/20/i-knew-my-father-would-be-hanged-remembering-nuremberg |access-date=2024-10-21 |website=Al Jazeera |language=en}}</ref> and so he instead bonded closer to Hilde, their nanny, and also felt closer to his mother than his father. According to Niklas, his siblings' "brains" had been "poisoned" by their father.<ref name=":0" /> Niklas, who in his early adult years became a journalist for the [[Time (magazine)|Time magazine]] in Germany, would also participate in the early printing of ''[[Schindler's Ark|Schindler's List]]''. In 1987, Niklas Frank wrote a book about his father, ''Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung'' ("The Father: A Settling of Accounts"), which was published in English in 1991 as ''In the Shadow of the Reich''. The book, first of a trilogy about his family's experiences, was serialized in the magazine ''[[Stern (magazine)|Stern]]'', and caused controversy in Germany, and even in some sectors of Poland, because of the scathing way in which the younger Frank depicted his father: Niklas referred to him as "a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic" and questioned his remorse before his execution.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Frank, Niklas (1991). ''In the Shadow of the Reich''. Knopf; {{ISBN|978-0-394-58345-7}}.{{page needed|date=August 2020}}</ref><ref>[https://archive.today/20120709064147/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_n11_v23/ai_11540503 Review] by [[Susan Benesch]], ''Washington Monthly'', November 1991.</ref> In his work, Niklas also created a compilation of Nazi-era films of the Frank family.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Hans Frank private motion pictures |url=https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1005020 |access-date=2024-10-21 |website=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum}}</ref>

The scars of having Hans as a parent would seemingly carry on, not quite healed. Michael, the closest to Niklas in their youth, though an ardent defender of their father's innocence, would develop an addiction to milk to the point his wife would struggle to save some for their children, which would go on to cause severe obesity and, in consequence, organ failure.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |last=Grzebałkowska |first=Magdalena |date=27 April 2021 |title=Syn "króla Polski" |trans-title=Son of the "King of Poland" |url=https://wyborcza.pl/7,75517,27014649,wojenka-magdaleny-grzebalkowskiej-prinz-von-polen.html |access-date=2024-10-21 |website=wyborcza.pl |language=pl}}</ref> Michael died in 1990, at 53 years old.<ref name=":0" />

Norman, whose last words from his father were that Norman should be silent (which would lead to tensions between him and Niklas, whose work was often about documenting insights into his family), would also become addicted to alcohol. Though he recognized and was critical of his father's political work and Nazi rhetoric of his recorded speeches, Norman followed his father's advice on silence and so was critical of Niklas's work, though he later privately confessed being proud of his brother.<ref name=":1" /> 

Brigitte committed suicide in 1981, at 46 years old, and Niklas would claim the motivation was "because she didn't want to become older" than their father. Niklas would come to believe this despite the fact that his sister had cancer, but the doctors claimed she could have survived about five to seven years. According to Niklas, she had written in her 16-year-old diary that she didn’t want to become older than their father, and made it so it happened. She took her own life by overdosing whilst sleeping with her 8-year-old son, Hans's grandson.<ref name=":0" />

Despite as a young woman, in 1945, being worried that they wouldn't be forgiven for "what we have done to the Jews", worried then of deadly retaliations, Sigrid remained a committed Nazi who emigrated to South Africa during the apartheid regime and, having developed an addiction for tranquilizers, died there.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />

Niklas is the sole living child of Hans and Brigitte Frank. Despite severe differences, especially when it came to Hans Frank's memory, Hans's family would remain unestranged all throughout their lives, not letting their differences destroy the relationships, no matter how fiercely they disagreed on the facts of the father's crimes.<ref name=":0" />

Whilst some, if not all, of Hans's grandchildren have been noticeably affected by the events of their grandfather's life, Niklas's daughter has claimed her father's critical work about her grandfather was a "wall" around her, growing up.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Niklas Frank, ''Hitler's Children'' (2012 documentary).</ref>