May 22nd, 1946.
The courtyard of Pankrac Prison, Prague.
It is morning.
Bright sunshine fills the yard.
Approximately 5,000 people have been admitted by special card.
Czechs who were selected from among the many thousands who applied for the right to be here.
They sit in arranged rows, silent, watching a wooden platform that has been constructed at the far end of the courtyard.
On that platform stands a tall pole.
At the top of the pole, a rope has been rigged with a noose.
This is not the standard gallows that a British or American executioner would recognize.
There is no long drop here, no calculated fall designed to snap the cervical vertebrae and end consciousness instantly.
This is the Austro-Hungarian pole method, a short drop that lets a man’s full body weight bear down on the noose around his throat, constricting the blood vessels and airway simultaneously, while the condemned remains aware of what is happening.
It is a method designed for a specific kind of dying.
In the second row of seats, in a position of deliberate prominence, sit seven women.
They are widows.
Their village, if a village can still be said to exist when every building has been burned to its foundation and the rubble dynamited and the earth plowed over and even the stream diverted to remove any trace that human beings had ever lived there, their village was called Lidice.
And the man who organized what happened to Lidice, who pressed the orders down through the bureaucratic chain and watched with something close to satisfaction as 173 men were shot in a farmyard while the women were shipped to concentration camps and the children
were gassed, that man is about to walk across this courtyard.
He appears between two guards.
He is wearing a ragged SS uniform stripped of all insignia.
He walks quietly.
He does not look at the widows.
He climbs the steps to the platform.
The executioner, who has the distinction of being the first man the Gestapo ever imprisoned in Prague, something the Czechoslovak authorities chose deliberately, positions the noose around his neck.
The condemned man mutters something.
Reporters leaning close catch the words, “In German, Deutschland wird leben, auch wenn wir nicht leben.
” Germany will live even if we do not live.
The drop is released.
The crowd watches in almost perfect silence.
There is only a mild sound, which court dignitaries immediately suppress as the body falls and the rope pulls tight.
And then begins the waiting, because with pole hanging, the waiting is the point.
Subscribe, because what happened to Karl Hermann Frank and what he did to earn that rope and those widows in the second row is one of the most complete stories of how becomes a mass murderer that the historical record of the Second World War contains.
And it begins not in Berlin, not in a Nazi Party meeting, but in a spa town in Bohemia where a one-eyed bookseller nursed a grudge against a country he had been born into and always despised.
Karl Hermann Frank was born on January 24th, 1898 in Carlsbad, the city now known as Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a famous spa town of elegant colonnades and mineral springs in Western Bohemia.
His father was a committed German nationalist, a follower of Georg von Schönerer, an Austrian politician whose Pan-German ideology was explicitly anti-Semitic, explicitly anti-Czech, and explicitly hostile to any political arrangement that placed Germans and Slavs in the same state.
Frank grew up marinated in this worldview.
The assumption that German culture was superior, that Slavic peoples were lesser, that the German-speaking populations of Bohemia had been wronged by history and needed to correct that wrong.
These were not ideas Frank discovered as an adult.
They were the air in his father’s house.
He attempted to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and was rejected.
The reason was practical.
He was blind in his right eye.
Whatever ambitions Frank might have had for military glory, a disability hidden behind one lens of his glasses closed that avenue before it opened.
He spent a year studying law at Charles University in Prague, the German language section of that ancient institution before economics forced him out.
He worked as a tutor to make money.
He was, by the measure of his own ambitions, a minor figure in a minor place, educated enough to feel the gap between where he was and where he believed he deserved to be.
Living in a country dominated by a Czech political majority that he fundamentally believed had no legitimate claim to govern him.
After the war ended and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved, the new country of Czechoslovakia was created.
For ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland, the border regions of Bohemia and Moravia, this was a deeply unwelcome development.
They had been part of an empire that placed Germans at its cultural and political pinnacle.
Now they were a minority population in a state governed by Czechs and Slovaks with German as a secondary language and the political center of gravity permanently tilted away from them.
Frank returned to Carlsbad, opened a bookshop, and made it into what was effectively a propaganda distribution center for German nationalist and early Nazi materials circulating through the Sudetenland.
He joined the Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, the Sudeten German National Socialist Workers’ Party, by 1919.
He had been a Nazi before Hitler’s party of the same name had consolidated its identity in Germany.
For the following decade and a half, Frank built his life around the cause of incorporating the Sudetenland into Germany and removing it from Czechoslovakia entirely.
He organized chapters of right-wing groups, distributed literature, cultivated the networks of ethnic German resentment that ran through the border communities.
When the Czech government banned the Sudeten Nazi organizations in the 1930s, Frank helped reconstitute the movement as the Sudeten Deutsche Heimatfront, the Sudeten German Homeland Front, which in 1935 was renamed the Sudeten German Party, SDP, under the leadership of Konrad Henlein.
Henlein was the public face, measured, presentable, capable of speaking the language of self-determination and minority rights that played well with international audiences.
Frank was the radical engine underneath, the man who represented the movement’s most extreme wing, and who maintained direct contact with Berlin.
He became the SDP’s deputy leader in 1935, was elected to the Czechoslovak Parliament that same year, the parliament of the country whose dissolution he was actively working to facilitate, and spent the years from 1935 to 1938 as one of the most
effective internal agents of Nazi Germany operating within a democratic state in Europe.
The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was the moment Frank had been working toward for 20 years.
Britain, France, and Italy agreed to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, sacrificing Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity in the hope of appeasing Hitler’s expansionist demands.
The session was completed in October 1938.
For Frank, the ethnic German bookseller who had nursed his resentments and distributed his pamphlets for two decades, the Munich settlement was vindication.
He had been right all along.
Germany was ascendant.
Czechoslovakia was being dismantled.
And now, with the Sudetenland absorbed into the Reich, Frank received his reward, the position of deputy Gauleiter of the Sudetenland.
He joined the Nazi Party and the SS formally on November 1st, 1938.
Heinrich Himmler, recognizing in Frank’s ideological intensity and his local knowledge the qualities the SS rewarded, promoted him to SS Brigadeführer within weeks of his joining.
On March 15th, 1939, German forces occupied the remaining Czech lands.
Hitler announced the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a euphemistic title for what was straightforwardly a German occupation of Czech territory.
Konstantin von Neurath was appointed the first Reich Protector, a German diplomat and aristocrat whose approach to governing the Czechs was, by Nazi standards, relatively restrained.
He believed that Czech industrial productivity, the Bohemian and Moravian factories, the Škoda Arms Works, the mines, the engineering plants that were among the most sophisticated in Europe, was more valuable to the Reich if the Czech workers were kept functioning rather than brutalized into resistance.
Frank disagreed with this philosophy completely.
He was appointed Secretary of State for the Protectorate and higher SS and police leader, theoretically Neurath’s subordinate, but in control of the entire SS apparatus and the police apparatus including the Gestapo.
He used that control.
He worked against Neurath quietly, reporting his superior’s inadequate severity to Himmler, positioning himself as the man who understood what needed to be done.
What Frank believed needed to be done was the systematic destruction of Czech national identity.
Czech universities were closed.
Czech intellectuals were arrested.
The Czech language was suppressed in official contexts.
Czech cultural institutions were dismantled or redirected.
The Gestapo, under Frank’s operational authority, arrested and executed anyone it classified as a threat to the occupation.
Resistance members, political figures, journalists, teachers, anyone who organized or communicated or simply represented Czech identity in a form that challenged German control.
The 30,000 Czechs for whose deaths Frank would later be held accountable at his trial were accumulated throughout the occupation in summary executions, in concentration camps, in prisons, in the systematic elimination of a civil society that had functioned under its own government for 20 years.
Frank had expected to be appointed Reich Protector when Neurath was finally removed from the position.
He was the ranking SS officer in the Protectorate.
He knew the territory.
He had been running the security apparatus effectively since 1939.
When Neurath was suspended in September 1941 and replaced, Frank was passed over.
Hitler’s decision, made almost certainly because Frank was Sudeten rather than an ethnic German from the Reich itself, would have been a profound personal humiliation.
The man appointed over him was Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, arguably the most feared SS officer in the entire apparatus after Himmler himself.
Reinhard Heydrich arrived in Prague in September 1941 with a mandate from Hitler to tighten the occupation decisively.
Within 3 days of arriving, he had 92 people executed.
He suppressed the black market.
He manipulated Czech workers with increased food rations and social benefits while simultaneously conducting sweeping arrests of anyone connected to the resistance.
He was effective in the way that a surgeon is effective, precise, capable, and completely without sentiment.
The Czechs called him the Butcher of Prague.
The British, who had helped plan what came next, called him by his more official title and targeted him as the highest-ranking Nazi official in any occupied country, a demonstration that the SS were not untouchable.
On the morning of May 27th, 1942, two Czechoslovak paratroopers trained by British special operations and inserted into the protectorate by the Czech government in exile were waiting at a bend in the road in the Prague suburb of Libeň.
Their names were Jozef Gabčík, a
Slovak, and Jan Kubiš, a Czech.
The operation they were executing was code-named Anthropoid, from the Greek for having the form of a human.
As Heydrich’s open-topped Mercedes slowed around the curve, Gabčík stepped into the road and raised his Sten gun.
It jammed.
Heydrich, standing upright in the car, drew his own pistol.
In that instant, Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade toward the wheel.
It exploded against the rear of the vehicle, embedding shrapnel and horsehair padding from the seat into Heydrich’s back, spleen, and diaphragm.
Heydrich stumbled from the car, chased his attackers briefly, then collapsed.
He died 8 days later on June 4th, 1942, of septicemia from his wounds.
The rage that followed Heydrich’s death was expressed in numbers.
In the protectorate alone, the reprisals produced more than 3,000 arrests and over 1,300 executions in the weeks after the assassination.
Hitler initially ordered the execution of 10,000 Czech civilians.
Himmler managed to reduce this, arguing that Czech industrial production was essential to the war effort and that killing workers in that volume would harm the German military.
But the village of Lidice had already been identified through false information extracted under interrogation, through the coincidence of a love letter that mentioned a name connected to a family in the village, as a target.
On the night of June 9th, 1942, SS and police units surrounded Lidice, a small mining village of approximately 500 people located about 20 km northwest of Prague.
Frank was directly involved in the chain of command that ordered what happened next.
Horst Böhme, the SS police chief for the Protectorate, acted on Frank’s orders.
The village was sealed.
All men and boys aged 15 and older, 173 of them, were herded overnight into the cellars of the Horak farmhouse on the edge of the village.
In the morning, they were led out in groups, first five at a time, then 10 at a time, into the farmyard, where SS firing squads shot them against the barn wall, one after another, group after group, until 173 men lay dead in the farmyard.
Their blood soaked into the earth of the village they had worked and built and lived in.
The village priest, Father Josef Štemberka, was shot with the rest.
Men who had not been in Lidice that night were tracked down and executed later, including who were the ostensible reason Lidice was targeted, whose actual connection to the assassination was entirely fabricated.
Four pregnant women from the village were sent to a hospital, forced to undergo abortions, and then dispatched to concentration camps.
The remaining 184 women were transported to Ravensbrück, where 49 died and three were recorded as disappeared.
105 children were removed from their mothers.
Seven were selected as racially suitable for Germanization and placed with SS families.
The remaining 88 were transferred to the Chelmno death camp in occupied Poland.
They were killed in gas vans.
When the shooting was done, Jewish slave laborers from the Theresienstadt camp were brought in to open every grave in the village cemetery and extract gold teeth and jewelry.
The buildings were burned.
The walls still standing were dynamited.
The rubble was cleared.
The stream running through the village was diverted.
The earth was plowed over.
In a statement broadcast on German radio, the Reich proudly announced, “The village of Lidice no longer exists.
” The Nazis made Lidice an example they intended the world to see, an advertisement for what happened when occupied peoples resisted.
Instead, it became one of the most internationally recognized symbols of Nazi occupation’s criminal character.
The name Lidice was adopted by communities from Britain to Brazil, Mexico to the Soviet Union as an act of solidarity with what had been done there.
Two weeks after Lidice, the village of Ležáky, a settlement of 50 people where resistance operatives had hidden a radio transmitter, was subjected to a similar operation.
Its adult residents, both men and women, were shot.
The children were deported.
The village was erased.
Frank’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia continued in this mode for three more years, methodical, brutal, effective in its short-term suppression of organized resistance, and accumulating its count of 30,000 Czech dead.
Gabčík and Kubiš were eventually found on June 18th, 1942, hiding in the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague.
SS and police surrounded the building and a battle lasting hours ended with both paratroopers dead.
Gabčík fighting inside, Kubiš of wounds sustained in the firefight.
Their families and the families of all those who had sheltered them were sent to Mauthausen and executed.
The death toll connected to Heydrich’s assassination exceeded 5,000 people.
Frank was promoted.
In August 1943, he was elevated to Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia, given cabinet rank, made effectively the supreme authority in the protectorate, commanding the entire Czech police and security apparatus while overseeing the forced labor deployment of Czech workers into German industry.
His personal hatred of Czech national identity, cultivated since childhood, had been given institutional power and he used it completely.
As the Allied armies advanced in 1944 and 1945 and the occupation became increasingly untenable, Frank continued the executions.
Czech resistance accelerated.
Frank’s response was unchanged.
On May 5th, 1945, with Soviet forces approaching Prague and the German military disintegrating, the Prague Uprising began.
A general insurrection of the Czech population that seized control of parts of the city, broadcast from captured radio stations, and began the process of liberation before Allied forces arrived.
The SS conducted fierce reprisals.
The fighting in Prague was brutal and close.
By May 8th, German forces in the protectorate had surrendered.
Frank, moving toward Western Bohemia as Soviet forces advanced, surrendered himself to the United States Army at Pilsen on May 9th, 1945.
He surrendered to the Americans deliberately, calculating correctly that American forces were more likely to treat him according to the Geneva Convention and provide legal proceedings than to shoot him or hand him to the Soviets.
He was held in American custody, subjected to the Allied Commission investigation in Prague that documented his crimes through 1945, then extradited to Czechoslovakia, and delivered to the People’s Court in Prague in 1946.
The trial opened on March 24th, 1946.
The courtroom at Pankrac was filled with spectators on each day of the proceedings.
Frank sat in the dock wearing a plain uniform with a red armband indicating prisoner of war status.
He listened through headphones as Czech testimony was translated for him.
Eyewitness accounts placed him in photographs and documents ordering the Lidice operation.
Survivors of the occupation testified about the executions.
The scale of the charges was enormous.
Responsibility for the deaths of approximately 30,000 Czech civilians over 6 years of occupation, including specifically the obliteration of Lidice and Ležáky, the execution of partisans and resistance members, the systematic suppression of Czech national life.
Frank’s defense counsel argued the court had no jurisdiction, that Frank, as a former member of the Czechoslovak Parliament, retained parliamentary immunity, and that he should be returned to American custody and tried at Nuremberg.
The court rejected all of
this.
The evidence was overwhelming.
Frank had signed documents.
His name appeared on orders.
His rank placed him at the center of every major security decision in the protectorate.
The verdict was delivered over 8 minutes in late April 1946.
Frank sat in the dock.
His face gaunt.
His expression without apparent emotion.
Time magazine’s correspondent, who was present, described the courtyard scene that followed for the sentencing.
“Tall and gray, his face gaunt, his SS uniform rumpled and shorn of insignia, the condemned man faced his judges.
Ranged before him were the judge and jury who had tried him 2 days before.
The yard was filled with spectators, some 3,000 hard-eyed Czechs.
Prominent among them sat seven widows from a village once known as Lidice.
The death sentence was confirmed.
The execution was set for May 22nd, 1946.
The morning of May 22nd was clear and bright.
The 5,000 people admitted by special card, Czechs who had applied in far greater numbers for the right to witness this, took their places in the courtyard of Pankrác Prison.
The Lidice widow sat in the second row.
The platform had been constructed.
The pole stood at its center.
The noose hung from the top of the pole.
Contemporary accounts from New York Times reporters present described what followed with precision.
Not the slightest gleam of compassion could be seen in that long row of unforgiving eyes as Frank, garbed in a ragged Nazi elite guard uniform, walked quietly between two guards.
He climbed the steps.
The executioner, the first man the Gestapo had imprisoned in Prague, chosen for the role by the Czechoslovak authorities with deliberate symbolic intent, positioned the noose around Frank’s neck.
Frank muttered his last words, “Deutschland wird leben auch, wenn wir nicht leben.
” Germany will live even if we do not live.
Then the drop.
The pole hanging method the Czechoslovak authorities chose for Frank was the same method used throughout the Austro-Hungarian legal tradition.
A tradition that predated the Nazi occupation by decades and that the Czechoslovak state had inherited as one mechanism of capital punishment.
It was emphatically not chosen for speed or mercy.
The drop in pole hanging is short, sufficient to produce the sudden pull of body weight against the noose, but insufficient to break the neck vertebrae in the way that a properly calculated British or American long drop is designed to do.
Without the neck fracture that terminates consciousness almost instantly, pole hanging proceeds by strangulation and restriction of blood flow to the brain.
The body fights instinctively.
The carotid arteries and jugular veins are compressed by the rope.
The airway is blocked.
Oxygen-starved blood continues to circulate for a time, keeping the brain aware of what is occurring.
The condemned remains conscious, at some level, for minutes.
The crowd at Pankrac watched quietly in the bright May sunshine.
The New York Times recorded only a mild sound from the crowd when the noose dropped, and that sound was immediately silenced by court dignitaries who wanted the execution conducted with dignity rather than spectacle.
No one cheered.
No one shouted.
5,000 people watched Karl Hermann Frank die, and they did so in near silence.
The widows in the second row watched the man who had ordered their husbands led out in groups of 10 into a farmyard and shot.
The man who had organized the gassing of their children in a camp in occupied Poland.
The man who had promised to remove the name of their village from the map of Europe, that man was now at the end of a rope in a prison courtyard, and the people he had wronged were watching him, and they were silent.
There is something more disturbing about that silence than any shouting would have been.
It was not the silence of indifference.
It was the silence of people who had been living with something for 4 years and were now simply watching it be concluded.
The Lidice widows had not come to cheer.
They had come to see, to confirm with their own eyes that the man who had organized the destruction of everything they had, their husbands, their children, their village, their name on the map, had received a consequence.
Whether that consequence was sufficient is a question the silence doesn’t answer.
Consequences and sufficiency are different things.
What happened at Lidice to 173 men and 88 children has no proportionate consequence.
There is no execution that weighs out against it.
What pole hanging in the courtyard of Pankrác Prison gave the Lidice widows was not equivalence.
It was a fact.
He was dead.
He would not be anything else.
Frank was buried in an anonymous pit at the Ďáblice Cemetery in Prague.
No marker, no inscription, the same treatment given to executed prisoners across the postwar trials, the graves deliberately anonymous to prevent them becoming shrines, the bodies returned to the earth without the dignity of acknowledged burial.
The village of Lidice itself was rebuilt, not on the original site, which remained a grassy field with a memorial.
The outlines of where the houses had stood invisible under grass, the place where the Horák farmyard had been.
A new Lidice was constructed adjacent to the memorial, and Lidice was repopulated by some of the surviving women who returned after liberation.
The rose garden that was established at the memorial site now holds varieties donated by gardeners from around the world, each bloom a different gesture of memory from a different country that heard what happened to this village and found it necessary to do something, even something as small as planting a flower.
The children who were gassed at Chełmno in 1942 have individual names on a memorial at the Lidice site.
82 of them are documented, their ages at the time of their deaths ranging from infants to early adolescence.
The youngest was less than a year old.
The oldest was 14.
All of them were killed because Karl Hermann Frank, the one-eyed Sudeten German bookseller from Carlsbad, had decided that the assassination of one SS officer required the annihilation of a community that had done nothing more than exist in the wrong place at a moment when the Nazi occupation wanted to demonstrate what disobedience would cost.
The poor hanging at Pankrac prison was filmed and photographed.
The footage exists in archives including the holdings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and shows the courtyard, the crowd, the platform, and the moment of execution.
The film going blurry at the critical instant as Frank’s body drops and the rope pulls tight.
The executioner’s white gloves, discarded after the process is complete, are flung onto the wooden steps of the platform.
The crowd turns to leave the courtyard.
Carved into the memorial at Lidice is a simple statement.
It does not describe what happened.
It does not catalog the crimes.
It simply says that Lidice was here, that its people lived here, that what was done here is remembered.
The village that Frank was told to erase from the map of Europe is the most remembered village in the Czech Republic.
Its name is known in dozens of countries.
Communities around the world that renamed themselves Lidice in 1942 retain those names to this day.
There are Lidices in Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela.
The promise to obliterate the name of Lidice from the map of Europe was the most completely failed promise Karl Hermann Frank ever made.
