What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy

Imagine what it must be like

to grow up as the child

of a mass murderer.

To live with such a parent

must impose the most terrible of burdens.

My name is Niklas Frank

I am born 9th of March, 1939.

This is not special,

special is that I'm by chance

the son of Hans Frank.

He was politically responsible

for all the ghettos

and for the concentration camps

on the soil of Poland.

I was researching a book on

the Nuremberg ma! when I met Niklas Frank

and later he introduced me

to Horst von Wchter.

I was born in Vienna on 14th April, 1939.

So I'm still a child of peace.

It was before the war.

As gratitude towards the Nazi party,

my mother proposed the name of Horst,

after Horst Wessel

who was a prominent figure

from the first years of the Nazi party.

Right from the beginning,

my father. he was a commie Nazi.

The material

was all the more relevant to me

because of my own family background.

I'm Jewish and my family

was very directly affected

by the actions of these men.

I'm curious about details and people.

I want to know why things happened,

why people act as they do,

how they can engage in mass killing

and then spend an evening with their families.

Yet, watching these images felt dirty.

As though, I was complicit

in a voyeuristic sort of way

looking on the inside of horror.

Mr. President, members of the court,

uh, ifs an honor...

My day job

is working as an international lawyer

on cases involving genocide

and crimes against humanity

but it was while

working on my book

that I was commissioned to write an article

about Horst von Wchter.

I came with a tremendous anxiety

because I just didn't know what to expect,

and because of this connection with the past.

Here was a man who might have met Hitler.

I was meeting someone

who was directly connected,

not just with abstract history

but with a deep part of my family's life.

How did you find this house?

Here, there was a colony of artists

in the '60s, you know.

Living in the schloss?

- Yeah, yeah.

It was a secret place, you know,

- where they came and made their festivities.

- Yeah.

I love this staircase.

Everything has a meaning,

you know.

Positions of the doors for elements,

for directions.

This room is, hmm, devoted to Trismegistus,

who's the god of wisdom, god of numbers.

Twenty-two windows.

- No, that...

No, 16 windows.

- There are 16, then you have four doors.

Yeah.

- And you have two chimneys, you know.

- Yeah.

And 22 is the number of the letters

in the Hebrew alphabet.

This is really very important.

The Hebrew thing

keeps coming back.

Yes, it is Hebrew.

Here you see we have two lovers, you know.

Are they the same lovers

or are they different lovers?

No, they are different.

They are very different, you know.

I've some to talk with him about

what his father got up to

during the Second World War

and he just wanted to talk about stones

and rocks and buildings,

about history going back millennia,

not just 70 years.

You can see here the two put here,

they are kissing each other, you know.

You told me that this building

was your father's gift to you.

- Oh, yes.

- What did you mean by that?

When you... You said that to me,

what did you mean by that?

This has to do with my youth

and how I dropped out of normality

because of my father.

Because my normality was, hmm,

that was normality between, hmm, until 1945

when I was six years

and that was practically destroyed, you know,

by this whole, by the war more or less

but I see it now like this.

Because everything was finished, you know,

and I was raised like a...

Like a young Nazi boy

and that everything was right

and things like that

and from one day to the other

everything was gone, you know,

and that was... I was really shocked.

I mean, I feel it today,

so that's why I'm here, you know,

more or less.

I do remember moments in summertime

on the lake.

I remember my, hmm, sixth birthday

which was on 14th of April 1945.

Ifs not only that the regime broke down

but everything around us broke down.

The normality broke down for us, for me,

and I was just... I remember

when I was sitting on this, hmm, veranda

overlooking, hmm, the lake

and we had this small birthday party

and then I was alone and just thought that

I should remember this moment

for all my life.

You had this feeling

that everything is finished,

there is no future for you

and whatever you do

it has no sense, you know.

What I remember now is the...

The British and American war planes.

You saw these huge masses

of planes over you

and sometimes they...

Yes, I remember. Yes.

I remember that they dropped.

They dropped the bombs in the lake,

you know.

When they had too much bombs

or they just wanted to get rid of the bombs,

they dropped it into the lake and...

And the whole, uh... The whole house

started to shiver, you know.

Within an hour of sitting in his room

he'd taken out the family albums

and we were going through pages

of summer holidays and winter holidays,

interspersed with pictures of Dachau

images of AH, Adolf Hitler,

and at! that happened

in the first two hours that t met Horst.

And here we have him on the water,

Austrian rowing champion on the Danube.

Yes.

- Next album.

- As the years move on.

Otto von Wchter played a central role

in the murder of the Austrian Chancellor

by the Nazis in 1934,

as early as that

he was a leading Austrian Nazi.

And he's gone from being

a complete outsider...

- Yeah, into the government.

- Into the government.

So he was named SS-Oberfhrer

on Kristallnacht.

- Yeah, when this... This was Kristallnacht.

- That's Kristallnacht, yeah.

Yeah, I must check it

but then when you say it...

A year later he's now been upgraded

and he's a Brigadefhrer...

That's already in Krakow here.

I recognize that, that's...

- Yeah, that's my mother.

That's your mother

sitting with Niklas' mother?

- Yeah, Brigitte Frank.

- So this must be in the Wawel.

- Yes.

- In the Wawel castle.

And you see,

she was quite a good friend to Brigitte Frank.

I was transported back 70 years

to the heart of an appalling regime

but Horst was looking at these images

with a different eye from mine.

I see a man who has

probably been responsible

for the killing of tens of thousands

of Jews and Poles.

Horst looks at the same photographs

and he sees a beloved father

playing with the children

and he's thinking that was family life.

- More skiing photos.

Yes.

And this... And now we're in Lemberg.

Now we're in Lemberg.

What is he now?

- The Governor of Galicia.

- Yes.

So they've just occupied it.

Here he is, they've just occupied it,

they are moving east,

this is Soviet propaganda

- and is that your father?

- Yes.

- There was a little photograph.

- Yeah, yeah of the... With the Jews.

Yeah.

That was a visit to Warsaw.

- A visit to Warsaw,

the eye's attention is caught by the little girl

- who is in the middle and.

- Wait, hmm,

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