What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy Page #8

to the judgment of the law

is one of the most significant tributes

that power has ever paid to reason.

(SPEAKING GERMAN)

But it is also true

that Frank was a willing

and knowing participant in the use of terrorism in Poland

which led to the death by starvation

of over a million Poles

and in a programme involving the murder of at least three million Jews.

Frank didn't kill anybody personally,

yet the Nuremberg judgment

was unequivocal in finding him guilty

of the murder of four million individuals,

ifs called command responsibility.

I don't think that Horst is a Nazi,

but he's completely wrong about his father

who was a senior Nazi leader.

And if he'd been apprehended and tried,

he would certainly have suffered

the same fate as Hans Frank.

Otto von Wchter's name is on the order

authorizing the construction

of the Krakow ghetto, game over.

Intention, having a decent character,

as Horst puts it, are totally irrelevant.

Nuremberg was the first time

that the political leaders of a state

were hauled up in front

of an international court of law.

Churchill wanted them to be lined up

and shot, but President Roosevelt preferred

that a court should dispense justice

and justice is what Hans Frank got.

It's the only room in the world

where I'm a little bit nearer to my father.

Sitting here

and thinking of being him.

For about a year to be in here,

coming from a big castle,

driving a big Mercedes,

having a lot of uniforms

and suddenly he's sitting here.

There's an open toilet with a small table.

With a small bed, nothing else.

There is right now in me a little kind of pity.

Yeah, here he sits.

Maybe it's the same place to us.

So it's a momentary feeling of pity,

is it amplified today,

the anniversary of his execution?

No, it's not a special day of the 16th.

Around this time he was already dead.

In a lot of hours,

shortly after 1:
00 in the morning

they got him and, hmm,

the funny thing about when they caught...

Took my father to the gallows,

when they opened the door

my father was kneeling like this

and he said to the priest,

"Father, my mother...

When I was a boy, my mother used to

"give me the cross every morning

when I was leaving for school.

"Please do this also now. "

And I think this catholic priest

was very, very much enjoyed

and he did it.

From behind you have all these people

and he was kneeling here

and I used to say that's

a ham actor's exercise.

Jesus Christ personally has shown himself

to my father

and so maybe...

Maybe he... And it wasn't a ham actor's...

Decision to do this,

maybe it's really in those moments

very near to the gallows,

very near to the death...

lam now about 30 years older than him

so he was very young,

he was 46 years and you know

you will not survive the 16th of October

and hmm, maybe it was really an honest,

the only and last honest thing he did.

He wanted to go back

to being an innocent child again.

What he was when his mother

make the sign of God on his brain'

Maybe, the first time I think about it,

I think he wanted to be a little boy again

and having done nothing of all those crimes.

What a last stand.

Ah, it's a happy room for me,

and for the world, I would say.

And then he's sitting here doing

this and that and he starts like...

Maybe he was thinking why I didn't stop it.

Why?

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