Hans FrankFrank was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on 23rd May, 1900. He joined the German army in 1917. He served in the Freikorps and joined the German Worker's Party (which soon evolved into NSDAP), in 1919, being one of the party's earliest members took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. He went on to study law, passing the final state examination in 1926, and rose to become the personal legal advisor to Hitler. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 he appointed Frank as Minister of Justice in Bavaria. While in this post he complained about the illegal killings that was taking place in the concentration camp at Dachau. During the Night of the Long Knives Frank raised objections to the execution of the proposed execution without trial of 110 members of the SA. As a result of his intervention only 20 men were shot. After this Frank lost his influence in the NSDAP hierarchy.Strongly influenced by the charisma of Hitler, he returned to the Party in 1928 whereupon he formed the "National Socialist Jurist Association" with himself as leader. In 1929 Hitler appointed him director of the headquarters legal department of the Nazi Party. He won an election to the Reichstag as a National Socialist representative in 1930 and shared his experience with Friedrich Krger who entered the Reichstag in 1932.But it was for crimes committed in the General Government that Frank was to pay with his life. Frank oversaw the creation of the ghettoes and the removal of Jews to these ghettoes. He initiated the arrest of the Polish upper class and Polish intellectuals regardless of their religion as he saw them as a potential threat to his authority in the General Government. He used non-Jewish Poles for forced labour. Four of the six extermination camps used during the Holocaust were built in the Greater Government. At the Nuremburg Trials, Frank claimed not to have known about these camps until 1944 but had said in public: I must ask you to rid yourself of pity. We must annihilate the Jews.However, he found himself involved in a power struggle with the head of General Government police, Friedrich Krger, as to who had the final say in the General Government. As Governor General, Frank clearly believed that he had. However, he no longer had the immediate support of Hitler who had been angered by some of the speeches that Frank had made.DeathFrank was captured by American troops on May 3, 1945, at Tegernsee near Berchtesgaden. Upon his capture, he attempted suicide in which he tried to cut his own throat. After the attempt failed he tried suicide again on 5 May, when he lacerated his left arm. However, this failed too.After his arrest he was selected as one of the defendants in the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946. During the trial he renewed his childhood practice of Catholicism and, under the pressure of being on trial for his life, claimed to have a series of religious experiences. Frank voluntarily surrendered over forty volumes of his personal diaries to the Allies, which were then used against him as evidence of his guilt. Frank confessed to some of the charges put against him and viewed his own execution as a form of atonement for his sins. On the witness stand he uttered:"A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will still not have been erased."However, during the trial, he vacillated wildly between penitence for his crimes and blaming the Allies, especially the Soviets, for an equal share of wartime atrocities. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging.