On 24 March, Czechoslovakia's People's Court in Prague finalised charges of war crimes against Karl Hermann Frank. One of the gravest episodes of the indictment was the mass execution of the villagers of Lidice and Ležáky.
A Sudeten German, Frank was a supporter of the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany, and gradually became a Nazi fanatic. Following the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Reich in 1938, he proved himself a brilliant career-maker, joining the NSDAP and finding favour with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In 1939, he was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and headed the Nazi police apparatus in Prague.
After the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942, Acting Reich-Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Frank was in charge of the “retaliation operation”: under his command, the Nazis completely destroyed the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky and executed 1,331 people, including 201 women, without trial across the country.
In August 1943 he was appointed Minister of State for the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Authority in the protectorate de facto belonged to Frank. Himmler gave him the power to order executions without trial. As early as 1 May 1945, Frank threatened the people of Prague by radio that he would “drown any uprising in a sea of blood”.
On 9 May 1945, Frank fled Prague to surrender to the Western Allies. He was supposed to become a defendant at the Nuremberg trials but was handed over to the new authorities in Czechoslovakia. In court, he tried to shift responsibility for the Lidice massacre onto Hitler, but the Americans provided the Court with Frank's secret archive, which they had discovered in a mine near the Czech village of Štehovice. Hundreds of orders for executions, arrests, and deportations to concentration camps bore his handwritten signature.
On 21 May 1946, Frank was sentenced to death and hanged on 22 May 1946 in the courtyard of Pankrác Prison in Prague before 5,000 onlookers.
Source:
“The Gestapo: A History of Hitler's Secret Police 1933–45” by Rupert Butler
