Justice & Law Quote by Hans Frank

A lie this bloodless can only be spoken by someone who thinks bureaucracy is a moral alibi. Hans Frank, Nazi Governor-General of occupied Poland, isn’t offering an informational clarification; he’s drafting an escape hatch. The sentence is engineered to sever cause from consequence: if “concentration camps” are “entirely” police business, then the civil administration can keep its hands clean while still profiting from the machinery of terror.

The intent is procedural laundering. “Matter for the police” invokes the comforting fiction of routine law enforcement, as if mass detention and extermination were merely an internal security file. “Had nothing to do with the administration” is the key move: a categorical denial that also admits the camps’ existence in plain view. It’s not ignorance; it’s jurisdictional theater. Frank tries to reduce complicity to an org chart, betting that history (or a tribunal) will treat institutional boundaries as ethical boundaries.

The subtext is the Nazi state’s favorite trick: fragmentation. When violence is distributed across agencies, everyone can claim they only handled “their part.” Paper-pushers authorize transport, requisition property, manage labor, and ration food; the police “do” the killing. The result is a system where atrocity becomes the sum of deniable tasks.

Context makes the evasion grotesque. Frank’s administration presided over ghettoization, forced labor, starvation policy, and deportations; the camps were not an external glitch but the regime’s logical endpoint. His phrasing anticipates the postwar defense of “just following orders,” updated for managers: just following departments.