Justice & Law Quote by Hans Frank

A bureaucrat’s deadpan can be its own kind of confession. Hans Frank’s line reads like a clipped CV update, but the chill is in what it refuses to name: the legal destruction he helped administer. He frames his rise as procedural inevitability - first a Bavarian justice minister, then, once “the ministries of justice in the various states were dissolved,” a Reich-level figure. The passive construction is doing the moral laundering. Ministries don’t just “dissolve”; they are dismantled. Federalism doesn’t simply fade; it’s strangled.

The specificity is revealing. Frank doesn’t cite laws, cases, victims, or even ideology. He cites offices. That’s the subtext of the Nazi state as lived by its lawyers: power as a chain of titles, legitimacy as a sequence of administrative steps. By emphasizing dissolution as a bureaucratic event, he normalizes the Nazi Gleichschaltung project - the coordinated takeover that erased local autonomy and brought courts and prosecutors under central control. The sentence enacts the very process it describes: flattening complexity, removing agency, turning political violence into paperwork.

“Minister without portfolio” sounds harmless, even decorative, but in the Third Reich it could mean proximity to the real portfolio: authority unbounded by institutional duties, a floating credential for influence. Context matters: Frank was not a neutral “public servant” shuffled by reforms; he was Hitler’s lawyer and later Governor-General in occupied Poland, where law became an instrument of exploitation and terror. The intent here is self-presentation as functionary, not architect - a classic defense posture in the language of governance. The horror is how well it can pass for routine.