Politics & Power Quote by Hans Frank

The line is a performance of innocence staged with paperwork. Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of occupied Poland, is not confessing so much as curating his legacy in real time: I could have erased the record, he suggests, but I chose transparency. It’s a cheap moral upgrade, the bureaucrat’s version of redemption - accountability framed as administrative neatness.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it signals cooperation to his captors at the precise moment he has the least leverage. Second, it reframes the evidence as something he is magnanimously providing, not something the Allies are prying loose. That pivot matters: if the diaries enter the record as a voluntary handover, Frank can hint at contrition while keeping the narrative centered on his own agency.

The subtext is darker. “43 volumes” is not incidental; it’s a flex of meticulousness, an almost proud tally of how thoroughly a regime of occupation can be documented by the man running it. He doesn’t say what’s in them - deportations, terror, forced labor, mass murder - only “events” and “the share I had in them,” a chilling euphemism that shrinks crimes against humanity into a career memoir.

Context does the rest. Frank is speaking from the wreckage of the Third Reich, facing Allied justice and, eventually, the Nuremberg gallows. In that setting, the diary becomes both evidence and prop: an attempt to trade documentation for a sliver of credibility, to look like a truth-teller rather than a defendant caught by history.