Politics & Power Quote by Hans Frank

Self-exoneration rarely comes as a confession of ignorance this polished. Hans Frank, the Nazi regime's chief jurist turned Governor-General of occupied Poland, isn’t merely denying guilt here; he’s trying to relocate it. The sentence is engineered like a legal brief: stacked clauses, careful qualifiers, and a relentless narrowing of responsibility to the inner sanctum around Hitler. It’s the rhetoric of a man who knows precisely how bureaucratic power actually works and is wagering that a courtroom will treat proximity to the Fuhrer as the only meaningful measure of culpability.

The intent is strategic: sever the link between authority and accountability by redefining political agency as something that happens only in “far-reaching” decisions, only in “general political questions,” only inside “the circle of the closest associates.” Everything else - the daily governance, the signing, the administration of an occupied territory - is recast as mere execution, not choice. That’s the subtext: I was a function, not a moral actor.

Context makes the maneuver even sharper. At Nuremberg, the defense many officials reached for wasn’t just “I followed orders,” but “I wasn’t important enough to order anything.” Frank’s phrasing mirrors that collective alibi, a kind of bureaucratic shrug elevated to metaphysics. It also quietly insults the public’s understanding of power: as if genocide required invitations to conferences, as if the machinery of occupation wasn’t itself a political decision repeated every day.

The line tries to turn distance from Hitler into innocence. Coming from a man whose job was to give the regime legal and administrative teeth, that distance reads less like an excuse than a final professional performance: lawyering as camouflage.