Politics & Power Quote by Hans Frank

The chilling work of this sentence is how it launders complicity through resume prose. Hans Frank lines up his life like a LinkedIn summary: lawyer, teacher, legal adviser. The rhythm is bureaucratic, almost soothing, a neat sequence of professional roles that refuses the moral category everyone hears anyway: architect of terror. By placing “legal adviser” beside “teaching staff,” he frames Nazism as a career step rather than a political choice, as if Hitler were simply an especially demanding client.

Context does the heavy lifting. Frank wasn’t a minor functionary; he became Governor-General of occupied Poland, overseeing a regime of exploitation, forced labor, and mass murder. At Nuremberg, where he was tried and executed, he sometimes gestured at remorse, but this line performs a different maneuver: it reasserts identity as technician. The intent is self-positioning: I was a professional, not a monster; I dealt in statutes, not blood.

The subtext is an indictment of how modern atrocities can be routed through paperwork. “National Socialist German Workers Party” is spelled out in full, formal and respectable, the way institutions name themselves when they want to sound inevitable. Frank’s phrasing reminds you that evil often arrives wearing credentials, insisting on procedure. The most unsettling point isn’t that he served Hitler; it’s how naturally he presents that service as work history, as if the moral rupture were just another line break.