"My aim was to safeguard justice, without doing harm to our war effort"
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A clean, bureaucratic sentence built to launder a dirty record. Hans Frank’s “aim” is framed as procedural, almost technocratic: “safeguard justice” sounds like the mission statement of a civil service, not the self-exculpation of Hitler’s chief jurist and the Nazi Governor-General of occupied Poland. The line’s genius, if you can call it that, lies in its careful balancing act. Justice is invoked as an abstract ideal, while “our war effort” functions as the real veto power. The phrase “without doing harm” quietly admits the premise that law exists at the pleasure of military necessity; it’s justice so long as it doesn’t interfere.
The subtext is a familiar authoritarian maneuver: redefine justice as order, legality as compliance, ethics as efficiency. Frank presents himself as the conscientious manager trapped between noble norms and harsh realities, a man trying to keep the lights on while others commit atrocities. It’s a rhetorical quarantine, isolating intent (“my aim”) from outcomes. That separation is the point. In regimes built on mass violence, the law becomes a toolkit for making coercion look like governance.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Frank didn’t merely fail to prevent harm; his administration helped structure it, overseeing terror, ghettoization, forced labor, and the conditions that made extermination policy workable. Spoken from the shadow of defeat and judgment, the sentence reads like a draft defense brief: I cared about justice, I just couldn’t jeopardize the nation. The chilling implication is that “justice” was never a constraint on the war effort; it was one of its instruments.
The subtext is a familiar authoritarian maneuver: redefine justice as order, legality as compliance, ethics as efficiency. Frank presents himself as the conscientious manager trapped between noble norms and harsh realities, a man trying to keep the lights on while others commit atrocities. It’s a rhetorical quarantine, isolating intent (“my aim”) from outcomes. That separation is the point. In regimes built on mass violence, the law becomes a toolkit for making coercion look like governance.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Frank didn’t merely fail to prevent harm; his administration helped structure it, overseeing terror, ghettoization, forced labor, and the conditions that made extermination policy workable. Spoken from the shadow of defeat and judgment, the sentence reads like a draft defense brief: I cared about justice, I just couldn’t jeopardize the nation. The chilling implication is that “justice” was never a constraint on the war effort; it was one of its instruments.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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