Justice & Law Quote by Hans Frank

A statistic dressed up as innocence, delivered by a man who helped turn law into a weapon. Hans Frank’s line is doing the classic bureaucratic magic trick: shifting the moral question (who enabled the regime?) into a narrow administrative one (who carried a party card?). “Ninety percent” is meant to sound exculpatory, even reassuring - as if non-membership equals independence. It’s a defense that trades on a public-service reflex: credentials, procedures, and organizational charts as substitutes for conscience.

The subtext is sharper: you don’t need formal Party membership to make the Nazi state function. In fact, Frank’s phrasing tacitly normalizes the deeper reality of authoritarian capture. Institutions don’t get corrupted only by zealots; they get corrupted when careerists, conservatives, technocrats, and respectable professionals keep the machinery running. By spotlighting party rolls, he invites listeners to imagine a firewall between “the Party” and “the law,” preserving the Academy’s legitimacy while laundering its outcomes.

Context matters because Frank wasn’t a distant observer. As Hitler’s lawyer and later Governor-General in occupied Poland, he sat near the center of a system that relied on legalistic veneers: decrees, courts, academies, and expert committees providing intellectual cover for dispossession and mass violence. The quote reads like a post-hoc alibi - the kind that becomes common after a regime collapses and everyone suddenly remembers they were “never political.”

It works rhetorically because it exploits a comforting loophole: complicity is always easier to deny when it can be reduced to paperwork.