Politics & Power Quote by Hans Frank

A bureaucrat’s alibi, polished to sound like a footnote. Hans Frank’s line is doing what so much Third Reich testimony tried to do after the fact: carve the world into administrative boxes so moral responsibility can’t find a way in. The specificity is the tell. “Discipline, organization, pay, and orders” is a checklist of control, the kind that signals command authority even as it’s being used to deny it. By itemizing the mechanics of power, Frank turns violence into paperwork and, conveniently, relocates culpability to an adjacent filing cabinet labeled “Reich police system.”

The context is the General Government in occupied Poland, a regime built on plunder, terror, and racial policy, with Frank as Governor-General. His claim that the police were “in no way connected” to that administration isn’t merely a factual assertion; it’s a strategic severing. It aims to separate civilian governance from coercive enforcement, as if occupation could be run like a municipality where the cops just happen to report elsewhere. The subtext is courtroom geometry: if the police apparatus belongs “exclusively” to Berlin, then Frank can present himself as a manager of roads and ration cards rather than a central node in a system of repression.

What makes the sentence chilling is its calm confidence in compartmentalization. It rehearses a fantasy of clean chains of command in a dirty reality: the occupation state functioned precisely because administrative and police powers interlocked. The language doesn’t exonerate; it reveals the mindset that treated domination as an org chart.