Politics & Power Quote by Hans Frank

A chilling bit of bureaucratic judo: Hans Frank takes an organization built to professionalize terror and tries to launder it into normal sociology. The phrasing is doing the work. “As such” suggests a neutral category - the SS as a mere institution, not a chosen instrument of ideological violence. “No more criminally” doesn’t deny crime; it smears guilt across the room until it becomes background noise. Then comes the real sleight of hand: “any other social groups.” The SS is recast as a club, a class, a demographic - something you might compare to party activists or civic associations. That move is meant to make atrocity feel like an unfortunate but predictable byproduct of “political events,” a term so bloodless it could describe an election cycle rather than mass murder.

Frank’s intent was defensive and strategic. As Governor-General of occupied Poland, he wasn’t a distant civil servant caught in a storm; he was a key administrator of a colonial regime of starvation, forced labor, and extermination. Speaking in the shadow of accountability (and ultimately at Nuremberg), he reaches for the oldest exculpation available to power: everyone would have done it. It’s an argument for moral determinism dressed up as common sense.

The subtext is worse than denial. It’s a bid to erase the SS’s defining feature: not that it “took part” in politics, but that it fused politics with organized criminality, making violence a career ladder. Frank’s sentence is what impunity sounds like when it puts on a tie.