Public Execution of Karl Hermann Frank *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

5,000 people crammed into a prison courtyard in Prague on a spring afternoon in 1946. Seven women sat in the front row. Women who had buried their husbands and sons because of the man now standing on the gallows above them. Newsre cameras rolled. Fathers lifted their children onto their shoulders so the kids could see better.

One filmmaker who watched the footage later said it looked medieval. This is the true story of the man Checkex called Bloody Dog Frank and the day the rope finally caught up with him. Before we go any further, hit subscribe to Untold War story right now. We dig into the real files, the real trial transcripts, and the real footage. Most channels are too scared to show you.

Tap the bell so you don’t miss what’s coming next. Drop a comment telling us where in the world you’re watching from and stay to the end because this execution had a twist of fate so strange even the court reporters struggled to explain it. Carl Herman Frank was born on January 24th 1898 in the spa town of Carlsbad then part of Austria Hungary and today the Czech city of Carlo Vivi.

His father was a school teacher and a committed German nationalist and the ideology took root in Carl before he was even a teenager. Fate marked him early. Around age nine or 10, a rock struck him in the eye during play with other children. The injury never healed properly and by 1918, doctors finally had to remove the eye and fit him with a glass one.

That injury changed the entire arc of his life. When World War I broke out in 1914, 16-year-old Frank tried to enlist in the Austrohungarian Army. He was rejected because of the blindness in his right eye. It’s a strange footnote in the story of a man who would go on to command an entire apparatus of terror. He couldn’t even pass a basic physical to become a soldier.

When Czechoslovakia declared independence in October 1918, Frank found himself part of a minority. Roughly half the population was Czech while Germans made up around 22%. Frank was one of these Sudatan Germans and he became an early aggressive voice pushing for his home region to be torn away from Czechoslovakia and folded into Germany.

In 1919 he joined a protofascist party of ethnic Germans and by 1925 he was running a bookstore that specialized specifically in national socialist literature. This is the detail most documentaries skip past. Frank wasn’t a soldier swept up in Nazism by circumstance. He was a small town book seller building the ideological groundwork years before most of Europe took Hitler seriously as a threat.

By 1938, Hitler had already annexed Austria without consequence, and the failure of Britain and France to respond only emboldened him further. In late summer of that year, he threatened to plunge Europe into war unless the Sudatan land was handed over. In September, the leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany met in Munich, and Czechoslovakia wasn’t even invited to the table where its own territory was being signed away.

The Czechoslovaks called it betrayal. Many Sudetan Germans, including Frank, called it liberation. He was made deputy regional Nazi leader of the Sudetan land. And on November 1st, 1938, he formally joined both the Nazi party and the SS. The ink barely dried. On March 15th, 1939, less than six months later, Nazi Germany tore up the Munich Agreement entirely and invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Hitler personally arrived in Prague. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was born the next day. Within weeks, more than 118,000 Jews living in the Protectorate had their rights stripped away, bank accounts frozen, businesses, and property confiscated. The Nazis seized roughly half a billion dollars of Jewish assets in the territory, equivalent to over 11 billion today.

Frank was rewarded for his loyalty with real power. He was promoted to SS grouper, a rank equal to major general and named secretary of state of the protectorate. Then Hinrich Himmler personally appointed him higher SS and police leader, putting the Gustapo, the criminal police, and the intelligence service directly under his authority.

This wasn’t a man pushing paper behind a desk. This was the man who controlled every instrument of fear in occupied Czechoslovakia. Here’s something almost every account of Frank leaves out entirely. And it says something chilling about him. He married his first wife, Anna Miller, back in January 1921.

And they had two sons together. But on February 17th, 1940, in the middle of consolidating his Nazi police power, he divorced her. Just 2 months later on April 14th, 1940, he married Corola Blick, a doctor 15 years his junior. Together they had three more children, daughters Eda and Holly, and a son named Wolf Dietrich.

While he was overseeing the machinery of persecution by day, he was starting a brand new family by night. History rarely hands us tidy monsters. It hands us men who juggled domestic normaly and industrial scale cruelty in the very same breath. In September 1941, Hitler decided the current Reich protector, Constantine Fonorath, was too lenient.

He was replaced by Reinhard Hydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. Heddrich arrived in Prague and reportedly told his staff he intended to Germanize the Czech vermin. Frank and Hydrickch clashed at first, two ruthless, ambitious men rarely fall in line easily, but their partnership became devastatingly efficient.

Within a month, systematic deportations of Jews to the Wuj ghetto began. Of the 5,000 people deported there by early November 1941, only 277 survived the war. That same November, the Terasian ghetto opened its gates to the first transports of Czech Jews. By February 1942, Hydrickch’s own internal estimate counted between 4,000 and 5,000 arrests with as many as 500 executions.

On May 27th, 1942, two Czechoslovak paratroopers, Ysef Gabchic and Yan Kubish, ambushed Hydrick<unk>’s open top Mercedes and wounded him in a Prague street. He clung to life for days, even managing to sit up and eat before collapsing and dying on June 4th. Hitler attended the Berlin funeral personally, and vowed revenge.

Frank had already begun delivering it before the funeral even happened. On the day of the ambush itself, he declared a state of emergency and locked down the capital. A search involving 21,000 men swept through 36,000 houses. By June 4th, 107 people had already been executed, and the assassins still hadn’t been found. On June 9th, the day of Hydrick’s state funeral, Frank relayed Hitler’s direct order for handling any village suspected of sheltering the killers.

Execute every man. deport every woman, sort the children for potential Germanization, and level the village entirely. A love letter found during the investigation mentioned a single name, Leiche. There was no genuine evidence connecting the town to the assassins. It didn’t matter. On June 9th and 10, 1942, Frank personally oversaw the destruction.

The men and older boys were shot in groups and buried in a mass grave. Roughly 203 women were deported to Ravensbrook concentration camp. Of the children taken from their mothers, only a small fraction were judged suitable for Germanization. The rest were murdered in gas vans at the Chelno camp. Four pregnant women were forced into abortions in the very same hospital where Hydrickch had died.

Witnesses said Frank personally inspected the wreckage the following morning and appeared satisfied. Two weeks later, the small village of Lejaki suffered the same fate after Gestapo agents found a radio transmitter linked to the assassin’s support network. Every adult in the village was shot. Historians estimate the total death toll from the reprisal campaign at more than 1,300 people.

By 1944, Frank was personally directing antipartisan warfare in Moravia, hunting the largest resistance brigade in the Protectorate, and ordering summary executions of suspected fighters. Their bodies left hanging in public for 48 hours as a warning. Despite deploying 13,000 soldiers, the partisans were never fully crushed.

By April 1945, with the war collapsing around him, Frank fled Prague and surrendered to American forces. Terrified of falling into Soviet hands instead. It didn’t save him. He was extradited back to Czechoslovakia, where his trial before the people’s court began in March 1946. No lawyer initially wanted to touch his defense. Eventually, one did.

Camil Wrestler, a man so committed to fair legal process that he defended Frank honorably despite the near certainty of a death sentence. That decision cost Wrestler dearly. After the communist takeover in 1948, he was persecuted for it and died in relative obscurity in 1961. During the trial, Frank admitted the killings could be regarded according to human feelings and human laws as a murder, but insisted he was only following orders.

On May 21st, 1946, the court sentenced Carl Herman Frank to death by hanging. He wrote a desperate telegraph to Czechoslovak President Edvard Benesh, begging for mercy. There was no reply. On May 22nd, 1946, in the third courtyard of Pancr Prison, more than 5,000 people gathered to watch, including survivors of Liche, seated in the front row.

At 1:37 in the afternoon, Frank was hoisted by a chest strap onto the pole and dropped. The executioner covering his face with a hand. His last words affirmed his loyalty to Germany until the very end. Normally, executed men were left hanging for half an hour. Frank remained on the rope for 45 minutes. There’s a strange historical footnote almost nobody tells you.

The forensic doctor who confirmed Frank’s death that day was named Navara, the husband of the nurse who had rushed to give first aid to Reinhard Hydrish after his own assassination four years earlier. Two threads of the same story tied together by coincidence, closing in the same courtyard where it had all begun.

It was the last public execution ever carried out in Prague. Frank was buried in an unmarked grave at Dabble Cemetery in the same secret mass grave where Hydrick<unk>’s assassins had been buried years before. His second wife, Karola, didn’t escape the reckoning either. She was arrested by Soviet forces, sentenced to 12 years, and spent a decade performing forced labor in a Kazakhstan gulog.

Released in 1955, it took her four more years just to track down her three children who had grown up under new names in new families, believing they belonged to someone else entirely. There were no tears shed for Carl Herman Frank. If this story hit you the way it hit us, make sure you’re subscribed to Untold War Story because we’re only getting started and the war criminals who thought they got away are running out of places to hide.