In the Shadow of the Reich.

• Author: Benesch, Susan

In the Shadow of the Reich. Niklas Frank, translated by Arthur S. Wensinger with Carole Clew-Hoey. Knopf, $23. As a teenager in West Germany during the fifties, Niklas Frank was a great hitchhiker. "There really were advantages to growing up in the Federal Republic as the son of a major Nazi war criminal," he writes with blunt irony in this book. "All I had to say after a couple of kilometers was, Do you happen to realize that I am the son of the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio and Governor General of Poland, executed at Nuremberg as a major war criminal?"'

That spiel almost always got him warm sympathy, antisemitic tirades, and a free lunch someplace along the Autobahn. During Frank's years of hitchhiking, just one German driver stopped, opened the passenger door, and silently let him out on the shoulder of the road.

Nevertheless, Niklas was embarrassed of his father, Hans Frank. During the next 40 years, his embarrassment became a burning, obsessive hatred. Searching out minute details of his father's life and death, Niklas made visits to old Nazis, to his family's wartime servants, and even (in Albany, New York) to Father Sixtus O'Connor, the priest who had heard Hans Frank say his last words: "Jesus, have mercy." Still, Niklas wanted to know whether the hangman's rope felt rough through the black cloth hood and exactly what sort of snapping sound his father's neck made as it broke.

The entire book is written as a scathing letter to this dead and omnipresent father, addressed in alternating sarcastic and brutal tones. It is a plea to understand coupled with a hatred that precludes the author's understanding. But not necessarily ours.

Despite Frank's great efforts to portray his father as an unnatural monster, he comes across as merely pompous, plump, cowardly, and mediocre. According to this book he became a war criminal not because he craved killing Jews and Poles but because he wanted a chauffeured car, a fat paycheck, and a long title to precede his bombastic speeches. In years of poring over Hans Frank's diaries, Niklas found only a handful of quotes that were brutal and even fewer that show hatred of Jews. Most of them are long streams of self-important foolishness that could have been written by politicians anywhere-although the German language lends itself easily to convolutions like, Unfortunately, in this most violent struggle in the world's history, something arises every now and again, something that surely cannot be...