In the Shadow of the Reich

Frank was seven years old when his father, Dr. Hans Frank, Hitler's governor-general of occupied Poland, was executed at Nuremberg as a Nazi war criminal. Here he bitterly, unforgivingly denounces his father as ``a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic,'' a fawning coward, a pompous actor whose speeches were ``the drivel of a numbskull,'' and a murderer. The author doubts that Dr. Frank's 11th-hour piety in his Nuremberg cell was genuine and regrets the failure of a 1944 assassination attempt. (He is equally hard on his mother, whom he calls ``a sleazy fur dealer.'') All this, based on prodigious research, is presented in a gleefully manic way that verges on hysteria. While Frank's prose possesses considerable literary power, the nonstop diatribe becomes offensive, then boring. Frank writes for the German magazine Stern. (Aug.)