Karola Blaschek / Karola Franková

 Karola Blaschek or Karola Franková (13 August 1913 Most – 1982) was a Sudeten German doctor and second wife of Karl Hermann Frank, State Secretary of the Office of the Imperial Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

She was born into a family of Sudeten Germans. She worked as a doctor at the Prague General Hospital. She and Karl Hermann Frank were married on April 14, 1940.

Unlike Frank, she knew Czech. She was a rank-and-file member of the NSDAP, but was not involved in politics. Her brother was promoted as a clerk in the Reichsprotektor's office thanks to the influence of her husband. After the end of World War II, she was detained near Rokycan while fleeing in a convoy of cars along with her husband and her children. She was later moved to Bartolomejska Street in Prague, while the children stayed with a nanny. She spent several days on the fifth floor of the building on Bartolomejska Street. Here the Soviet military intelligence service showed interest in her. Before the end of May 1945 she was taken to a military airfield near Dresden. From there she was transported to the Soviet Union in Moscow to the Lubyanka prison. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison in the Soviet Union. She spent a year in a prison in Lubyanka and the rest in a labor camp in Kazakhstan. Her fate in Soviet captivity is not entirely clear and she is the subject of investigation by historians. Probably in 1955, under the Soviet-German Treaty on the Surrender of Prisoners of War, she was released and returned to Westphalia in West Germany, where she resumed her medical profession. She only learned of her husband's execution after her return to Germany. She also managed to find children who were taken in by several German women in the Pilsen internment camp. The children were then transported to Germany and lived in families with new names. During a search that lasted four years, the three children were gradually found. There is speculation about the date of his death,in 1982.

Together with Frank, she had three children:

Edda, born August 16, 1941

Holle, born March 8, 1944

Wolf-Dietrich, born August 20, 1942

The newlyweds Frank at an exhibition of political cartoons in Mánes (May 1940)

From left to right, Frank, Heydrich and Toussaint at a concert by Heydrich's father at the Wallenstein Palace on May 26, 1942, the day before Reinhard Heydrich's assassination.

The spouses Karola and Karl Frank (1942)

                                                  

Intermission during the Beethoven concert in the Smetana Hall of the Municipal House. From left to right, Karola Franková, the Minister of the Interior, Richard Bienert, and the President of the State, Emil Hácha (1942).

Photographers first captured her "as a single woman" in early 1940, during the visit of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to the Barrandov film studios.

Karola with Reinhard Heydrich

a frame from a capture of the filming where Karola is detained in Rokycany that May 9, 1945 at approximately 1:00 p.m.

Karola Franková in the courtyard of the police headquarters building on Bartolomejska Street (1945)

photo of Karola taken by the Soviets in prison

shelter given by other prisoners to Karola for her service as a doctor in Lubjanka prison

video summary

Holle Frank youngest daughter of Karola