he's having to delay trying to secure funds from american taxpayers for his wall along the mexican border. democrats in congress are blocking his request forfederalfunds. aid agencies have told the bbc they now consider the middle east the global hub for the trafficking of human organs. the flow of refugees from syria has created new opportunities to exploit desperate and vulnerable people. american troops have begun installing parts of an advanced anti—missile defence system in south korea. it's a response to the risk of ballistic missile attack from the north. president trump's daughter, ivanka, has been obliged to defend his attitude towards women. at a conference in germany, there were groans from the audience when she claimed he was an advocate for women's interests. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. today i'm in rural northern germany. stable, prosperous, 21st century germany. but i'm here to talk about the past and its relationship to the present. my guest is the writer, journalist and son, niklas frank. now, his father was appointed by hitler to be the governor general of nazi—occupied poland. he was intimately involved in the murder of millions of people. so, how has this german son dealt with the terrible crimes of his father? niklas, i'm wondering why you have chosen to make your life in the very

far north of germany. is it because you wanted to get as far away as possible from yourfamily background in bavaria? no, i still love bavaria. and every year we have about many weeks in bavaria, in the same village where i grew up. but it was my profession as a journalist at stern magazine, which i worked for 23 years, was based in hamburg. so, i had to lure my wife, she was attached to munich, because she is a big gardener, to her house with a big garden, so we've lived here for 33 years. this place where you now live is extraordinarily peaceful. yes, it is. would you say it has helped bring you some sort of peace of mind? ah, no. no, i don't think that it depends

on the country i am living in. it is... in myself i have found peace, because i acknowledge what my father has done. that i think is the first and most important step. thinking of my father is thinking first about his victims. there is no german around who has not certain pictures of corpses in his mind. and those pictures always remind me of my father, what he did. and especially when i look at him... that's the leather coat of my father. it's a scarecrow. in german, you call it vogelscheuche.

and this scarecrow is the most expensive one in germany, i would say, because i bought it from a soldier who had stolen it. the coat, you mean? the coat, yes. and someone gave me a call and asked it if i was interested in the coat of my father and i said yes. she wanted $500 and i paid it. you mean this old military greatcoat, leather coat, is actually your father's old coat? yes. what i have to admit, since the scarecrow is standing here, i have got a stronger connection to my father. it's very strange. and always, when i'm sitting in our living room, looking at him and say, "this you have earned, father, being a scarecrow in the end." that's your fault. niklas, i want to hear more

about your family history. i want to dig deeper into your relationship with your father. but i also want to get out of the cold north german wind. that is a good idea. why don't we head back into your home? ok, that's great. bye—bye, scarecrow. niklas frank, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. do you feel that you have some sort of a duty to your country to speak about your past? i think so, yes. i think i have the duty because, by chance, i was born in this family and i could tell the people... ah, how to behave with parents like i had. as volubly, as publicly as possible about your father

and about your feelings toward your father? it was a growing wish, because of the silence in germany. families, all the families of my friends, everybody was silent. and they didn't talk about the past. and this i couldn't endure, because i always wanted to know how is it that society behaves if it changes to a dictatorship. and i always have a feeling that germany is still prepared to do this. and so i looked closer towards families and friends and connectedness, and ifound out

that still there is something in the german people which makes me fear them. fear, your own country and your own people? yes, i would say so. well, i want to pick up on that, because that's a pretty remarkable thing to feel and to say. but before i get to your thoughts on the country, on germany, i do want to stay with the personal. because it seems to me in that period you're talking about, after the end of the war, and for decades afterwards, many families of senior, top nazis still felt a vestigial loyalty to their kin, to their blood. did you never feel that? no. especially not for my father. it's slightly different with my mother, because i have

experienced my mother as a really fighting motherfor us. but she was a nazi too. she wasn't a nazi. was she not? she was never a member of the nazi party, nor was she a nazi. she hated all this screaming of her husband when he was delivering a speech. and she hated this kind of stuff. but she very much liked the luxury she found through the position of her husband. she was a very cold and inhuman woman. in terms of your father, i want you just to look at this picture with me. that is your father in his nazi uniform. when you look at him, do you feel anger, rage,

what do you feel? angerand rage, angerand rage. and the next thing was i always... the word which for me is always sticking to my father is, what a coward you are. what a coward. and that feeling isn't just a memory feeling, it is something that is very alive in you. it's very alive, it's very alive. it is still as if he is sitting in your place. i despise him, really. he died, he was hung, after the nuremberg trials, when you were seven years old. so i'm just wondering how strong your memories can be of him

when you were in that castle in krakow, his headquarters, the headquarters of the nazi force in poland, do you really remember what it was like and what he was like? no, i didn't remember what kind of profession he had. i only knew poland was ours. and the castle was ours. and the other castle outside of krakow was ours. and there were our properties. it was almost like you were part of the royal family. yes, it was, it was. and this i enjoyed very much, like my mother. i enjoyed it. what about the truth of the unimaginable crimes and cruelty as a young boy growing up from the age of, well, from being a baby to being six years old. did you have any awareness

of what was happening? no. the only thing was, when i accompanied my mother into the krakow ghettos, when she was shopping, maybe it was one visit, maybe more, but i remember especially this one visit, there was a lot of people, everybody was looking very sadly. and this was the only memory. but i didn't know where it was. later on i talked to my mummy, my beloved hilda, and i told her the flashes of my memory. and she told me it was krakow and we were together and i remembered her sitting beside me in the car. we now associate your father with the holocaust. he was instrumental in delivering millions ofjews and others to their deaths, and he seemed to be enthusiastic about it. was there any way that anybody else in your family could have known exactly what was happening?

exactly knew it, um, his wife, my mother. your mother? she knew exactly. you have to imagine this castle in krakow, it was really like a kingdom. everybody knows each other, yes. everybody talked to each other. they knew exactly what was going on in the death camps and what was going on day by day. you have said, i think, that you have no doubt that your father loved hitler more than he loved his own family. yes, that's for sure. and you use that word love advisedly. you really mean love. really love, real love. it is something of a homosexual kind of love. tell me about your last encounter with your father. he, of course, was tried

at nuremberg as one of the top nazis to be held responsible for the genocide, for the war crimes, crimes against humanity. but before he was executed, you saw him one last time. yes. sitting on my mother's lap, it was a big room on the other side... i will always remember i was sitting behind this window with small holes to understand each other. i was sitting on my mother's lap. and knowing that will be my last visit to him. and he smiled at me and laughed. do you have a picture of him at nuremberg? it is here, during his... this is during the trial. during the trial, yes. so, he smiled. and what did he say to you, what was his last message to you? the last message

to me was a big lie. i knew that he would be hanged and he told me, "hi, niki," which was my name in the family, "heil, niki, we will soon celebrate christmas at our house," and i was really thinking, "why is he lying, why is he lying?" let's move forward and think about the impact of all this on yourfamily. you have siblings, two older sisters and i think two brothers. yes. could you, in the years that followed, talk to them, share feelings with them, actually have the same sort of understanding of what your father had done and what it meant to you as a family? i was living in a boarding school until i finished school. we were separated in different places. but whenever we came together,

after a short "hi," we were discussing our father. and then very slowly i found out the very different approaches to my father especially. and this separated me. because your sisters, what, they... three of my sisters defended my father as innocent victim of hitler, himmler and the justice of nuremberg. i would say it cost them their lives. they died very early. my next oldest sister, frigita, called kitty, she wrote in her diary when she was a teenager, she said that she would not become older than our father and she committed suicide at a6, the same age my father was when he was hanged.

my next older brother, a really great looking guy, very sporting, a very funny guy he suddenly started to drink milk, litres a day and became fatter and fatter and died of all that follows when you are too fat. he was alive when my book came out and he attacked me in public. it sort of destroyed your family. yes, certainly. what about forgiveness? there are many people who hear your story and the rage and the anger you acknowledge to this very day. they say there is something inhuman about it, because humanity is full of the deepest failings and flaws and in the end, part of humanity is to find forgiveness. i am an inhuman being.

i will neverforgive him. looking around in europe and also in other countries, such as america, wherever, i find a lot of families have fathers who have killed a part of that family. i cannot forgive that. never. do you ever wonder if you may have had a better, happier, more positive life if you had found a different way to deal with what is, after all, your father's terrible crime? not yours? yes, but these crimes, you can say it was my father, but it comes out of demolishing society

and demolishing families and killing innocent children. they were the victims, not my father. my father did it, he gave the signatures for death penalty and that sort of thing. he was responsible by german law, he was the deputy of hitler in poland. every death camp, he was responsible for. the true power, certainly it was with himmler, but he was responsible. with you talking to me, asking me this question, maybe you can see my face going red, i become furious again because it was unbelievable in which he was involved. but that is...those red cheeks, the fury that you feel,

you are allowing your father to define you. define me exactly? you are giving your father another form of enormous power. he wielded this terrible power over so many millions in poland and still over you. i think you once called yourself a puppet on a string. why not cut those strings? do not allow your father, even in death, after so many years, to pull your strings. too many victims. let's not just talk about you. let's also talk about germany. you introduced that topic earlier and i would like to return to it. it seems to me that you feel, i think you used the word fearful, still, of your own country and your own people. today, 72 years after the liberation of auschwitz. why? you don't know my people as i do. i do not trust them. nobody spoke, a normal german family never really spoke

about what our fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers have really seen. whether they were cowards, whether they were actively involved in the system. they are silent. this is like a swamp. that swamp was never drained. so here and there in germany you find nowadays, you find these poison flowers coming up. meadows full of them. but when you say there is suddenly a meadow full of poison flowers, that is where i wonder whether that is fair. this interview is being filmed by three young german men in their 20s and 30s. why should they have to bear any sense of guilt or shame or responsibility?

no. no guilt, no shame. acknowledge. really acknowledge. if you talk to these youngsters, really, you will find out a lot of uncertainty, or not really wanting to talk about it. they say why should we be taking high school trips to bergen—belsen? why should we have to, as kids, be fed this sense of our collective responsibility? the responsibility, for me, it's a dead word. you have to know your history, the history of your people. it hurts to admit that there was a time in germany where we left a family of people all around the world, and we killed millions

of innocent people in a system which was really a difficult system. and to be against the system then was to have a very brave character. but this hurt, you can endure, like i endured and i still love germany. i love being world champion in football, for instance. really. i am a nationalist. i also love very when merkel said she will do this refugees, now it may be thrown out, but that was a good thing. you can especially see with merkel, everything changed because we are treating them as if they werejews again... that swamp is coming. you really feel that, you feel so insecure

about your germany today? don't trust us. especially, i was very happy when the european community suddenly... suddenly we were watched countless all over germany, we have very determined centrists, so that what gave me a happy feeling — now england is leaving, poland is like a dictatorship, hungary, czechoslovakia, austria, italy, who is the strongest left? the germans. but the germans, as you painted, germany today is a bulwark of moderation, of tolerance, compared to so many messages coming from hungary or marine le pen or from so many people in so many corners.

as long as our economy is great and as long as we make money, everything is very democratic. but let's wait and hopefully not see if we have five to ten years heavy economic problems and the swamp is a lake, it is a sea and we are swallowed again. i swear it to you. i don't trust it. it always makes me... thinking and feeling exactly...wait a minute, there is something else. you can lead a happy life, but there is something else around you. yeah, it hurts but, on the other hand, because i have had a really happy life. ask my grandchildren. niklas, what a nice way

to end, and we must end. thank you for being on hardtalk. hi there. it felt pretty chilly at times yesterday, didn't it? it was even cold enough for some snow on the ground up in the highlands of scotland. not bad going for late april. you can see the snow cover here at kincraig in the highlands. and we even had a dusting of snow further south, as far south as staffordshire, up in the north—west midlands. those showers have been feeding in, then, on a brisk north—easterly wind, but over more recent hours, we've seen those showers tending to become confined more to coastal districts,

northern scotland, around the eastern side of england, western wales, and cornwall as well. but, as we go through the day today, we are going to see a mixture of sunshine and heavy showers. plenty of these thunderclouds will be developing as the day goes by, particularly across eastern stretches of england. and it is going to be a chilly start to the morning. there should be plenty of sunshine around, yes, but showers from the word go near to the east coast of england, and tending to move inland pretty quickly as the day goes by. there will be some pockets of frost also around, across parts of the midlands, maybe south—west england and wales, but soon melting away, with plenty of blue sky and sunshine here. those winds continue to feed in the showers to the east coast of england, one or two for northern ireland, and showers continuing to feed in across scotland. there will continue to be some snow up in the hills of scotland, above around 100—200 metres elevation, in the morning. so some wintriness here, perhaps a little bit of iciness around as well, and perhaps a bit

of sleet in some of the heaviest showers during the morning across the eastern counties of england, and maybe a dusting of snow for the north york moors. aside from that, though, i think it's going to be heavy rain showers that we see developing through the afternoon, and spilling inland across the midlands, covering much of east anglia, south—east england, where the showers will be particularly heavy, some hail and thunder mixed in. another coolish—feeling day, temperatures 9—12 degrees. colder, though, as those showers move through. the temperatures will drop away for a time. now, looking at wednesday night, things will begin to turn a little bit less cold across northern and western areas, as cloudier weather spills in, bringing some spots of rain with it. but further south, with any lengthy clear spells, we could well see a frost developing. and it could be quite a damaging frost, the lowest temperatures perhaps getting down to maybe about —3 degrees or so. so it will be a cold start to thursday morning. and, as this streak of cloud comes in, bringing some less—cold air with it, it probably won't feel a whole lot different across southern counties because, although the air is less cold, we lose the sunshine. so cloudier weather, probably not feeling too great

underneath those leaden skies. temperatures ii or 12 degrees, some spots of rain arriving through the afternoon. brighter conditions for the north and west. by friday, we will still have a few showers knocking around. most of them will be near to the east coast of england. sunny spells elsewhere. temperatures recovering, highs of 15 degrees in london. that's your weather. this is bbc news. i'm james menendez. the headlines: it looks like president trump's border wall is going to be delayed. he's facing a government shutdown over the money, and mexico's not going to pay either. if they decide to do it, it's in their own sovereign right. the only thing that is clear is that there is no way mexico is going to pay for it. the us starts deploying its anti—missile system in south korea a day after the north put on a huge display of firepower. a special report from lebanon, where refugees from syria are falling victim to the illegal trade in human organs. a special report from lebanon, where refugees from syria are falling victim to the illegal trade in human organs. in business: be prepared

for the big trump cut. and i'm not talking hairstyles. donald trump will present his tax plan today, and big cuts are expected, but will it make multinationals bring their huge