Born in Forchheim near Karlsruhe, Germany, Oberle moved with his family to German-occupied Poland in 1941. There he was placed in a
Hitler Youth indoctrination program. Later, he fled the
Red Army advance, surviving on grass and stolen eggs while walking 800 kilometres to his home village in the
Black Forest. Rejected by his relatives, he immigrated to Canada at the age of 19 and became a
logger and then a gold miner. Oberle entered municipal politics, becoming mayor of
Chetwynd. He entered federal politics and was elected to the
House of Commons of Canada in the
1972 general election as the
Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for
Prince George—Peace River,
British Columbia. He subsequently won re-election five times. In 1985, Oberle became the first German-born federal
Canadian cabinet minister when he became
Minister of State for Science and Technology in
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's government. He was science minister when the
Canadarm went into space as part of the
Space Shuttle program. He later became Minister of State for Forestry, and then
Minister of Forestry in 1990. Oberle retired from Cabinet when
Kim Campbell succeeded Mulroney as Prime Minister, and retired from politics with the dissolution of the
34th Canadian Parliament for the
1993 election. In 2004, Oberle published a
memoir of his
World War II experiences,
Finding Home: A War Child’s Journey to Peace (2004). A second memoir,
A Chosen Path: From Moccasin Flats to Parliament Hill, was published in the same year. His son
Frank Oberle Jr. was elected to the
Legislative Assembly of Alberta in the
2004 provincial election, and was appointed Solicitor General on January 13, 2010. Oberle died on September 12, 2024, in
Squamish,
British Columbia, two weeks after his wife of Joan, at the age of 92. ==Electoral history==