Anna Frank
Annelies Marie Frank, known in Spanish as Ana Frank (Frankfurt am Main, June 12, 1929-Bergen-Belsen, February or March 1945), was a German girl of Jewish descent, known worldwide thanks to the Diary of Anne Frank, the edition of her private diary where she recorded the almost two and a half years she spent hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, with his family and four others, during World War II.
Once they were discovered in their hiding place, Ana and her family were captured and taken to different German concentration camps. The only survivor of the eight in hiding was Otto Frank, her father. Anna was sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz on September 2, 1944, and later to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus around mid-February 1945, about two months before the camp was liberated. In 1947, just two years after the end of the war, his father published the diary under the title The Secret Annex (Dutch: Het Achterhuis ).
Biography
Childhood in Germany
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main (Hesse, Germany), the second daughter of Otto Heinrich Frank (1889-1980) and Edith Hollander (1900-1945), a family of German Jews. The family lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens; the children were raised with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish friends. The Franks were Reform (also called Progressive) Jews; they kept many traditions of the Jewish faith, but did not stick too closely to the precepts. Of her parents, the believer was Edith. Otto, who had participated as a lieutenant in the German Army during the First World War and was now a businessman, was more concerned with the training of his two daughters. He had a large private library and encouraged the girls to read. Anne was continually compared to her sister Margot, three years older than her, and who was considered kind, exemplary and discreet, while Anne had many interests and was extroverted and impulsive; she felt at a disadvantage compared to Margot. Before the anti-Jewish policy of the National Socialists sowed unrest in her life and ended up completely destroying it, Anne lived a peaceful life in Frankfurt with her family and her friends. She had occasion to visit Alice Frank, her paternal grandmother, in Basel. According to her cousin Bernhard's account of her, she was a girl who couldn't stop laughing.
On March 13, 1933, a few weeks before Hitler's seizure of power, the NSDAP won a majority in the Frankfurt municipal elections, and anti-Semitic demonstrations immediately followed. Otto Frank realized the great problems that were coming their way. The same year, Edith moved with the girls to Aachen to her mother's house. At first, Otto stayed in Frankfurt, but then he was offered to set up a branch of Opekta, a German company, in Amsterdam, and he went to the Netherlands to start up the business and prepare everything for the arrival of his family.. The Franks lost their German citizenship there by application of the Law on the citizens of the Reich.
Exile in Amsterdam
In 1934 Anne's mother moved with her two daughters to Amsterdam, where her husband Otto had been preparing his business and the future life of his family for several months. They went to live in a new neighborhood to the south of the city, Rivierenbuurt, where many Jewish families from Germany had already settled, who felt safer in the Netherlands than in what was actually their homeland.
In exile, parents continued to worry about the education of their daughters. Margot went to a public school and Anne to a Montessori, also public. Margot was terrific in math, and Anne was good at reading and writing. One of her best friends, Hannah Goslar, who was called Hanneli, later recounted that Anne often wrote in secret and did not want to say any of the content. Her memories led to a book by Alison Leslie Gold, published in 1998. Another friend, Jacqueline van Maarsen, also recounted her experiences with Anne a few years later. In the summer of 1935 and 1936 Anne spent carefree vacations with her aunt grandmother in Switzerland, and also made friends there.
From 1933, Otto Frank was in charge of the Dutch branch of the German company Opekta. In 1938 he founded, together with his friend Hermann van Pels, a butcher who had also fled with his Jewish family, another company dedicated to the sale of spices. Otto went to great lengths to secure an income, as he witnessed how his father's bank, which had already emerged weakened from the world economic crisis of 1929, was expropriated by the National Socialists.
In 1939 Anne's grandmother (mother of her mother Edith) moved to Amsterdam with the Franks and stayed with them until she passed away in 1942. Her family learned, firsthand, of the ruthless manner in which the National Socialists acted for Edith's brother, Walter Holländer, who was arrested on the "night of broken glass" and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, before being allowed to travel to the Netherlands with special authorization. However, Otto Frank remained optimistic about him, even after learning about the burned synagogues. He described this event as a fever attack that would make all the participants see reason. But his hope turned to fear when, in September 1939, the attack on Poland sparked World War II.
The exiled Jews worried about the threat that Hitler's desire for expansion could pose to the Netherlands, which tried to remain neutral. On May 10, 1940, the German Wehrmacht attacked and occupied the country. The Dutch troops surrendered and Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, where she went into exile. She immediately became clear that the same fate awaited the Jews residing in the Netherlands as those in the other occupied territories. Otto and Edith Frank saw that they could no longer hide the political situation from their daughters. Until then, the parents had tried to keep them apart and simulate a certain normality, but now Ana was in a mess. Her combative character used to lead her not to give in; she was used to imposing her point of view. Otto tried several times to be granted asylum in the United States or in Cuba, among others with the help of her friend Nathan Straus, who had contacts with the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, but was unsuccessful.
There were more and more "anti-Jewish" laws; their rights were taken away, they were excluded from social life and from all public institutions. For Ana, who enthusiastically collected photos of Hollywood stars, it was especially hard when she was banned from going to the movies. She had to go to a special school, the Lyceum, which meant separating from many of her friends. All Jews were required to come to be searched; to them and later even to their bicycles. When they were made to wear the Jewish cross, many Dutch people stood in solidarity with them. But on the other hand a Dutch National Socialist party was formed. To protect his company from the strict inspections to which it was subjected, Otto Frank handed over the management, on paper, to two of his collaborators who were Aryans.
On her thirteenth birthday, on June 12, 1942, Ana received a small diary as a gift, a red and white checkered notebook that she had pointed out to her father in a shop window a few days before. That same day, Ana began to make notes in the Dutch language, describing herself and her family, as well as her daily life at home and at school.
The hideout in the back house
Otto Frank had prepared a hideout at the back of the company, at 263 Prinsengracht, as one of his collaborators had suggested. The main building near the Westerkerk church was not conspicuous; it was old and typical of that neighborhood of Amsterdam. The Annex was a three-story building attached to the rear of the main building. On the first floor there were two small rooms with a bathroom and WC, above a large and a small room, and in the latter there was a ladder that led to the attic. In total they were about 50 square meters. In front of the offices was a corridor, in which, concealed behind a bookcase, a door opened onto a steep staircase leading to the rear house.
Otto Frank had previously asked his secretary Miep Gies (née Hermine Santrouschitz) for help. Although she had to expect to be punished if the hiding Jews were discovered, she agreed and took on a difficult responsibility. Together with her husband Jan Gies, Otto's collaborators Kugler and Kleiman, as well as Bep Voskuijl, she helped the inhabitants of the back house.
The situation of the Frank family became acute when on July 5, 1942 Margot Frank received a call from the "central unit for Jewish emigration in Amsterdam", ordering her deportation to a labor camp.. If Margot hadn't come, the whole family would have been arrested. Following the call, Otto Frank decided to move ahead of schedule to the hideout with his family. Since the Jews could not use public transport, they had to walk several kilometers from their house to the refuge, each one wearing as much clothing as possible, since they did not have to risk being seen with luggage. The next day, July 6, a life in hiding began for the whole family, as it seemed impossible to flee the now-occupied Netherlands. Helmut Silberberg, a friend of Ana's, went to visit them at her house and found that they were no longer there. To conceal it, the family had left their previous home in disarray, and they had abandoned a piece of paper from which they could deduce a sudden flight to Switzerland. A week later, the van Pels family also entered the rear house, as did the dentist Fritz Pfeffer later in November 1942. Initially, they hoped to be released within a few weeks, but they spent more than two years in hiding. During all this time they could not go outside, and they had to be careful not to make noises that could be heard from outside. The atmosphere was tense, and the refugees lived in fear and uncertainty, leading to ongoing tensions. Personal conflicts became more and more visible. Ana resented having to share a room with Fritz Pfeffer, and seeing her limited privacy. She often argued with her mother, increasingly desperate, which clashed with her daughter's way of being, and Otto tried to calm her down. It was especially difficult for Ana to go through her adolescence, a time characterized by a rebellious attitude, locked up with her parents and forced to adapt to them.
Miep Gies brought not only food, but also news of the war. At noon, the helpers ate together with the refugees, and in the late afternoon, when the other company employees had left the building, Ana and the others could go to the main house, where they listened to the BBC. The news was worrying: on July 17, 1942, the first train left for the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the Jews were deprived of their nationality.
Ana read many books during this time, which helped her improve her style and become a freelance writer. Her writing ability grew, as did her confidence in herself as an author. She had her doubts as to whether Otto really loved Edith; he suspected that he had married her for convenience. Ana, for her part, began to take an interest in Peter van Pels, a boy whom she had initially described as shy and boring. But the relationship ended after an episode of passion. The diary also reveals that Ana was aware of the deportations and the money offered as a reward for betraying Jews.
In late July, they were joined by the Van Pels (Van Daan) family: 16-year-old Hermann, Auguste, and Peter, and later in November, Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel), a dentist and family friend, arrived. Ana wrote about how good it was to have other people to talk to, but tensions quickly arose in this group of people who had to live confined to this hideout. After sharing her room with Pfeffer, Ana came to find him unbearable, and fell out with Auguste van Pels, whom she considered out of her mind. Her relationship with her mother became difficult as well, and Ana wrote that she felt she had little in common with her because her mother was too abstracted from her. She sometimes argued with Margot, and wrote of an unexpected bond that had developed between them, though the one she felt closest to was her father. Some time later, she also began to appreciate the kindness of Peter van Pels, and they even developed romantic feelings.
Ana spent most of her time reading and studying, while continuing to write in her journal. In addition to narrating the events that transpired, Ana she wrote about her feelings, her beliefs and her ambitions, topics that she did not talk about with others. Feeling more confident about her writing style, as she grew and matured, she dealt with more abstract topics, such as her belief in God, or how she defined human nature. She wrote regularly until her final entry on August 1, 1944.
Ana, her family and those accompanying them were arrested by the Grüne Polizei ("green police") on August 4, 1944 and a month later, on September 2, the entire family was transferred by train from Westerbork (concentration camp in the northeast of the Netherlands) to Auschwitz, a trip that took them three days. Meanwhile, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the people who had protected them while they were in hiding, found and kept Ana's Diary and other papers.
Since their capture, it was believed that the family was ratted out by a Gestapo collaborator, while other investigations claimed that the discovery of the occupants was accidental, as SS agents were investigating illegal employment crimes in the building and that the persecution of Jews was not its goal. betrayed the Frank family hideout, in what would have been a deal with the Nazis in exchange for guaranteeing the safety of his own family, although some historians have disputed this theory.
Anne, Margot and Edith Frank, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer did not survive the Nazi concentration camps (although Peter van Pels died during marches between camps). Margot and Ana spent a month in Auschwitz II-Birkenau and were then sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in March 1945, shortly before liberation. Only Otto made it out of the Holocaust alive. Miep gave him the diary, which he would edit in order to publish it under the title Diary of Anne Frank, and which has eventually been published in more than 70 languages..
The Memorial in honor of Anne and Margot Frank is located on the site of the mass grave corresponding to the barrack where they died, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Victor Kugler (in old editions named as Kraler), Johannes Kleiman (Koophuis), Miep Gies and Elisabeth ''Bep'' Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the hideout and, along with Gies's husband Jan, and Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl, Bep Voskuijl's father, were the ones who helped the Franks survive during their confinement. They were the only contact between the outside and the occupants of the house, and kept them informed of the news of the war and political events. They were also the providers of everything necessary for the safety and survival of the family; the supply of food became more and more difficult as time passed. Ana wrote about dedication and efforts to lift their spirits during the most dangerous times. Everyone was aware that sheltering Jews was punishable by death at that time.
Arrest and death
On the morning of August 4, 1944, the Grüne Polizei ("Order Police," a uniformed police force whose executive functions fell to the SS leadership) stormed the achterhuis. Led by SSS Sergeant Karl Silberbauer of Section IVB4 of the Security Service (SD), the group included at least three Security Police officers. The tenants were loaded into trucks and taken away for questioning. Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were jailed, but Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were allowed to go. Later they would return to the achterhuis, where they found Ana's notes scattered on the floor. They collected them, as well as several family photo albums, and Gies made it a point to return them to Ana when the war was over. In 2022, a team of international investigators, including retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke, concluded that the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh was the one who betrayed the Frank family's hiding place, in what would have been a deal with the Nazis in exchange for ensure the safety of your own family.
The detainees were taken from the house to a camp in Westerbork, apparently a transit camp through which more than 100,000 Jews had passed up to that point. Once there, the eight in hiding were classified as "criminals"; for not complying with the order to voluntarily submit to forced labor, and for having hidden. They were taken to the "Barracones S", an area of the camp that was separated from the rest by a large barbed fence. They were forbidden to wear their own clothes, and were given a blue uniform with red patches and clogs for shoes. Although the men and women were in different barracks, they could see each other during the afternoon and night.
On September 2, the group was deported, in what would be their last transfer, from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After three days of travel they reached their destination, and the men and women were separated according to their sex, never to see each other again. Of the 1,019 new arrivals, 549 – including children under the age of 15 – were selected and sent directly to the gas chambers, where they were murdered. Ana had turned 15 three months earlier and escaped, and although all of the achterhuis survived the selection, Ana believed that her father had been murdered.
Along with the other women not selected for immediate death, Ana was forced to remain nude for disinfection, had her head shaved, and an identification number tattooed on her arm. During the day they used the women in forced labor and at night they were packed into refrigerated barracks. Diseases spread rapidly and within a short time Ana ended up with scabbed skin.
On October 28, the selection to relocate the women to Bergen-Belsen began. More than 8,000 women, including Anne Frank, Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transferred, but Edith Frank was left behind. Tents were erected to house the prisoners, including Anne and Margot. With the increase in population, the death rate due to disease increased rapidly. Ana was able to meet for a brief period with two friends, Hanneli Goslar (called "Lies" in the newspaper) and Nanette Blitz, who survived the war. They told how Ana, naked except for a piece of blanket, explained that she, infested with lice, had stripped off her clothes. They described her as bald, emaciated and shaky, but despite her illness, she told them that she was more concerned about Margot, whose condition seemed more serious. Goslar and Blitz did not see Margot, who remained in her bunk, too weak. Likewise, Ana told them that they were alone, and that her parents had died.
In February 1945, a typhus epidemic swept through the countryside; it is estimated that it killed 17,000 prisoners. Witnesses later recounted that Margot, weakened as she was, fell from her bunk and died as a result of the blow, and that a few days later Ana also died, around mid-February. About two months later the camp would be liberated by British troops, on April 15, 1945.
After the war, of the approximately 110,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, only 5,000 had survived. Of the eight tenants of the achterhuis, only Ana's father made it out alive. Herman van Pels was gassed just after the group's arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 6, 1944. His wife Auguste died between April 9 and May 8, 1945 in Germany or Czechoslovakia. His son Peter died on May 5, 1945 in the Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria, after being transferred on foot from Auschwitz.
Dr. Friedrich Pfeffer (or Mr. Dussel) died on December 20, 1944 in the Neuengamme concentration camp. Anne's mother, Edith Hollander, died on January 6, 1945 in Birkenau. Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, business associates of Otto Frank who had helped the former while in hiding, were arrested for helping the Frank family. Both were sentenced to perform Arbeitseinsatz (labor service) in Germany, and survived the war.
The Diary of Anne Frank
Journal publication
Otto Frank survived and returned to Amsterdam. He was informed of the death of his wife and the transfer of his daughters to Bergen-Belsen, hoping that they would survive. In July 1945, the Red Cross confirmed the deaths of Ana and Margot, and it was only then that Miep Gies gave her the Diary. After reading it, Otto commented that he had not realized how Ana had kept such an accurate and well-written record of their time together. Trying to posthumously fulfill Ana's wish expressed in the Diario to become a writer, he decided to try to publish it. When asked many years later about her first reaction, he replied simply, "I never knew my little Ana was so deep."
Ana's Diary begins as a private expression of her inner thoughts, expressing the intention of never allowing others to read it. She candidly describes her life, her family and peers, and her situation, as she begins to recognize her ambition to write and publish novels. In the summer of 1944, she heard a radio broadcast from Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, who said that at the end of the war he would create a public record of the oppression suffered by the people of his country under German occupation. She mentioned the publication of letters and diaries, so Ana decided that she would contribute to her Diary of hers. She began proofreading her writing, deleting sections and rewriting others, with a view to possible publication. To her original notebook, she appended several additional notebooks and loose sheets. She created pseudonyms for the members of the group and her benefactors. The van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella, and Peter van Daan; Fritz Pfeffer was renamed Albert Dussel. Otto Frank used the original version of the Diary, known as "version A", and the corrected version, known as "version B", to produce the first version for publication. He removed some passages, especially those in which he referred to her wife in unflattering terms, as well as sections in which she discussed intimate details regarding her burgeoning sexuality. She restored the true identities of her family, but withheld the other people's pseudonyms.
Frank took the diary to the historian Anne Romein, who tried to publish it, without success. She then passed it on to her husband Jan Romein, who wrote an article about the book under the title "Kinderstem" ("A Girl's Voice") in the newspaper Het Parool on April 3, 1946. She wrote that the newspaper "slowly expressed in the voice of a girl, shows all the hatreds of fascism, better than all the evidence of the Nuremberg trials put together." Her article attracted the attention of editors and the Diary was published in the Netherlands in 1947 by the Amsterdam publisher Contact, under the title Het Achterhuis (The Annex House). It was reprinted in 1950. In April 1955 the first translation of the newspaper appeared in Spanish under the title Las habitaciones de atrás (translation by Mª Isabel Iglesias, Garbo editorial, Barcelona).
Albert Hackett wrote a play based on the Diary, premiered in New York in 1955, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The piece was made into a film in 1959 under the title The Diary of Anne Frank. It was starred by the actress Millie Perkins, and Shelley Winters, who played Mrs. Van Pels, getting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, which she delivered to the Anne Frank House. The film was well received and won two other Oscars. However, it did not become a huge box office success, although it aroused such attention that worldwide interest in the book increased. The Diary grew in popularity over the years, and today it is required reading in high schools in several countries and in several states of the United States. In February 2008, the musical The Diary of Anne Frank - A Song to Life premiered in Madrid, marking the first time that the Anne Frank Foundation ceded the rights to a company to represent a musical about Anne Frank and her work around the world.
In 1986, a critical edition of the Diary was published. This edition compares original sections with sections modified by the father, and includes a discussion regarding its authenticity as well as historical information about his family.
In 1988, Cornelis Suijk—former director of the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the United States Foundation for Holocaust Education—announced that he had obtained five pages that had been removed by Otto Frank from the Diary before publication. Suijk claims that Otto Frank gave him these pages shortly before his death in 1980. The deleted pages contain highly critical comments by Anne Frank towards her parents' marital relationship and towards her mother. Suijk's decision to claim copyright on the five pages to thereby finance his foundation in the United States caused controversy. The Dutch Institute for War Documentation, the current owner of the manuscript, requested that the missing pages be handed over to them. In 2000 the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science agreed to donate $300,000 to Suijk's foundation and the pages were delivered in 2001. Since then they have been included in new editions of the Journal.
In 2004, a new book was published in the Netherlands, titled Mooie zinnen-boek (Book of Pretty Phrases), containing book fragments and short poems which Anne compiled, on her father's advice, during her stay at the achterhuis.
Praise Anne Frank and her diary
In her introduction to the first edition of the Journal in the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt described it as "one of the wisest and most moving comments I have ever read on war and its impact on human beings." humans". The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg would later say: "A voice that speaks for that of six million; the voice not of a sage or a poet, but that of an ordinary girl'. As Anne Frank's stature as a writer and humanist has grown, she has become a symbol of the Holocaust and more broadly as a representative of the chase. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her acceptance speech for the Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award in 1994, quoted the Diary of Anne Frank and said that it "awakens us to the folly of indifference and the terrible price it exacts for our young people", which he linked to recent events in Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda. After receiving the Anne Frank Foundation's humanitarian award in 1994, Nelson Mandela addressed a crowd in Johannesburg, saying that he had read Anne's diary Frank while in prison and that she "got a great encouragement from him." He compared Ana's fight against Nazism to his own against apartheid, drawing a parallel line between the two philosophies with the comment "because these beliefs are patently false, and because they were, and always will be, challenged." by the likes of Anne Frank, are doomed to fail."
In the final message of Melissa Müller's biography of Anne Frank, Miep Gies tried to dispel what she believed was a growing misconception, "Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust," writing: " Ana's life and death was her own destiny, an individual destiny that was repeated six million times. Ana cannot, and she must not, represent the many individuals whose lives were stolen by the Nazis... But her fate helps us come to terms with the immense loss the world suffered through the Holocaust."
The Diary has also been praised for its literary merit. Commenting on Anne's writing style, American Jew Meyer Levin, who worked with Otto Frank on the dramatization of the diary shortly after its publication, praised it for "maintaining the tension of a well-constructed novel", while the poet John Berryman wrote that it was a unique representation, not only of adolescence but also of the "mysterious and fundamental process of a child becoming an adult, as it really happens". His biographer Melissa Müller said that he wrote "in a precise style confident and economical, astonishing in his frankness." Her writing is largely a character study, and she examines each person in her circle with a shrewd, uncompromising eye. He is occasionally cruel and often biased, especially in his portrayals of Fritz Pfeffer and her own mother, and Müller explains that she channeled "normal adolescent mood swings" through her work. Her examination of herself and her surroundings is maintained for a long period in an introspective, analytical, highly self-critical way, and in moments of frustration she recounts the battle that is taking place inside her between the "good Ana" who wants to be, and the "bad" she thinks she is. Otto Frank recalled his editor explaining why he thought the Diary would be so widely read: "He said that the Diary covers so many stages of life that each reader can find something that moves you.
Denialism challenges and legal actions
Efforts have been made to discredit the newspaper since its publication, and since the mid-1970s David Irving (a Holocaust denier) has been consistent in asserting that the newspaper is inauthentic. it was really written by Anne Frank, since it contains pages written with a ballpoint pen, invented in 1938 and patented in Argentina on June 10, 1943, but which would not have been introduced into Germany until a year later, the date on which Anne had already been transferred to the concentration camp (September 2, 1944) and her Diary was finished. In any case, the various studies carried out in the diary have shown that there are two pages containing pen annotations, added in 1960 by a graphologist who studied the text. In 2006, the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA), who in 1980 had certified the existence of those two pages written in ballpoint pen, issued a statement explaining that this four-page study could in no way be used to question the authenticity of the Diary.
Continuous public statements made by Holocaust deniers led Teresien da Silva to comment in 1999, on behalf of the Anne Frank House, that “for many right-wing extremists [Ana] proves to be an obstacle. Her testimony of the persecution of the Jews and her death in a concentration camp are blocking the way for the rehabilitation of National Socialism ».
Since the 1950s, Holocaust denial has been a criminal offense in some European countries, and the law has been used to prevent an increase in neo-Nazi activity. In 1959 Otto Frank took legal action in Lübeck against Lothar Stielau, a college teacher and former member of the Hitler Youth who published a student document in which he described the Diary as a forgery. The court examined the diary and concluded in 1960 that it was authentic. Stielau retracted his earlier claim, and Otto Frank did not take his claim any further.
In 1958, a group of protesters challenged Simon Wiesenthal during a performance of the Diary of Anne Frank in Vienna, claiming that Anne Frank never existed, and they asked him to prove her existence by finding the man who had made her. arrested. He began looking for Karl Silberbauer and found him in 1963. When he was interviewed, Silberbauer readily admitted the role of him, and identified Anne Frank in a photograph as one of the people who were arrested. He provided a full version of events and recalled dumping a suitcase full of papers on the floor. His statement corroborated the version of events that had been previously presented by witnesses such as Otto Frank.
In 1976 Otto Frank took action against Heinz Roth of Frankfurt, who published pamphlets claiming the Diary was a forgery. The judge decided that if he published any further statements along these lines, he would be fined DM 500,000 and face a six-month jail sentence. Two cases were dismissed by German courts in 1978 and 1979 on the grounds of the right to freedom of expression, since the complaint had not been made by any "injured party". The court stated in each case that if a new petition was made from an aggrieved party, such as Otto Frank, defamation proceedings could be opened.
The controversy came to a head in 1980 with the arrest and trial of two neo-Nazis, Ernst Römer and Edgar Geiss, who were tried and found guilty of creating and distributing literature denouncing the falsehood of the Diario, which was followed by a lawsuit by Otto Frank. During the appeal, a team of historians examined the documents according to Otto Frank, and determined their authenticity.
On the death of Otto Frank in 1980, the original diary, including letters and loose sheets, was bequeathed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, which carried out a forensic study of the diary in 1986 through the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands. After comparing the calligraphy with copies of proven authorship, they determined that they matched, and that the paper, glue, and ink used were readily available during the period in which the Diary was claimed to have been written. His final determination was that the Diary was authentic. On March 23, 1990 the Hamburg Regional Court confirmed its authenticity.
Acknowledgments and Honors
Anne Frank Foundation and Anne Frank House
On May 3, 1957, a group of citizens, including Otto Frank, established the Anne Frank Foundation in an effort to save the achterhuis building on the Prinsengracht from demolition, and to make it accessible to the public. Otto Frank insisted that the purpose of the foundation would be to foster contact and communication between young people of different cultures, religions and races, and to oppose intolerance and racial discrimination.
The Anne Frank House opened its doors on May 3, 1960. It consists of the Opekta warehouse, offices and the achterhuis, unfurnished so that visitors could walk freely through all the rooms. bedrooms. Some personal relics of its former tenants remain, for example the photographs of movie stars pasted on the wall by Ana, a portion of the wallpaper on which Otto Frank marked the height of his daughters as they grew up, and a map on the wall above the one that recorded the advance of the allied forces, all now protected by sheets of Plexiglas. From the small room that was once the home of Peter van Pels, a corridor connects the building with its neighboring buildings, also acquired by the Foundation. These other buildings house the Diary, as well as non-permanent exhibits describing various aspects of the Holocaust and more contemporary displays of racial intolerance in various parts of the world. It has become one of the main tourist attractions in the Netherlands, and is visited by more than half a million people every year.
In 1963 Otto Frank and his second wife, Fritzi (Elfriede Markowitz-Geiringer), established the Anne Frank Fonds as a charitable organization, based in Basel, Switzerland. The Fonds raises money to donate to causes in need. Upon his death, Otto bequeathed the rights to the Journal to this institution, with the stipulation that the first 80,000 Swiss francs produced as profit each year be distributed to his heirs, and that any income above of that amount is allocated to the Fonds for use in the projects that its administrators consider worthy of it. Provides, on an annual basis, funding for the medical treatment of the Righteous Among the Nations. He has worked to educate young people against racism and has loaned some of Anne Frank's manuscripts to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for an exhibition in 2003. His annual report for that same year gave some account of his effort to contribute globally, with his support for projects in Germany, Israel, India, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States..
Currently, the Anne Frank House has five associated organizations: in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Austria and Argentina, which in addition to functioning as facilitators of the educational activities of the Anne Frank House (such as the exhibition traveling «Anne Frank a current history») carry out their own educational activities.
Dedication of public spaces, equipment and statues
There is an extensive list of cities, towns, countries, and institutions around the world, especially in Europe, that have honored his memory by dedicating streets, squares, avenues, statues, sculptures, and facilities, among others.
Spain
The city of Barcelona inaugurated, on February 13, 1998, a public space with her name in the neighborhood of Villa de Gràcia, Plaza de Ana Frank. In addition, in 2001, a realistic bronze statue was placed in her honor, the work of Sara Pons Arnal. Located on top of the small overhang at the entrance to the Centro Artesano Tradicionarius (CAT), in the same square, Anne Frank is represented lying face down and holding her personal diary, with a thoughtful look. On the same façade, at a close but lower distance, as an element of the set, there are two pages made of bronze that contain some words of reflection and appreciation from the author of the statue, Sara Pons.
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