For the record, Anne Frank entered Holland legally before it was invaded by Germany. She had every right to be there. Her father, Otto, had gotten the needed visas and moved his family there in 1933 and opened two spice related businesses.
After Germany invaded they started rounding up Jews. To their shame, Holland did not protect their Jews with the same vigor that Denmark did. Out of the 140,000 Dutch Jews, about 100,000 were lost in the Holocaust. Denmark managed to save 95% of their Jews.
Personally I still often refer to the place casually as Holland and there are a pair of counties there that constitute Holland. The Dutch changed the name to bring the rest of the country to light and make it known that the country doesn't consist of just two counties. Whatever. Their country, their choice of what to name it.
In other news, the Dutch have a relationship with Suriname and periodically send troops there for jungle warfare training. One of the things they have done is gotten a Suriname amateur radio callsign, PZ5JT and use ham radio as a training tool. The American military does this also with cross band communications drills but I digress. I have worked both militaries and have the QSL cards to prove it.
Working ham pileups is excellent cost effective training for military radio operators. The have to pull callsigns consisting of letters and numbers out of chaotic pileups of babbling hams and they have to be fast and accurate. Military radio operators constantly deal with letters and numbers which makes this training, while a little unorthodox, very useful.
Back to the Franks. They moved to Holland in 1933 and in May, 1940 Germany invaded and held de facto ownership of Holland until May, 1945, five long years. Legal ownership of Holland during the war years probably created legal jurisdiction problems that most likely to some small extent continue to this day.
On release from Auschwitz-Birkenau Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam on 3 June, 1945. His wife had died there and Anne and her sister died at Bergen-Belsen. He found that the keepers of the secret annex he had hidden in had survived the war and when he visited the secret annex that had they had hidden in for over two years he discovered Anne's diary that he had published.
Otto never became a Dutch citizen. After the war he became a stateless person and never had a passport. In 1953 he remarried and the couple moved to Switzerland where he lived out the remainder of his life. In 1957 he went to Amsterdam and formed the Anne Frank Foundation, rescued the building the family had been hidden in from demolition. It opened as a museum in 1960 and is still open to this day.
'Anne Frank's diary' is a useful tool in educating the masses to the dangers of nazism. It is widely read, and a cultural icon. For that reason, it has value.
ReplyDeleteThat said, over the years I have become convinced that much of the content was written, expanded, and exaggerated by Otto, (though some was surely written by Anne) as a way to monetize the story. He was a grifter with an important story to tell, so we all agreed to let him tell it.