On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands during World War II. The German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, used paratroopers to capture tactical points and to assist the advance of ground troops across the country.
The invasion was accompanied by heavy aerial bombardment of Rotterdam. It culminated on May 14 with the destruction of the city's entire historic center. Because the Germans threatened to bomb Utrecht in the same way, the Dutch forces surrendered one day later.
Soon after, the Nazis began occupying the whole country and passed new anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude Jewish people from society and restrict their livelihood. Among the 15,000 Jews who had fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands between 1933 and 1939, and who were once again under Nazi domination, was Otto Frank, whose daughter Anne would become one of the world's most famous diarists.
Otto Heinrich Frank was born on May 12, 1889, in Frankfurt, then part of the German Empire. He was the second of four children of Michael Frank, the owner of a business bank in Frankfurt, and Alice Betty Stern. They were liberal Jews who valued Jewish traditions and holidays but did not observe all religious laws.
After high school, Otto briefly studied art history and went on to do traineeships at various banks and at Macy's in New York. After his father's sudden death in 1909, Otto returned to Germany and spent some time at a company that produced horseshoes.
The First World War began on July 28, 1914. Otto Frank enlisted in the German Army in 1915 and served in a Lichtmesstrupp unit, which analyzed where enemy artillery fire came from. His unit also took part in the Battle of the Somme, in which more than three million men fought. One million were wounded or killed, making it one of the deadliest battles in human history. By the end of the war, Otto Frank was a lieutenant and had been awarded the Iron Cross.
After the First World War ended on November 11, 1918, Otto joined the family bank. In 1924 he met Edith Holländer, a daughter of wealthy Jews trading in industrial equipment. She was 12 years his junior. They fell in love, and on May 8, 1925, the couple celebrated their civil wedding in Aachen. Four days later, on Otto's 36th birthday, they had their Jewish wedding in the Aachen synagogue.
The couple then moved to a new housing estate in Frankfurt am Main, where Margot, their elder daughter, was born on February 16, 1926. Anne was born three years later, on June 12, 1929. The Franks were liberal Jews and lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions.
On October 24, 1929, the stock market crash marked the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, which soon spread across the globe. The Great Depression also played a role in the emergence of Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party. While the Great Depression and German economic conditions were not solely responsible for bringing Hitler to power, they helped create an environment in which he gained support. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg.
In 1933, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany, less than one percent of the total population. Most Jews in Germany were proud to be Germans. More than 100,000 German Jews, including Otto Frank, had served in the German army during World War I, and many were decorated for their bravery. Jews held important positions in government and taught in Germany's renowned universities.
Marriage between Jews and non-Jews was becoming more common. Although German Jews continued to encounter some discrimination in their social lives and professional careers, many were confident of their future as Germans. They spoke the German language and regarded Germany as their home.
On April 1, 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power, the Nazi leadership decided to stage an economic boycott against the Jews of Germany. This boycott, targeting Jewish businesses and professionals, was the first nationwide, planned action against the Jews. It was both a reprisal and an act of revenge against atrocity propaganda that German and foreign Jews, assisted by foreign journalists, were allegedly circulating in the international press to damage Nazi Germany's reputation.
On the day of the boycott, members of the SA, a paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party, stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned department stores and retail establishments, as well as the offices of professionals such as doctors and lawyers. The Star of David was painted in yellow and black across thousands of doors and windows, with accompanying antisemitic slogans. Signs were posted saying "Don't Buy from Jews" and "The Jews Are Our Misfortune." Acts of violence against individual Jews and Jewish property occurred throughout Germany, but the police intervened only rarely.
Although the national boycott operation, organized by local Nazi party chiefs, lasted only one day and was ignored by many individual Germans who continued to shop in Jewish-owned stores, it marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign by the Nazi Party against the entire German Jewish population. A week later, the government passed a law restricting employment in the civil service to "Aryans." Jewish government workers, including teachers in public schools and universities, were fired.
Because of business problems and growing antisemitism, the Franks made the difficult decision to leave their country and emigrate to the Netherlands. In September 1933, Otto founded a franchise for the Amsterdam branch of the Opekta company, which traded in pectin, a gelling agent for making jam. The rest of the family moved to Amsterdam soon after. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.
After their experiences in the Third Reich, the family soon felt at home in Amsterdam. They were able to make a fresh start, could live their own life, and feel free. The girls enrolled in Dutch schools, made new friends, and despite initial problems with the Dutch language, they became excellent students, especially Margot.
While the girls seemed happy about their new life in the new country, for their parents the situation was more challenging. Otto had to work hard to get his company going and build a new life for his family. The financial situation of the family improved in 1938 when Otto started a new company called Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices. Edith concentrated on running the household, struggled with a new language, and had a hard time settling in the Netherlands.
In the meantime, Edith's family, who had been left behind in Aachen, witnessed the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht, which occurred on November 9 and 10, 1938, when Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories. The Nazi SA and German civilians ransacked Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools, while the German SS and police sent almost 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps, primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
Edith's brother Julius escaped arrest because he had fought in the German army and been injured in the First World War. However, Edith's other brother, Walter, was arrested and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp. Soon after, both brothers emigrated to the United States via the Netherlands. Edith's mother, Rosa, left Nazi Germany as well. She came to the Netherlands and moved in with the family in March 1939. Seeing the development in Nazi Germany, Otto looked into options for setting up a business in Great Britain, but the plans never worked out.
World War II started on September 1, 1939. All of Otto and Edith's hopes that they would be safe in the Netherlands were dashed by the invasion of the German army in May 1940. Desperate attempts to emigrate to the United States, with the help of Edith's brothers Julius and Walter as well as Otto Frank's American friend Nathan Strauss, also failed.
The life of the Franks, who were once again under Nazi domination, changed completely. The criminal Nazi regime from which they had fled in 1933 finally caught up with them in the country that had become their new home and had made them feel free to live their own life.
The Netherlands became an occupied territory, and it did not take long for the Nazis to begin introducing new anti-Semitic laws and regulations that restricted the lives of Jews. Jewish civil servants were fired, and Jewish businesses as well as the Jews themselves had to be registered. They could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops. Many places thus became off-limits to Margot and Anne, who could not even go to the same school as all Jewish children had to go to separate Jewish schools.
According to the new laws, Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses, and the Nazis forced Otto to give up his companies. However, he had managed to transfer control of his businesses to his employees soon enough to keep his companies out of Nazi hands. But the situation only continued to get worse, and in 1941 Jewish men were arrested during raids and then deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths soon started coming in.
Otto understood that the situation was critical and continued trying to emigrate to the United States and Cuba. However, he never managed to obtain the necessary documents. In January 1942, Edith's mother Rosa died.
It was in the spring of the same year when Otto Frank, anticipating deportation of his own family, decided to set up a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. If necessary, there would be enough room for his own family and for the family of his employee Hermann van Pels, seven people in all. Otto asked four of his closest employees to take care of him and his family if they would have to go into hiding, and all of them agreed.
Regulations forcing Jews to wear a yellow badge in the form of a Star of David as a means of identification were announced in the Netherlands on April 29, 1942. Those caught without the badge after May 5 of the same year, when the regulations came into effect, were arrested and detained for a six-week period.
The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps started in the summer of 1942. Transports regularly left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught. Out of 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands by the beginning of the Second World War, 107,000, including little children, were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, by September 1944. Only 5,000 of them returned after the war.
Before going into hiding, June 12, 1942, was probably the last happy moment for the Frank family. It was the day when Anne celebrated her 13th birthday and received her diary, a diary that would one day make her famous and in which she would write about her thoughts and feelings during the difficult times that were to come.
Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot, Anne's sister, received a call-up to report for a so-called labor camp in Nazi Germany. Knowing the fate of their friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did not hesitate for a second. The next morning, they went into hiding in order to escape persecution.
In the Secret Annex, Edith and Otto were to stay with a rebellious Anne and a thoughtful Margot for 761 long days. After seven days, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family, made up of Hermann and Auguste and 16-year-old Peter, from whom Anne would receive her first kiss. In November, they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend.
It is Anne's diary thanks to which we know how the Frank family and four other Jews lived for more than two years in a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase. The people in hiding were completely dependent on their six helpers: Miep and Jan Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep and Johan Voskuijl. They were employees and friends of Otto who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary to the eight people in the Secret Annex between 1942 and 1944.
Writing helped Anne pass the time, and it is thanks to her diary that we can get a glimpse into the everyday life of the people in hiding. It was important to be silent, especially from 8:30 a.m. when the men in the warehouse below the Secret Annex started their work day. Any sound could cause suspicion. Otto continued to be concerned with the ins and outs of the company, and whenever business relations from Frankfurt visited, he would lie down with his ear to the floor in order to hear what was being discussed in the office below.
The morning was devoted to reading, studying, and preparing for their lunch break. At 12:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home for lunch, a few of the helpers came up to the Secret Annex to have lunch with the people in hiding. Miep Gies usually stayed in the office to keep an eye on things. The people in hiding could see other faces and listen to Radio Oranje, a programme broadcast by the BBC in which the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who on May 13, 1940, had escaped from the invading German troops and then travelled to England, spoke 34 times.
While in the afternoon some people in hiding took a nap, Anne, who wanted to become a writer and journalist, would study or write in her diary. Margot, who saw a future for herself as a maternity nurse in Palestine, also had a diary. Otto loved to read Charles Dickens, with a dictionary in hand. Then they had coffee, prepared dinner, and at 5:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home, the people in hiding would leave the Secret Annex and spread out through the building. They would cook dinner and take turns using the bathroom, as they did in the morning before the warehouse workers started their working day.
Otto felt responsible for the atmosphere in the Secret Annex and acted as a mediator in the countless larger and smaller arguments. The Franks had thought that living with their partner's family in the Secret Annex would make life less monotonous, but they had not foreseen how many problems would arise because of the differences in characters and views.
In her diary, Anne wrote: "I am dazed by all the abusive exchanges that have hurtled through this virtuous house during the past month. Daddy goes about with his lips tightly pursed, when anyone speaks to him, he looks up startled, as if he is afraid he will have to patch up some tricky relationship again. Quite honestly, sometimes I forget who we are quarreling with and with whom we've made it up."
In the hiding place, Edith and Anne often clashed, too. In her diary, Anne did not spare her mother and would often write about the disagreements, conflicts, mutual lack of understanding, and her mother's pessimism, from which she wanted to disassociate herself. As Anne grew wiser, she managed to keep things bearable and wrote in her diary: "I usually keep my mouth shut if I get annoyed, and so does she, so we appear to get on much better together."
According to Otto, Edith suffered more from their arguments than Anne did. And even though he was worried about Edith and Anne not having a good relationship, he never doubted that his wife was an excellent mother who put her children above all else. Although she often complained that Anne would oppose everything she did, Edith was comforted to know that Anne trusted in her father Otto.
Miep Gies, one of the helpers, remembered Otto in the Secret Annex as "the calm one, the children's teacher, the most logical one, the one who balanced everyone out. He was the leader, the one in charge." Edith, however, had a hard time in the Secret Annex. According to Miep Gies, she suffered from feelings of despair, and although the others were counting the days until the Allies came, making games of what they would do when it was all over, Edith confessed that she was deeply ashamed of the fact that she felt the end would never come.
The situation became more dangerous after September 1942, when special units were formed, made up of Dutch collaborators, that began hunting for hiding Jews. An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two thirds of them survived, but one third was betrayed and discovered.
To this day, we do not know the reason for the police raid, but the hiding period for the eight people in the Secret Annex came to an abrupt end on August 4, 1944. The hiding place had been discovered and its eight inhabitants were arrested. Two of the helpers were also arrested. One of them, Victor Kugler, remembered how Margot had been weeping silently during the arrest.
The Dutch police officers who arrested Otto and the others in hiding were headed by an Austrian SS officer, Karl Silberbauer. Otto Frank was upstairs giving an English lesson to Peter van Pels when a Dutch SD man entered Peter's room pointing a gun. Next, everybody was gathered together. Silberbauer reacted with surprise when he spotted Otto's army footlocker, realizing one of his prisoners had been a German officer during the First World War. This might explain why the people in hiding were allowed time to pack up a few personal belongings. While Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money, he scattered out the papers and notebooks.
After the people from the Secret Annex were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, the two helpers Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl took Anne's documents before the Secret Annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. While Anne's diary and other manuscripts survived, Margot's diary was lost.
From a prison in Amsterdam, they were sent to the Westerbork transit camp, where they ended up in a prison barracks, and the men and women were separated. As convicted offenders, Edith and her daughters had to do the dirty and unhealthy work of taking old batteries apart for reuse. The kind of work Otto had to perform during the day is unknown, but in the evening he could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne.
On September 3, 1944, the Franks were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their train was the last one to leave Westerbork for this extermination camp located in Nazi-occupied Poland. When they reached Auschwitz, they did not know that the worst was yet to come.