Otto Heinrich Frank

Otto Frank (1961)

Otto Heinrich "Pim" Frank (born on May 12, 1889 in Frankfurt am Main ; died on August 19, 1980 in Birsfelden near Basel ) was a Dutch - Swiss merchant of German origin who worked in the from 1933 to 1944 and from 1945 to 1953 Netherlands lived. He was the father of Anne Frank , whose diary he edited.

Life

Otto Frank's father Michael came from Landau in the Palatinate , the family tree of his mother Alice Stern can be traced back to the 16th century in Frankfurt registers. Otto Frank attended the Lessing Gymnasium in Frankfurt and graduated from high school in 1908 . He served on the Western Front from mid-1915 until the end of the First World War . Most recently he was an officer candidate in the light measuring squad 172. He was the bearer of the Iron Cross .

Otto and Edith Frank-Holländer married on May 12, 1925. Edith moved out of her parents 'house and initially lived with Otto in his parents' house on Beethovenplatz in Frankfurt. After the birth of their daughter Margot in 1926, the family moved into a rented apartment at Frankfurter Marbachweg 307 in mid-1927 . They lived there until 1933/34. In 1929 the second daughter Anne was born. After the Nazi regime came to power , he moved with his family to Amsterdam , also because he feared anti-Semitic reprisals in Germany .

In 1933, Erich Elias, a friend of Robert Feix , made his brother-in-law Otto Frank an offer to set up a Dutch foreign agency "Nederlandsche Opekta" in Amsterdam for the German Opekta . This agency should expand the business in the Netherlands. Frank accepted this offer. He initially went to Amsterdam alone to find a place to live for his family and to clarify requirements for the company. In February 1934 his wife Edith and their two daughters followed.

In May 1940, German troops occupied the Netherlands in the first days of the western campaign . On July 6, 1942, the Frank family hid from the German Gestapo in the back of the building on Prinsengracht 263, in the front of which was the headquarters of the “Nederlandsche Opekta” . About two years later, the family and other Jewish residents of the Secret Annex were discovered, possibly through betrayal; on August 4, 1944, they were arrested by Karl Josef Silberbauer (then SS-Oberscharführer in the security service ).

After this arrest, the people in hiding were interrogated by the Gestapo and detained overnight. On August 5, she was taken to the overcrowded Huis van Bewaring prison in Weteringschans. Two days later, Otto Frank was with his family in the Westerbork transit camp admitted, and later to Auschwitz deported . His wife Edith died there on January 6, 1945 of malnutrition; Otto was liberated by the Soviet army in Auschwitz at the end of January 1945 . He was the only one in his family who survived the Holocaust .

After the war, he refused German citizenship, which had been revoked in 1941, and became Dutch in 1949 . On the advice of some friends, he published his daughter Anne's diary . On November 10, 1953 Otto Frank married Elfriede Markovits in Amsterdam , who had lost her husband, Erich Geiringer, and her son in the Auschwitz concentration camp, while their daughter Eva survived imprisonment. The two had met in the concentration camp. Together they emigrated to Switzerland in 1952, where he also received Swiss citizenship . He founded the Anne Frank Fund in Basel in 1966 after the Anne Frank Foundation for the preservation of the house at 263 Prinsengracht had been established in 1957 . Otto Frank died on August 19, 1980 in Birsfelden near Basel.

Text manipulation when publishing the daughter's diary

Anne Frank also wrote about the relationship between her parents in her diary. In 1998 it became known that an entry dated February 8, 1944 in the publication had been removed, which presumably affected Otto Frank in particular. He also kept Anne's last version of an introduction to the diary separately. Melissa Müller , whose biography of Anne Frank was published in 1998, published a revised version of the biography in 2013, which took into account these omitted papers.

Feature films

Otto Frank was portrayed in the feature film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) by Joseph Schildkraut , in Anne Frank - The True Story (2001) by Ben Kingsley and in The Diary of Anne Frank (2016) by Ulrich Noethen . He was portrayed by Emrys James (1987) and Iain Glen (2001) in the two BBC productions The Diary of Anne Frank , and in the TV film My Daughter Anne Frank (2015) by Götz Schubert .

Commemoration

In February 2015, stumbling blocks for Anne, Margot, Edith and Otto Frank were laid at the last official residence of the Frank family in Amsterdam .

literature

• Carol Ann Lee : Otto Frank's Secret. The father of Anne Frank and his hidden life (Original title: The Hidden Life of Otto Frank ). German by Renate Weitbrecht and Helmut Dierlamm. Piper, Munich and Zurich 2006, ISBN 978-3-492-24692-7 .
• Melissa Müller : The girl Anne Frank: The biography . First published in 1998, ISBN 3-546-00151-6 ., Published in 2013 as a Fischer paperback ("New edition expanded to include unknown material"), ISBN 978-3596189021 .
• Rian Verhoeven: Anne Frank was no good. Het Merwedeplein 1933-1945. Prometheus, Amsterdam 2019, ISBN 978-90-446-3041-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Heinrich Frank in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst Schnabel: Anne Frank. Trace of a child . Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 13.
2. ↑ Melissa Müller: The girl Anne Frank: The biography . First published in 1998, ISBN 3-546-00151-6 ., Published in 2013 as a Fischer paperback ("New edition expanded to include unknown material"), ISBN 978-3-596-18902-1 ( reading sample )
3. ↑ Abitur class Easter 1908; 309. Frank, Otto, Ffm. May 12, 1989, banker in Amsterdam. Before 14 worked in Ffm. And Düsseldorf with several stays in New York; War participation; then again in Ffm. until the move to Amsterdam; K: 2, not alive anymore. (From: Rudolf Bonnet: Das Lessing Gymnasium zu Frankfurt am Main - teachers and students 1897–1947 , Frankfurt am Main 1954)
4. ↑ Carol Ann Lee: The Hidden Life of Otto Frank . Perennial, New York 2003, pp. 239 .
5. ↑ ^{a b} Foreword by Melissa Müller in the 2013 edition (full text here )
6. ↑ Stolpersteine ​​Merwedeplein 37 / ll on tracesofwar.com