Photo courtesy of Julieta Leon
A Dutch judge decided that the Anne Frank's archive collection kept in a museum in Amsterdam should be returned to the Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland.
By H. Nelson Goodson
June 26, 2013
Amsterdam, Netherlands - On Wednesday, Rueters reported that a Dutch judge ordered the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam museum to return over 10,000 documents, photos and letters about the plight of Anne Frank (Annelies "Anne" Marie Frank age 15) to the Anne Frank Fond in Switzerland by January 2014, ending a long disputed legal battle about where the archives belong. The Anne Frank Fond loaned the archive collection to the Anne Frank House in a long term agreement allowing the House to register and inventory the documents about Anne Frank's life.
The judge ruled that the Anne Frank Fonds was the actual owner of the Frank-Elias family documents, which contained hundreds of letters and photos from Elias, a Frank's cousin. The judge decision does not include the famous Anne Frank's diary.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt Weimer Germany, She was a young Jewish girl that hid along with her family in a small back room hidden crawl space where her father worked in 1942 for two years in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The Nazis were enforcing Hitler's final solution campaign that included the massive relocation of Jewish people to concentration death camps. She lost her German citizenship in 1941.
The Frank family was betrayed and the Nazis discover their hiding place. The Frank's were detained and sent to separate concentration camps. Anne and her sister, Margot were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen consentration camp where she ultimately died of typhus in March of 1945.
Her father Otto Frank was the only survivor who went back to Amsterdam and discovered that Anne's diary survived the war. He published it "The Diary of a Young Girl" in Dutch in 1947. In 1952, the diary was published in English and later translated to numerous languages. The Anne Frank's diary was the basis of several films and plays.
The diary was given to Anne on her 13th birthday and details her life experiences in written notes from June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1945.
She wrote a personal diary during her plight, which was published by her father detailing her accounts about the suffering she and her family endured under Nazi occupation and the inhumane treatment of Jewish people during World War II.
The legal dispute resulted from the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam Museum refusing to return the archive collection to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Basel-base foundation created by Otto Frank, her father in Switzerland. The documents detailing the life of Anne Frank included letters, which were loan to the Anne Frank House in 2007 by Buddy Elias, president of the Anne Frank Fonds. The disputed documents have become known as the Frank-Elias family archive historical documents.
The Anne Frank Muesum in Amsterdam makes an estimated $18 million dollars (14M euros) and attracts over one million visitors a year. The Anne Frank Foundation wants to display the documents in a Frankfurt Jewish Museum.
Película en español "El Diario de Anne Frank" video
The Diary of a Young Girl (English version) video
