Portal:Germany/Selected article/31

Anne Frank in 1940

Annelies Marie Frank (12 June 1929 – c. February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim. She gained worldwide notability posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. In the diary, she regularly described her family's everyday life in their hiding place in a secret annex in Amsterdam from 1942 until their arrest in 1944.

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four-and-a-half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party was elected to govern Germany. By May 1940, her family were trapped in Amsterdam due to Germany's occupation. Frank lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecution of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in a secret annex concealed behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank, worked. The family were arrested two years later by the Gestapo, on 4 August 1944. (Full article...)