Otto's employees Kleiman and Kugler, as well as Jan and Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside world. The Franks were accompanied in hiding by Otto's business partner Hermann van Pels as well as his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter. The very next day, the Frank family went into hiding in makeshift quarters in an empty space at the back of Otto's company building, which they referred to as the Secret Annex. On July 5, 1942, Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany. Otto managed to keep control of his company by officially signing ownership over to two of his Christian associates, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, while continuing to run the company from behind the scenes. Anne and her sister were forced to transfer to a segregated Jewish school. Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David at all times and observe a strict curfew they were also forbidden from owning businesses.
The Dutch surrendered on May 15, 1940, marking the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.Īs Anne later wrote in her diary, "After May 1940, the good times were few and far between first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews."īeginning in October 1940, the Nazi occupiers imposed anti-Jewish measures in the Netherlands. On May 10, 1940, the German army invaded the Netherlands. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting a global conflict that would become World War II. Anne had many friends, Dutch and German, Jewish and Christian, and she was a bright and inquisitive student. "In those days, it was possible for us to start over and to feel free," Otto recalled.Īnne began attending Amsterdam's Sixth Montessori School in 1934, and throughout the rest of the 1930s, she lived a relatively happy and normal childhood. Otto later said, "Though this did hurt me deeply, I realized that Germany was not the world, and I left my country forever."Īnne described the circumstances of her family's emigration years later in her diary: "Because we're Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam."Īfter years of enduring anti-Semitism in Germany, the Franks were relieved to once again enjoy freedom in their new hometown of Amsterdam. They moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in the fall of 1933. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 20, 1933, the Frank family immediately realized that it was time to flee. "I can remember that as early as 1932, groups of Storm Troopers came marching by, singing, 'When Jewish blood splatters from the knife,'" Otto later recalled. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the virulently anti-Semitic National German Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party) led by Adolf Hitler became Germany's leading political force, winning control of the government in 1933. But she was born on the eve of dramatic changes in German society that would soon disrupt her family's happy, tranquil life as well as the lives of all other German Jews.ĭue in large part to the harsh sanctions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, the German economy struggled terribly in the 1920s. The Franks were a typical upper-middle-class, German-Jewish family living in a quiet, religiously diverse neighborhood near the outskirts of Frankfurt. Anne Frank at school in 1940 Photo: Unknown photographer Collectie Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam (Website Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam), via Wikimedia CommonsĪnne was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany.
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