While the story of Anne Frank is tragedy, the basic facts of the Frank family history fly in the face of the belief that Auschwitz was an “extermination factory.”
…by Jonas E. Alexis and David Merlin
David Merlin has a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He also has a Juris Doctor. He is currently writing a book on the “Irving vs. Lipstadt” trial. He is a frequent contributor to the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, CODOH.com.
Jonas E. Alexis: Anne Frank is arguably one of the most difficult personalities of World War II. She has been revered by political leaders of all stripes, including like Nelson Mandela. When the Ann Frank Exhibition was opened in 1994, Mandela, a Communist and Marxist/Leninist throughout his political career and a product of Jewish messianic and subversive movements, declared then that
“The Anne Frank Exhibition explores the past in order to heal, to reconcile and to build the future. I think we will all agree that it is not the most pleasant thing to revive bitter memories, to invoke the pain and suffering of the past.
“But, like the people of the Netherlands and others in Europe who experienced the harsh realities of Nazism and fascism, like the people in the developing world who lived under the brutality of colonialism, we, in South Africa know too well that we cannot move forward with confidence if we ignore the past.”
How ironic that the man who uttered those words did not even think that Leninism was worse than Nazism or Fascism. Mandela was even trained by the Israeli Mossad!
In any event, there is now an Anne Frank Exhibition in South Africa, but there is not a single exhibition for millions upon millions of innocent people who suffered under Lenin and Stalin—not even in America, the land of “democracy” and “freedom.”
Beyoncé and Jay Z have even all the way to Amsterdam to visit the Anne Frank House, but they never asked the most damning question ever: whatever happened to other people who suffered under the Bolshevik Regime? Do they deserve our sympathy?
Are these people being fair? Are we really being careful with the historical account? One cogent observer by the name of Marc C. Digiuseppe has recently sent me his great assessment on the some of the problems facing the political and historical world which states in part:
“The German people were maligned and abused by the Western Oligarchs in World War I. The Oligarchs cleverly navigated a diplomacy that played upon Germanic Traditions—abstract notions of pride and honor—a rule of the clan that had endured for thousands of years…
“This entire process was then repeated upon the German people at the end of World War II.”
Absolutely true. The questions before us are simply these: When will the Holocaust establishment be fair to the German people, particularly those who suffered under the Red Army? When will they look at the death and evil on both sides of the historical equation? More importantly, what aren’t they telling us about Anne Frank?
Well, we’ll let Merlin answer that question for us.
Now, some readers will probably say that we are trying to deconstruct history here. Not at all. We should all sympathize for those who have suffered under violent regimes and for those who have absolutely and positively nothing to do with revolutionary movements.
In fact, we should all be able to separate good, bad, and indifferent people. But it is not fair to sympathize for one particular group while ignoring the suffering of others. And the Holocaust establishment has certainly tampered with the Anne Frank account. Now let us allow Merlin to talk about this issue.
David Merlin: There is a rather pretentious writer for the New York Times named Ed Rothstein. Mr. Rothstein specializes in pious critiquing of Holocaust tales and museums. He wrote an article about the Anne Frank extravaganza exhibit put on at the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The article is entitled “Playing Cat and Mouse With Searing History.”[1]
Rothstein feels that people are drawing the wrong “lesson” from the exhibit. The exhibit is not horrible enough and “horrific circumstances are distilled into effervescent platitudes!” In fact, Mr. Rothstein has totally missed the history lesson. Maybe Mr. Rothstein can be excused since the backstory history of the Frank family is never mentioned by Holocaust Believers.
While the story of Anne Frank is tragedy, the basic facts of the Frank family history fly in the face of the belief that Auschwitz was an “extermination factory.” To Quote Bradley Smith’s Blog,
“Official history is that non-working Jewish people arriving at Auschwitz were all ‘gassed.’ But of the eight sent to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944 from the Annex, not one of them was killed in a gas chamber. Instead, five of the eight were transported back to Germany-Austria in November 1944.”
Otto Frank
The details of the eight individuals from the Annex are:
- Anne Frank– sent to Auschwitz, then transported to Belsen where she died of typhus (in Belsen not Auschwitz).
- Otto Frank– left behind in Auschwitz with those in the sick barracks. Survived the War.
- Edith Frank-Holländer–left behind in Auschwitz as the Germans retreated.
- Margot Frank (Anne’s older sister) died of typhus in Belsen (not Auschwitz).
- Fritz Pfeffer, sent to Auschwitz then transported to Neuengamme concentration camp where he died on 20 December 1944. His cause of death is listed in the camp records as “enterocolitis.”
- Auguste van Pels born Auguste Röttgen (Hermann’s wife), whose date of death is unknown. Witnesses testified that she was with the Frank sisters during part of their time in Bergen-Belsen. According to German records, van Pels was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany with a group of eight women on November 26, 1944. Hannah Goslar’s testimony was that she spoke to van Pels through the barbed wire fence “in late January or early February”. Auguste was transferred on February 6, 1945 to Raguhn (Buchenwald in Germany), then to the Czechoslovakia camp Theresienstadt ghetto on April 9, 1945.
- Peter van Pels died in Mauthausen (not Auschwitz).
- Hermann van Pels died in Auschwitz. It is often claimed that he was “gassed.” However, according to eyewitness testimony, this did not happen on the day of his arrival there. Sal de Liema, an inmate at Auschwitz who knew both Otto Frank and Hermann van Pels, said that after two or three days in the camp, van Pels mentally “gave up.” He later injured his thumb on a work detail, and requested to be sent to the sick barracks. There is no evidence whatever for the assertion that Hermann van Pels was gassed.
The pattern is the same with other groups closely associated with Anne Frank who were also sent to Auschwitz from Holland.
- Eva Geiringer — born May 11, 1929. Sent to Auschwitz May 1944 Step-sister of Anne Frank. Survived the War. Married Zvi Schloss, also refugee from Nazi Germany. She is a co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK. Her experiences story was made into the play And Then They Came for Me – Remembering the World of Anne Frank.
- “Fritzy” Geiringer, mother of Eva, Married Otto Frank. Survived the War.
- Heinz Geiringer, brother. Survived Auschwitz but died on a forced march out of the camp.
- “Pappy” Geiringer. Survived Auschwitz but died on a forced march out of the camp.
The Geiringers were immigrants from Austria; They too ignored a call up for labor service received July 6, 1942 and went into hiding. They were found out on May 11, 1944, detained and were sent to Auschwitz that month.
- Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper. Was arrested for forgery. Was in the Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Traveled to Auschwitz on the same train as the Frank family and to Belsen with Anne and Anne’s older sister Margot. Survived the War.
- Lientje, sister of Janny. Was in the Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with Janny. Survived the War.”
Not one of the group of 14 was gassed or executed.
There is more: Anne, Margo, Janny, and Lientje were put on trains and transported back across Poland into Germany. It is pretty obvious that they were not moved around due to their value as workers.
How do Believers in an alleged policy to “Exterminate all Jews” explain this? Rothstein dances around the issue, playing up the tragedy and avoiding the actual history.
“Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the sole survivor of the “secret annex”
Rothstein also skims over the transportation problem with lurid rhetoric, “where the Germans had shipped her from Auschwitz along with other condemned souls in the waning months of the war.”
The point is exactly that the people transported out of Auschwitz were NOT condemned but saved. Their later tragic deaths by disease, cold, etc. may have been negligence (or not) but to bray out that they were “condemned souls” is absurd and dishonest.
Even Rothstein’s “waning months of the War” claim is a conflation. Anne, et al were transported out in November 1944.
The display that Rothstein finds most meaningful in the Exhibit is a “symbolic” wall of children’s clothes: Typical of a Holocaust Believer to worship symbolism and ignore the Truth.
The obvious point is that (whatever German policy was earlier) by September 1944 the policy was not to “exterminate all Jews.”
The Shady Mr. Frank
The promoters of the Anne Frank story leave out unpleasant information about Otto Frank.
The official story was that Otto Frank and his family were detained because they were Jewish. However a recent book by Carol Ann Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank (Penguin Books, 2003), brings to light never before documented information about Otto Frank.
The operative fact was that Otto Frank was always in need of money. With one broken engagement already behind him, in 1925 Frank married Edith Hollander, a women with a substantial dowry and heiress to a scrap-metal and industrial-supply business.
It was, he later admitted, ‘a business arrangement’, though not even his well-to-do wife could help when, in the early Thirties, the family banking business plunged once again into the red.[2]
Getting out of Germany
Otto Frank and his family emigrated from Germany to Holland in 1933, evidently under a cloud of some illegal business transactions. It is interesting to note that the various Anne Frank Websites blame the emigration on anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialists.
However, Hitler did not gain power until after the passage of the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933 and the Nuremberg laws were not passed until September 1935. By then Otto Frank had been in Holland for over two years.[3]
Frank had established his franchise for the Amsterdam branch of Opekta pectin company by September 1933, evidently after months of planning. Interestingly, Frank had previously managed managed a large rival firm named Pomosin, which also traded pectin to factories from the Dutch town of Utrecht.
All this clearly shows that failed business dealings had already prompted Otto Frank to look for a creditor free life in Holland.
Business with the Germans
Holland did not give the Franks Dutch citizenship. When the Germans occupied Holland in 1940 Frank was happy to do business with the Occupying German Army (the pectin his firm produced was essential for the preservation of the German army’s rations.) In her book, Lee writes…”Otto Frank made a pact with the devil […]”
Otto manufactured and wholesaled pectin and other products to the German army.
“Pectin was a preservative that could be put to many uses, depending upon the type of pectin it was. All pectin was useful for food production, but certain kinds could be applied as a balm for wounds and as a thickener for raising blood volume in blood transfusions.
Other types of pectin were used in the steel industry as a hardener and in the oil industry as an emulsifier. Therefore, it is possible that the Wehrmacht used the pectin they bought from Otto Frank’s company for the war industry.”
Carol Ann Lee details evidence that after the War Otto paid hush money to people to keep his business dealings with the Nazis secret.
Otto Frank’s illegal activities
Frank illegally re-registered his business naming the husband of a secretary, Jan Gies, owner and changing the business name to Gies & Co. but Frank continued to act as an illegal “sleeping partner.”
Two years later, in July 1942, Margot Frank receives a call-up to report for a German work camp. Otto Frank went into hiding.
There is also the matter of the two Opekta employees, Martin Brouwer and Pieter Daatzelaa, who were arrested in March 1944 for dealing in counterfeit ration cards. They worked in the same building as the Annex.
Rather than mention what appears to be a sizable black market food and fake ration card ring centered at the Gies & Co building, protectors of the “Anne Frank Brand name” make the dramatic claim that the family “had been betrayed” but,when Otto Frank was discovered in hiding, he and his family were illegal aliens in Holland with a string of legal violations by Otto Frank, including strong connections with a counterfeit ration card operation.
The family was held for almost a month at Westerbork Detention Center while all this was sorted out. When the Frank family’s legal status was determined they were all transported to Auschwitz. None of the women were registered into the camp and none seemed to work.
All of the family survived the alleged “Extermination Factory.” As mentioned above, Anne and her older sister were transported back to Germany, where Anne Frank died of typhus right at the end of the War.
The “official” Anne Frank website ignores all these inconvenient facts about Otto Frank and the Frank Family’s visit to Auschwitz.
Dutch ration cards from Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum
The Diary and the Anne Frank Brand Name
The pages that constitute the “Diary” were actually various loose sheets of paper allegedly left by the police strewn on the floor of the Annex.
Whatever else one can say about the “Diary,” it has been a huge goldmine and everyone connected with young Anne Frank has exploited her story, usually by establishing a “Foundation” such as Eva Geiringer’s Anne Frank Trust UK. More than 30 million book copies have been sold along with movie rights, plays, and exhibits like the pay-to-view show at the Los Angeles Wiesenthal Center ($15.50 to enter. Not included with general admission. Advanced reservations are recommended.)
In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed the original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. The copyright however belongs to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Switzerland-based foundation.
Over the years, there have been numerous legal brawls over ownership of the publishing rights.
For example, Cornelis Suijk—a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the U.S. Center for Holocaust Education Foundation—announced in 1999 that he was in the possession of five pages that had been removed by Otto Frank from the diary prior to publication; Suijk claimed that Otto Frank gave these pages to him shortly before his death in 1980. It cost US$300,000 to Suijk’s Foundation to get the pages back to the The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
Also see: “a legacy feud is simmering between the owners of Frank’s writings — the Switzerland-based Anne Frank Fonds — and stewards of the “Secret Annex” museum visited by more than one-million people each year, the Anne Frank House.[4]
The disputes among the various trusts and foundations aside, they all unite in preserving the value of the Anne Frank Brand name. The Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation paid for a report that claimed that the various papers were “authentic.”
But then, after years of claiming that the Diaries were the sole work of Anne, The Anne Frank Fund, based in Basel, Switzerland, has claims that it holds exclusive copyright because Otto Frank was a co-author!
It all leads one to suspect that the various Anne Frank trusts, foundations, and museums are not shooting straight with the facts.
Conclusion
Obviously the detention and death by disease of Anne Frank is a tragedy but a review the facts puts a slightly different spin on the story than the myth making exploitation of the tragedy by the folks at Anne Frank House, the Anne Frank Fonds, and the Simon Wiesenthal Museum.
[1] Edward Rothstein, “Playing Cat and Mouse With Searing History,” NY Times, October 13, 2013.
[2] Rachel Cooke, “The Hidden Life of Otto Frank,” Guardian, July 14, 2002.
[4] Matt Lebovic, “A most unseemly battle over the legacy of Anne Frank,” Times of Israel, December 18, 2014.
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