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Anne Frank Charities Duel Over Archives

There’s been some pretty audacious name-calling too

by
Adam Chandler
May 08, 2013

There’s some pretty dispiriting news about a spat between two Anne Frank charities that are fighting over the rights to the Frank family archive. Apparently, this isn’t the first time the groups have mixed it up with the two organizations–the Anne Frank Fund (Swiss) and the Anne Frank Foundation (Dutch)–having previously gone to court in the 1990s over the trademark…gird yourself…for Anne Frank’s name.

The archive, which contains 25,000 family letters, documents and photos from several generations, has been in the care of the Foundation in Amsterdam since 2007, on a loan from the Fund that it expected would become permanent.



The Fund, headed by Anne Frank’s closest living relative, her cousin Buddy Elias, now wants the material to go to a new permanent Frank Family Center devoted to the wider Frank clan and other relatives, not just Anne. It will be located at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, where Anne Frank was born in 1929.

A member of the Fund’s board ratcheted up the hostilities when he likened the Foundation’s actions to…well…Nazi theft: “..in the 1940s, the Frank family had its possessions seized by the Germans and their accomplices. Now a Dutch institution is trying again to carry out a seizure.”

To recap Anne Frank sideshows from the past month: Justin Bieber, a school debate about the unedited version of her diary, and now this.

Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.