Those who knew Otto Frank spoke of a man of merry, even jocular, temperament who was lively and full of energy but also private; he kept his own counsel. He’d met his Jewish wife in Germany, and his two daughters had been born there. He was not observant. His attachment to Germany was as strong as his attachment to his Jewish heritage.
Soon after Germany’s defeat in 1918, Jews were scapegoated for the country’s humiliation. Angry crowds attacked Jews on the streets of Berlin, blaming them for food shortages, for inflation, for the war that Germany itself had started. And a young man in prison in 1924 began writing a book, Mein Kampf. He ranted:
The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. . . . If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men. . . . by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting the work of the Lord.2
Those who espouse conspiracy theories, with their superlatives, always suggest that the survival of humankind is at stake. And there is always an enemy, here the Bolshevik Jew. In that case it worked.
As soon as Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, the persecution of Jews began. The process was remarkably bureaucratic, systematic, and devious. In March 1933, the SS established Dachau as a camp for political prisoners; by 1938, it was converted into the first World War II concentration camp. Extensive propaganda spread theories of racial hygiene, which claimed Jews were genetically unfit. The firing of Jews from their jobs and the confiscation of Jewish property soon followed.
For Otto Frank, the decree separating Jewish and non-Jewish children in schools, which forced his elder daughter, Margot, to sit apart from her non-Jewish classmates, was the defining moment. He said he would not raise his daughters “like horses with blinkers, ignorant of the social landscape outside their small group.”3 He wanted his daughters to be part of the world, not isolated as inferiors, as pariahs, and by implication, he wanted his country to be part of the world, not isolated by an absurd sense of Aryan superiority.
Otto Frank was forty-four and thoroughly German—friends smiled at his Prussian self-restraint—but he was also prescient. In January 1933, he and his wife were having dinner with German friends when the announcement of Hitler’s election win came on the radio. He and Edith looked at each other in horror as the friends remarked, “Let’s see what the man can do!”4 For those friends, Hitler was the strongman who would bring order and make the country great again after the terrible Depression. They thought they could cope with his “eccentricities.”
That night, Otto and Edith discussed how to leave Germany. Otto had been watching the rise of nationalism and knew how dangerous it could be. He asked himself how he would be able to support his family, since flight would mean giving up everything. Where could they go? Much of his extended family had already left Germany. In 1932, his older brother, Herbert, had fled to Paris, where his cousin Jean-Michel Frank had become a talented designer working with artists such as Salvador Dalí. His younger brother, Robert, and Robert’s wife, Lottie, had emigrated to England in the summer of 1933 and opened an art dealership in a basement gallery on St. James’s Street in London. His sister, Helene, called Leni, and her husband, Erich Elias, lived in Basel, Switzerland, where Erich was a founding member of Opekta, a branch of the Frankfurt company Pomosin Werke, which produced pectin, the gelling agent in jam. In 1933, Otto’s mother, Alice Frank, had emigrated to Basel to join her daughter.
When Otto looked at his choices of countries, he saw that England and the United States were out. He told himself that he did not speak English well enough. How would he earn a living? He knew his siblings would help in whatever way they could, but they were also struggling, and he did not want to burden them even more. He thought that France might work. But then his brother-in-law Erich wrote that his company wanted to expand into the international market and asked Otto to open an Opekta office in Amsterdam.
Otto had spent time in Amsterdam in 1923 setting up a subsidiary branch of his father’s bank, Michael Frank & Sons. Unfortunately, the project failed within a year as the family faced bankruptcy, and Otto was forced to return to Germany. But he had liked the city, and the Dutch were known for their tolerance. Hadn’t they remained neutral in the First World War? In early August 1933, Otto Frank became a refugee. Packing his country in his suitcase with his shoes, he and his wife and daughters left Germany forever.