The Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin was founded in 1998. Through its exhibition and educational work the centre not only commemorates the fate of the young Jewish girl, but it also calls into memory the crimes of National Socialism.
History
For over two years, Anne Frank and her family hid in the rear building of a town house in Amsterdam in the hope of escaping persecution by the German occupying forces. In August 1944, the family was denounced, arrested by the Gestapo and soon afterwards deported. Anne Frank, her mother and her sister were deported to Auschwitz. In October 1944, she was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus in March 1945, aged 15. Her father, Otto Frank, was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, he made efforts to publish his daughter's diary, which soon became famous all over the world.
Victims
Anne Frank's exact date of death is not known. She probably died of typhus at the beginning of March 1945, shortly before the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany.
Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war.
In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives.
Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals.
The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.
Remembrance
The Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin, founded in 1998, is the German partner organisation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The centre in Berlin was established by a support association, which had been founded to supervise an exhibition about Anne Frank in the mid-1990s in Berlin. In 2002, the centre moved into the historic »Haus Schwarzenberg« building in Rosenthaler Straße in Berlin's Mitte district. Located there today are also the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt and the »Silent Heroes« Memorial Centre.
The centre focuses both on history education and on working to overcome anti-Semitism and discrimination. The concept primarily addresses children, youths and families. The Anne Frank Zentrum has developed various travelling exhibitions in connection on these topics, and they have been shown all over Germany. The educationalists at the centre are themselves trained youths.
In November 2018, a new permanent exhibit »All About Anne« was set up as an an interactive learning venue in »Haus Schwarzenberg«. Through the life of Anne Frank and her diary the visitors receive a personal access to the history of the Holocaust. The exhibition also focuses on the subject of anti-Semitism in past and present.
Possibilities
Permanent exhibition »All About Anne«, educational programme for school groups and youth groups, thematic city walks and project days, readings, meetings with eyewitnesses, film screenings, lectures, touring exhibitions
Open
Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., registered groups from 9 a.m.
