Btselem: Ratting On Anne Frank Was Following The Law

“What the Frank family, from Otto on down, was doing was nothing less than a crime.”

Amsterdam, January 8 – The human rights organization Btselem defended the unknown persons who revealed Anne Frank’s hiding place in this city, saying that whoever did so was reporting a crime, which should be a good thing.

Organization spokeswoman Ayama Moser told reporters that the fate of the Frank family was of secondary concern, since the main principle to follow is the law that required all Dutch Jews to report to various train depots for deportation, a legal order that the Franks had flouted. Whoever eventually told the Gestapo they were hiding in a secret annex of an office building should be celebrated, not condemned, as the Frank family was in clear violation of the explicit law under the Nazi regime of the time.

“What the Frank family, from Otto on down, was doing was nothing less than a crime, since the law prohibited Jews from remaining in Amsterdam after they had been ordered to assemble at the train station for ‘resettlement’ in the east,” said Moser. “The law also prohibited the sheltering of such Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors, which means that the anonymous party who informed the authorities stopped a crime in progress and saved whoever was sheltering them from further violations of the law.”

Moser emphasized that the fate of the family was of secondary concern to the human rights group, if at all. “What happened to Anne and her family at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and elsewhere is an internal Nazi matter, and should not concern us,” she intoned. Anne was interned at Auschwitz, where others in her family were murdered, while she was eventually transferred to Belsen and died there in 1945 of typhus. Only the father, Otto, survived the war, and eventually published his daughter’s diary in edited form, a work that helped generations of people give a face and personality to one of the nearly six million victims of the Holocaust.

Other Israeli human rights activists seconded Moser’s assertions. “There is no reason for anyone to meddle in Nazi Germany’s internal affairs,” insisted Ezra Nawi. “Just as it should be fine for Palestinians to mete out torture and the death penalty for those who sell land to Jews, and commendable for us activists to inform on such sellers to Palestinian authorities, there is nothing of great human rights interest in the Frank case. I don’t see why anyone is making a big deal out of this.”

“Really, people should be focusing on the way the Nazis felt and how threatened they saw themselves, and maybe they won’t be so quick to condemn,” he suggested.