THE HIDDEN LIFE OF OTTO FRANK

A troubling portrait of an iconic figure of the Holocaust and his sad, secretive life during and after the Nazi era.

Lee, a biographer of Otto’s daughter (Roses from the Earth, not reviewed, etc.) and associate of the Anne Frank Trust, brings due sympathy to bear on Otto, a German Jew who had served with distinction in the Kaiser’s army, succeeded in business, but was forced out of Nazi Germany into neighboring Holland. There he established a spice-importing firm, some of whose employees were members of the Dutch Nazi Party—many Netherlanders, Lee writes, were glad to join the crusade to purge Europe of Jews; whereas the survival rate for French Jews was something like 75 percent, only 25 percent of those in the Netherlands saw the fall of the Nazi regime. A Dutch Nazi acquaintance of one of those employees began to blackmail Otto, and for a time he kept the knowledge of Frank’s secret annex to himself until someone—Lee has a strong opinion on who that was—phoned the Gestapo to betray the Frank family. Amazingly, the blackmail resumed after the war and Otto’s relocation to Switzerland. What was the basis of thug Tonny Ahlers’s hold over Otto? Lee suggests that it had to do with Frank’s collaboration with the occupying Wehrmacht, to which he sold pectin and other materiel; adultery may have figured into the matter, too, for Ahlers’s acquaintance suspected that his wife had been having an affair with Frank. Lee does not condemn Frank, though she points to some strange choices he made while editing his daughter’s famous diaries for publication, as well as his approval of a German translation that altered lines such as “only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German” to “all civilized languages . . . but softly!”—all of which brought Frank fortune, and Ahlers too.

A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.