Fotoeins Fotografie

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Posts from the ‘Jewish-Euro History’ category

Past and present histories of Jewish communities and culture in AT, DE

Frankfurt am Main: Frank Family Center at the JMF

Above: “It’s a miracle I’m still alive”, Otto Frank. Photo, 17 Jun 2023 (X70).

Familie Frank Zentrum, Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt

Frank Family Centre, Jewish Museum Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main is a city I’ve visited countless times since 2001, but I hadn’t known until recently that Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were born in Frankfurt am Main, or that their parents, Otto and Edith, had lived in Frankfurt for almost ten years before moving their family to Amsterdam in early-1934. I’ve put together a list of places and traces the Frank family spent and left in Frankfurt am Main.

Here I cast light on the Frank Family Center (FFC), both memorial and historical record of the European-Jewish Frank family which was added to the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt (JMF) in 2020. Having begun in 2012, the Frank Family Center brings together an extensive collection of material belonging to the Frank-Elias families. The archive includes photographs, official documents, hand-written letters, art, books, household items, and furniture. The items provide a glimpse into the lives of the Frank- and Elias-families across Europe; there’s happy times, catastrophe and loss, and the strength gained in survival. The FFC has been designed for the public to view a part of the archive on permanent display in an open museum setting, as well as for research parties to pursue various avenues of academic inquiry.

Upon entry into the space, the first panel includes the following introductory text which I’ve modified to improve clarity.

The Jewish Museum Frankfurt holds a large number of objects belonging to Anne Frank’s family who had lived in Frankfurt for several generations.

Between 1929 and 1933, the entire family departed Frankfurt am Main and established new lives in Basel, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. In 1942 Amsterdam, Otto and Edith Frank, along with their daughters, Margot and Anne, went into hiding to escape imminent deportation. In August 1944, the secret location was revealed to the authorities, and the family was detained, and deported to Auschwitz. Of the four in the family, only Otto Frank survived, who subsequently devoted the rest of his life to acquainting and educating the world with the diary of his murdered daughter, Anne.

In 1933, Anne’s paternal grandmother Alice Frank sold their home in Frankfurt am Main, and moved to Basel to join her daughter, Leni Elias, and her family. Alice was able to take some of the family belongings with her from Frankfurt to Switzerland, including personal photos and documents. Her moving boxes also contained furniture, porcelain, silverware, and paintings. The family’s heritage as documents of their previous lives in Frankfurt was carefully preserved in Basel.

This room of the Frank Family Center provides an introduction to this family heritage and to the history of the Frank and Elias families.

( Click here for images and more )

Frankfurt & the Franks: Anne, Edith, Margot, Otto

Above: The Frank family in happier times; seen left-to-right are Margot, Otto, Anne, and Edith, respectively. Display at the Frank Family Centre at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, 17 Jun 2023 (X70).

I hadn’t realized how long an impression would last, decades after having read in high-school the diary of a young girl stuck in hiding for years. Much later down the line and standing in front of a house in a quiet neighbourhood in a German city, I could almost hear the laughter of children in the backyard and the gentle rebuke of a mother to one of her daughters, years before one of the girls ever considered writing her thoughts down into a book.

The story of Anne Frank and her family are well known. Her father and businessman Otto Frank moved his family from Frankfurt am Main to Amsterdam in 1934 to escape increasing Nazi discrimination against Jews. Otto survived capture, deportation, and time in the camps; but his wife and two daughters did not. After liberation in 1945, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and wrote letters to relatives in Basel. He learned how the diary written by his daughter Anne had been carefully hidden; reading her daughter’s thoughts would change the remaining course of his life. In the early-1950s, he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to be closer to his sister’s family. He and his extended family spent time and energy for the rest of their lives dedicated to translation efforts and the distribution of Anne’s diary as a document of family memory, world history, and essential education; and to the collection of memories and belongings of lost family members. Otto died in 1980, and is buried in Birsfelden cemetery, just east of Basel proper.

Much of the story has been written about the Frank family’s time in Amsterdam, but I hadn’t been aware of the family roots in Frankfurt am Main, despite my countless times passing through and multiple stays in the city since 2001 when I moved to Heidelberg. I wanted to learn about their time in Frankfurt am Main, before the family left for Aachen and Amsterdam in 1933–1934. What follows below is my examination of some of the places and traces left behind by the Frank family in Frankfurt am Main.

ANNELIES Marie Frank, daughter: b/✵ 12 June 1929, Frankfurt am Main – d/✟ March 1945, Bergen-Belsen.
EDITH Frank (née Holländer), mother: b/✵ 16 January 1900, Aachen – d/✟ 6 January 1945, Auschwitz.
MARGOT Betti Frank, daughter: b/✵ 16 February 1926, Frankfurt am Main – d/✟ March 1945, Bergen-Belsen.
OTTO Heinrich Frank, father: b/✵ 12 May 1889, Frankfurt am Main – d/✟ 19 August 1980, Birsfelden.

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Nuremberg: The Landmark Trials in Room 600, 80 years on

Above: In front of the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) at the corner of Benjamin-Ferencz-Platz and Fürther Strasse in Nuremberg, Germany.

On 20 November 1945, an extraordinary trial got under way in the German city of Nuremberg, only six months after the Nazis surrendered to the Allied nations in World War 2. For the first time in modern history, an assembled tribunal of international judges presided over trials against top leaders of a nation for crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to carry out these crimes.

What is called the “Nuremberg Trials” refers primarily to the “Major War Criminals Trial” where over 20 leaders in German Nazi high command were put on trial before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) from November 1945 to October 1946. The IMT consisted of judges from each of the four Allied nations: Great Britain, France, United States, and the U.S.S.R. Subsequently from late-1946 to 1949, 12 additional trials were held before American military tribunals to uncover and highlight the extent and depth to which additional leaders in German society supported the Nazi dictatorship.

“… The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”

– Opening statement by Robert H. Jackson, U.S. chief prosecutor, on the second day of the Nuremberg Trials (Major War Criminals Trial), 21 November 1945; see Sources below.

( Click here for images and more )

25T85 The Nuremberg Trials: Courtroom 600

E84, N02.

There’s a courtroom I’ve wanted to visit for a very long time. On return to Nuremberg after 22 years, I’m taking full advantage of the opportunity.

After the conclusion of World War 2, the four Allied powers agreed to put key Nazi perpetrators on trial which began in November 1945 and ended in October 1946. The Nuremberg Trials became the first international war crimes tribunal in history.

The famous venue, Schwurgerichtssaal 600 (Courtroom 600), remained an active courtroom at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice until 2020. The courtroom is now a part of the museum Memorium Nuremberg Trials housed in the same building.

On 21 November 1945, Robert H. Jackson, the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, gave his opening statement, which remains as one of the most influential speeches about the emergent principles and applications of international criminal law in the post-war era. His statement began with:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish, have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.

• US National WW Museum: 2020 article.

• Robert H Jackson Center: YouTube.

I received neither support nor compensation for the present piece. I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 31 July 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

25T52 Berlin-Wannsee: 2 key places of remembrance

E51, B46.

On the train southwest from central Berlin to Potsdam, there are many reasons to stop in Wannsee on a bright summer day, including the many nice big (richly decorated) villas in the city district, a memorial to Heinrich Kleist, a small cemetery where Hermann Helmholtz and Emil Fischer are buried, as well as boating clubs and the Strandbad beach next to Wannsee lake.

But I’m here for the lakeside villa purchased by German Impressionist painter Max Liebermann and his wife Martha, and another villa just down the street whose importance lies in total infamy.

Liebermann-Villa

Max Liebermann was an important late 19th-century artist, contributing to the German Impressionism movement of the time. Liebermann had by 1910 a villa constructed by Wannsee lake for their family summer getaway from Berlin. By the 1930s, he like many suffered discrimination and persecution by the National Socialists because of his Jewish heritage. He died in 1935, and in 1940, the National Socialists forced the rest of the family to sell the villa. Since 2006, the refurbished villa reopened as a museum, thanks to the Max Liebermann Society.

Mounted on the fence is a Berlin memorial plaque dedicated to Max Liebermann. The 1909-1910 building was by architect Paul O.A. Baumgarten.
Front of the villa at centre-background, garden shed at left is now the museum’s entrance portal, and the “front garden” is in the foreground.
Renovated upstairs with barrelled ceiling; this used to be Max Liebermann’s work space and now it’s exhibition space.
Facing west to the back, which is now patio seating for the museum’s café. Wannsee lake is behind me.
2025 eastward view of the back garden, towards Wannsee lake. The villa is behind me.
1921 painting by Max Liebermann: “View of the garden at Wannsee, looking east”, oil on canvas.

Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz

On 20 January 1942, 15 high-ranked SS-officers in various aspects of Nazi governance met in another lakeside villa just down the road from the Liebermann summer house. In a lunch meeting lasting about 90 minutes, the 15 decided the fate of millions, organizing pre-existing extrajudicial-killing groups into the logistics and industrialization of mass murder of European Jewish men, women, and children. Since 1992, the renovated building is both memorial and education site, with an active archive and library on the upper floor.

Sign in front of entrance to “Memorial site: House of the Wannsee Conference”.
The villa at Am Großen Wannsee 56-58. Architect Paul O.A. Baumgarten had this villa built in 1915 for businessman Ernst Marlier.
This is the former dining room where the 1942 meeting took place. Today, the memorial site has displays of the meeting, its participants, and a complete display of “The Protocol”, or minutes of the meeting.
Page 1 of “The Protocol” (minutes of the meeting): German at left, English translation at right. Numbers in dark blue correspond to participants. The Moiré pattern is caused by direct imaging of an illuminated display.
Page 2 of “The Protocol” (minutes of the meeting): German at left, English translation at right. Numbers in dark blue correspond to participants. The arrow points to wording with the word/phrase “Endlösung” or “final solution”; the euphemisms fly fast and thick. The Moiré pattern is caused by direct imaging of an illuminated display.
The idyllic view out back onto Wannsee lake.

I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 28 June 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.