Posthumous Anne Frank citizenship bid fails

A bid to secure Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank posthumous Dutch citizenship has failed, almost 60 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp, officials said yesterday.

Anne Frank - whose family were betrayed to the Nazis while in hiding in German-occupied Amsterdam in 1944 - lost her German citizenship in 1941, years after fleeing persecution in Hitler's Germany. But she never became a Dutch citizen.

Dutch television network KRO said it had backed a bid to secure her posthumous citizenship after she was put on a list of 200 famous writers, painters, sports stars, politicians and scientists for its The Greatest Dutch Person series.

"As part of the programme... there was an effort to see if she could be awarded posthumous Dutch citizenship," KRO spokeswoman Monique Moeskops said. "The Justice Ministry said it was not possible."

Anne Frank - nominated by a panel of experts alongside 19th century painter Vincent van Gogh and soccer star Johan Cruyff for the series - was known not to have Dutch citizenship before she was nominated, the network said.

It said there was no question of removing her from the list. Dutch law does not allow citizenship to be awarded after someone's death, leaving Anne Frank stateless despite her deep ties to her adopted homeland and its canal-lined capital Amsterdam.

"Although we are very sympathetic to the request from KRO it's not legally possible to award posthumous Dutch citizenship," the Justice Ministry said.

Anne Frank wrote her diary in the secret annex of a canal side house in Dutch, noting in it that she wanted to become a Dutch citizen. But she was stateless when she died in 1945.

"We consider her to be Dutch. She wrote in Dutch, she thought in Dutch. She was as Dutch as can be," said Anne Frank House museum spokeswoman Patricia Bosboom. "She never actually was Dutch."

Born in Frankfurt in 1929, Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, weeks before it was liberated.

Her diary, first published in 1947 by her father Otto Frank, is the most widely read document to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed. It has been translated into more than 60 languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Otto Frank, who survived the Holocaust, became a Dutch citizen in 1949.

The house on the Prinsengracht where her family hid during World War Two was saved from demolition in 1957 to become one of the most popular museums in Amsterdam.

Around 200,000 people have already voted by email or phone in the Dutch poll to whittle down the list to a top 100 to be announced later this month.

Viewers will pick a winner from a shortlist next month after special programmes dedicated to each of the top 10 nominees.