1938 anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany

The 1938 anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany form an early landmark in Anne Frank’s account of persecution: they drove her maternal uncles to flee Germany and brought her elderly grandmother into the family home. In the diary’s wider arc, the pogroms foreshadow the escalating restrictions and forced displacement that would shape the family’s life in the Netherlands, while helping frame Anne’s reflections on Jewish identity, safety, and belonging.

Family Flight and Refuge

Anne recalls that relatives in Germany were already suffering under Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws. After the pogroms of 1938, her mother’s two brothers left Germany and found refuge in North America. The family’s response to persecution was thus not abstract: it involved separation, flight, and the search for safety across the Atlantic.

Anne’s elderly grandmother, then seventy-three, came to live with the family. Her arrival is recorded alongside the uncles’ departure, making the family’s changing circumstances visible through both movement away from danger and the gathering of relatives under one roof. Anne later remembered her grandmother with affection, and the family lit her candle at Anne’s 1942 birthday celebration.

From Persecution to Daily Restrictions

The diary links the earlier pogroms to a worsening climate for Jews in the Netherlands after the German occupation in May 1940. Anne recounts a long series of restrictions: Jews had to wear a yellow star, surrender bicycles, shop only during specified hours, attend Jewish schools, and avoid public transport, entertainment, sports facilities, and visits to Christian homes. The cumulative force of these rules narrowed ordinary life, turning identity into a basis for constant regulation.

In July 1942, after Margot received a call-up notice, the Frank family advanced its planned move into hiding by ten days. The family had already been moving furniture and clothing out of the apartment for months; the hiding place was in Otto Frank’s office building. The sudden acceleration connects the long progression from anti-Jewish measures to the immediate threat that prompted concealment.

Witness to Displacement and Danger

Inside the Secret Annex, Anne learned more about the fate of people outside from Fritz Pfeffer, who described raids, deportations, and families being taken away. Her account conveys both the limits and the force of this testimony: the hidden residents were protected from immediate exposure, yet the news made their safety inseparable from concern for friends and others they could no longer help.

She also wrote of people being dragged from their homes and families being separated, and of Dutch Christian men being sent to Germany for forced labor. The diary places these reports beside the Annex residents’ own guarded routines and their awareness that their relative safety did not remove them from the larger persecution and war.

Identity, Belonging, and the Diary’s Afterlife

The pogroms’ significance in the diary extends beyond the immediate story of flight. In a later reflection on Jewish identity, Anne insists that Jews had been set apart and deprived of rights, yet imagines a future in which they might again be people and not only a persecuted group. Her account holds together the violence of imposed classification and the possibility of affirming Jewish identity on one’s own terms.

That tension also shapes her attachment to the Netherlands. Anne writes that she loves the country and had hoped it would become a fatherland after she lost her own, a hope she still holds despite the persecution around her. The early history of flight from Germany therefore resonates in her later question of whether refuge can become belonging.

The diary itself became part of the postwar record of occupation and persecution. After hearing Gerrit Bolkestein’s appeal for eyewitness letters and diaries, Anne began revising her writing with publication in mind while continuing her original diary. Otto Frank later combined material from her original and revised versions for publication, and the expanded definitive edition restored additional passages. The account of the 1938 pogroms consequently appears not as an isolated historical note, but within a testimony that traces how persecution entered family memory, daily life, and hopes for the future.