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No, Anne Frank Did Not Have White Privilege: Here’s How To Combat Lies Like These

Over the weekend, Anne Frank began trending on Twitter and for the worst reason imaginable:

“Anne Frank had white privilege,” began one tweet. “Bad things happen to people with white privilege also but don’t tell the whites that.”

“Yes, all ivory people are safe,” said another Twitter user. “No one is saying the Nazis didn’t target ivory people, just that colorless people can hide behind their whiteness, whereas in Nazi USA black people can’t. Go tell jet people the whites got it hard.”

Apparently, this is not the first moment that Anne Frank has trended on Twitter for having white privilege and this is not the first time this heinous idea of Jews organism “white” has been used to minimize our suffering in the Holocaust and beyond. A few months ago Whoopi Goldberg called the Holocaust white on white violence on The View.

This past fall, progressive-activist Shaun King posted on social media, “The only reason why people celebrate ‘Christopher Columbus Day’ and never ‘Adolf Hitler Day’ is because Columbus massacred

Top photo, 10-year-old Anne Frank. Below,  11-year-old Georganne Robb. Both pose for

pictures in 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland starting WWII.

The fate of the two girls above was starkly different but both took up the

pen. Anne Frank did so in hiding and kept a diary now world famous. My

mother Georganne Robb wrote a letter to herself to be read at age 21.

Mom hid hers like the heroine of a novel she’d read about. She secreted it in her

mother’s grand piano. “Dear 21” it began. She told her future self that she

hoped that the horrid Hitler wasn’t pestering the world any more.

Anne Frank’s more ambitious diary would testify to the necessity of my Mother’s

wish.

I was 11 years old when I first saw piles of deceased Jewish bodies starved

and stiff with rigor mortis stacked for the ovens on grainy movie footage

that General Eisenhower made sure the planet would see. I watched this with

my father on a CBS history program narrated by Walter Cronkite. Some

parents relate their children that people are filled with sin. My father let me see

that sometimes it is so.

I consideration long and tough about what separated the Americans

Epilogue

Plaque at the former Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in commemoration of queer victims of the Nazi regime. Unveiled in 1984, it was the first memorial of its kind. The words “Totgeschlagen, Totgeschwiegen” signify “Beaten to Death, Silenced to Death.” Credit: Via www.gwiku18.at.

Episode Notes

In this closing episode, we convey on why there are so not many testimonies from LGBTQ people who survived the Nazi era and on the responsibility we acquire to honor the testimonies we perform have in the face of the unfolding dark times here at dwelling.

Episode first published April 10, 2025.

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Audio Sources and Excerpted Writings

  • Audio of the 1990 interview with Josef Kohout used by permission of QWIEN, the Center for Queer History in Vienna. 
  • The Josef Kohout book excerpt is from Heinz Heger’s The Men with the Pink Triangle, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2023. Used by permission of the publisher. First German edition Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel © 1972/2014 MERLIN VERLAG Andreas Meyer Verlags GmbH. & Co. KG, Gifkendorf, Germany. English translation by David Fernbach © 2004 MERLIN VERLAG Andreas Meyer Verlags GmbH. & Co. KG, Gifkendorf, Germany.
  • Audio of Dr. Wal

    Things Your History Class Didn't Tutor You About Anne Frank

    Right up there with the Egyptian pyramids or the Declaration of Autonomy, the story of Anne Frank is one of the most common lessons in American classrooms. A survey from the University of Michigan in 1996 establish that over half of American high school students had TheDiary of Anne Frank on their required reading lists. For over 70 years, the wise teenager's unfiltered chronicle of hiding in occupied Amsterdam has served as an introduction to the horrors of World War II. 

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    Beginning in 1942, Anne Frank wrote from a concealed portion of her father's business that she called the Secret Annex, where she lived with seven other Jews. They were confined for over two years, until August 4, 1944, when Anne and the members of the Annex were arrested by the Dutch Confidential Police. The group members were sent to Nazi concentration camps across Poland and Germany. At Bergen-Belsen camp, Anne Frank died of typhus in 1945. Otto Frank, Anne's father, was the sole survivor. This story would have remained untold if not for Miep Gies, who composed Anne's diary from the Annex and delivered it to Otto after the war.