Introduction

In a speech before the German law-making body called the Reichstag in January 1939, Adolf Hitler declared his desire to destroy all the Jews in Europe. Later that year, the German army invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Before the end of the war in 1945, six million Jews from across Europe would be systematically murdered in Hitler's "Final Solution."

Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl provides an intensely personal view of a small group of German Jews in Amsterdam during that time, living in hiding in an attempt to escape the genocide perpetrated by the German Nazi party and its allies in Holland. This book's historical and psychological importance is immeasurable; it provides a detailed account of the strategies the Frank family and their friends employed while...