Want to learn the ideas in The Diary of a Young Girl better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
Video Summaries of The Diary of a Young Girl
We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on The Diary of a Young Girl, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Anne Frank.
1-Page Summary of The Diary of a Young Girl
Overview
Anne Frank’s diary was written during the toughest years of World War II. To understand why that war happened, we must go back to World War I and its aftermath.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany was a powerful country in Europe. It lost much territory after World War One and had to pay reparations as punishment for starting the war. The Germans were humiliated by their defeat and angry at their politicians for signing a treaty that made them pay so much money. They faced runaway inflation during this time because they needed to raise money quickly to pay off some of these debts.
In the 1920s, multiple political parties were formed in Germany in hopes of destroying the republic and hated Versailles treaty. One of those parties was the National Socialist German Workers Party–also known as Nazi party. The Nazis promised to redistribute wealth and create full employment through a totalitarian state. The man who rose to power at that time was an Austrian named Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was an influential leader. He became a skilled orator and his speeches were inspiring to people, especially the German people. However, he wasn’t as interested in socialism anymore and focused more on race hatred. He blamed other races for Germany’s problems (e.g., Slavs) and Jews were a special target of hate because they produced things such as communism, inflation, Christianity that had “infected” German society. On the other hand, Hitler believed Germans were the strongest Aryan race with pure bloodlines that deserved to rule over all others who should be their slaves.
At first, the Nazis were small and relatively ineffectual. But after depression began to weaken Germany, people began to listen to Hitler. He eventually developed a following so great that he was appointed chancellor of Germany by Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. From this position, Hitler bullied other members of the government until they dissolved themselves and granted him total power over Germany. He established a totalitarian state and ruled by decree, allowing propaganda to flood the country while outlawing all political parties except for his own Nazi party. To enforce his power, he used teams of secret police called Gestapo who were well-schooled in torture methods; thus no one dared oppose him.
In September 1939, Hitler launched the war he had been planning for a while. He quickly conquered Poland and Denmark in 1940. England and France declared war on Germany after they realized that appeasement would not stop Hitler this time. However, they were soon defeated by Germany’s sustained bombing campaign over London, which led to their surrender in June 1940. In June 1941, Hitler invaded Russia with his army and attacked them relentlessly until his death in 1945.
Hitler’s army spread poison of anti-Semitism and race hatred. They implemented anti-Jewish pogroms in all occupied countries, where Jews were not allowed to marry or work with non-Jews, wear a yellow star in public, segregate into their own schools and businesses, banned from many professions and public facilities, as well as persecuted the non-Jewish citizens of every country they went into. Work camps made thousands of people virtual slaves; the German police had rights over life and death over populations that did not agree with the German program.
Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews, as if they were pests. He had German police officers murder Jewish civilians in occupied territories. In addition, he rounded up millions of Jews and sent them to concentration camps in Poland and Germany where they worked until exhaustion and then died from diseases or being gassed, shot, or left to die. Hitler killed over six million Jews by the end of World War Two while another six million civilians (especially Slavs) were also murdered under his regime.
