Group campaigns to award Dutch nationality to Anne Frank posthumously

A Catholic television group has announced that it would campaign to posthumously award the Dutch citizenship to Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose diary of her time in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam made her a symbol of the Holocaust. Frank died aged 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany after she had been discovered and deported. She was stateless because she and her family had been stripped of their German nationality and never gained the Dutch passport. However, a spokesman of the justice ministry of the Netherlands said posthumous naturalization was not possible under Dutch law, but praised the initiative as a "very human initiative". Anne Frank herself repeatedly noted that she would like to gain Dutch citizenship.