A Fight Over Anne Frank’s Fallen Tree

AMSTERDAM — From the window in the attic of her family’s hiding place in Amsterdam, Anne Frank could see the crown of an old chestnut tree growing in a neighbor’s garden. For two years, it was her only contact with nature.

The tree is gone now, having fallen during a storm in August, but its memory lives on — not in the diary but in a nasty dispute over its remains.

Board members of the Support Anne Frank Tree foundation, the group responsible for the tree, are incensed with the contractor they hired to build a metal brace meant to extend the sick tree’s life. They accuse him of botching the job and killing the tree, and then stealing the tree’s remains and leaving them to rot instead of distributing them to the Jewish museums and other institutions around the world that would like to have them. Perhaps inevitably, given the context and the hard feelings the matter has stirred, they have also accused him of acting like a Nazi....