BERLIN — Police say a sapling cloned from the tree that lifted Anne Frank’s spirits while she hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam has been felled and stolen from outside a school in Frankfurt bearing the name of the Jewish teenage diarist.
Spokesman Manfred Fuellhardt said Wednesday the 8-foot tree was felled over the weekend in the grounds of the Anne Frank School.
Anne Frank, who was born in Frankfurt and died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, made several references to the original chestnut tree outside her home in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she hid indoors.
It blew over in a storm in 2010 but scores of cloned saplings have been planted around the world, including the one donated to the Frankfurt school in 2008.