Opekta - History

History

The Opekta company was based in Cologne when Otto Frank, then residing in Germany, was appointed to aid their expansion into The Netherlands. Frank had considered moving his family there after the election of Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism, so he accepted the post and moved alone to Amsterdam to find accommodation for his family and premises for the company. He had briefly managed a large rival firm, Pomosin, which traded pectin to factories from the Dutch town of Utrecht but decided that retail trade would be more lucrative in the Dutch market than wholesale. His franchise for the Amsterdam branch of Opekta was established in September 1933.

Victor Kugler, an ex-colleague from Pomosin, came on board almost immediately to help run the company. The workforce was small; apart from a junior clerk, the only other employee was a secretary, who left a few months after the company started trading. She was replaced by Miep Gies, whose duties extended from the secretarial, to public relations and advertising. In 1938, she appeared in a promotional film to promote the Opekta product, which was used to demonstrate to consumers how easy it was to use in cooking. That year they were joined by two other employees, Hermann van Pels as an herb specialist and Johannes Kleiman as a bookkeeper. Bep Voskuijl, who was the administration manager when war broke out, had been taken on the previous year, 1937.

After the arrival of the German occupiers in 1940, the company was re-registered under the names of Jan Gies and Johannes Kleiman to prevent it from being confiscated as a Jewish-owned business. It moved from the Amsterdam address Singel 400 to new premises, Prinsengracht 263, and changed its name to Gies & Co. Although Otto Frank had to resign in December 1941, he continued to act as a silent partner, when he and Hermann van Pels and their families were forced into hiding in the upper rear rooms of the building in July 1942. Their two year confinement, which was aided by Kleiman, Kugler, Gies and Voskuijl, was famously chronicled by Otto Frank's youngest daughter, Anne, in a diary published in 1947.

Otto Frank retired as director of Opekta in 1953 and was succeeded by Johannes Kleiman, until Kleiman's death in 1959. The building at Prinsengracht 263 was sold to developers in 1954 and Opekta was given notice to vacate the premises. By this time, Anne Frank's diary had drawn readers to visit the premises and a successful campaign saved the building from demolition. Opekta left the building in 1955 and five years later it re-opened as a museum dedicated to the life and writings of Anne Frank.