Buddy Elias, Cousin of Anne Frank and Guardian of Her Legacy, Dies at 89

Buddy Elias, the closest living relative of Anne Frank and an ardent guardian of her legacy, died on Monday at his home in Basel, Switzerland — a house whose attic yielded a cache of long-forgotten letters from Anne and her family that formed the basis of a recent book. He was 89.

His death was announced by the Anne Frank Fonds, a charitable fund in Basel begun by Anne’s father, Otto. At his death, Mr. Elias was the fund’s president, a post he had held since 1996.

Mr. Elias was Anne’s first cousin, four years older than she. An actor, comedian and professional ice skater, he lectured worldwide on the Frank family and on the mission of the fund, which supports social and cultural projects centered on tolerance.

A childhood playmate of Anne and her older sister, Margot, Mr. Elias is mentioned fondly in Anne’s diary, which begins in 1942, just before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and ends in 1944, before they were discovered and arrested by the Gestapo.

Anne died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, shortly before the end of the war; Margot also died there. Their mother, Edith, died in Auschwitz.

Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz, established the Anne Frank Fonds in 1963. He died in 1980.

First published in the Netherlands in 1947, Anne’s diary has sold tens of millions of copies in scores of languages and has inspired well-received adaptations for the stage, film and television.

One of the chief functions of the Anne Frank Fonds is to control the copyrights to Anne’s writings, including the diary. As its president, Mr. Elias was called upon to say yea or nay — and it was quite often nay — to proposed works, from novels to stage plays to musicals, that sought to use Anne’s words. (As was widely reported, he also once stopped a Spanish company from marketing Anne Frank bluejeans.)

Mr. Elias wound up adding to the Franks’ literary legacy himself after his wife, Gerti, while cleaning out the attic of their house in 2001, came across a trove of letters, postcards and photographs — some 6,000 items in all — sent to the Eliases by the Franks, including the young Anne. The house had long been in Mr. Elias’s family, and the material had been carefully put away by his mother, Helene Frank Elias, who was Otto’s sister.

“On July 5, 1942, Otto Frank sent a postcard to us telling us that we would have to understand that we could not correspond anymore,” Mr. Elias recalled in a 2008 interview. “We knew then that they were going to hide. But we had no idea where. And from then on, there was no contact anymore.”

It took Mr. and Mrs. Elias more than two years to go through everything. The material ultimately formed the basis of a narrative nonfiction book, “Treasures From the Attic” (also titled “Anne Frank’s Family”), written by Mirjam Pressler with Mrs. Elias. It was first published in English in 2011.

Mr. Elias was also instrumental in supplying material for a 2003 exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The exhibition featured examples of all of Anne’s writing, including her essays and short stories, many of them never before seen in public. (Her full literary output was published that year as part of “The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition.”)

Bernhard Elias was born on June 2, 1925, in Frankfurt, where the Franks also lived. As a boy, he often visited the Frank children, putting on puppet shows and playing hide-and-seek.

“Anne was always good at hiding,” Mr. Elias told CNN.com in 2012.

In 1929, Mr. Elias’s father, a merchant, was transferred to his company’s Swiss office. Two years later, Buddy and his mother joined him in Basel, where they remained for the duration of the war and beyond. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Anne’s father moved his branch of the family to Amsterdam, which the Nazis occupied in 1940.

As a young man, Mr. Elias spent more than a decade working for Holiday on Ice, with which he toured the world as a comic skater. He later had an extensive career in film, television and theater, much of it in Germany, before returning to Basel in the 1980s.

His films released in the United States include the Holocaust drama “My Mother’s Courage” (1995), directed by Michael Verhoeven, in which Mr. Elias plays a rabbi.

Mr. Elias’s survivors include his wife; two sons, Patrick and Oliver; and five grandchildren.

To the end of his life, Mr. Elias recalled a Frank family letter sent to his mother in 1945, just after the war’s end. The letter was from Otto, who informed Mr. Elias’s mother that he had survived but Edith had not. He was determined, he wrote, to locate Margot and Anne.

“All my hopes are for the children,” Otto wrote. “I cling to the firm belief that they are still alive and that we will be together soon.”

CREDIT: THE NEW YORK TIMES MARGALIT FOX