Anne Frank's last living relative, the actor Buddy Elias, has died at the age of 89.
The Anne Frank Fonds, a charity founded in honour of the young Jewish diarist, said that in his lifetime, Elias advocated relentlessly for "civil society, dialogue and education against discrimination".
Having held a leading position at the charity, Elias was responsible for the publication of Anne Frank's diary - written while in hiding from the National Socialists in Amsterdam - and its adaptation as a series of plays and films.
A life-long promoter of Anne Frank's legacy, Buddy Elias spent years giving lectures and interviews about the Holocaust and about his cousin.
"The time will come when we will be people again and not just Jews," was one of his favourite sentences from Anne Frank's diary, he told the Germany's Der Spiegel magazine in 2012.
Born in 1925 in Frankfurt, Elias spent the first years of his life with his cousins Anne and Margot Frank. In 1931, his family emigrated to Switzerland.
Anne Frank frequently mentioned him in his diary. In one entry, she imagined how the two of them would go ice-skating together.
Frank's family fled to the Netherlands to escape the Nazis' persecution of Jews. After nearly two years in hiding, she was deported in 1944 and eventually died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before the end of World War II.
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