Victor Kugler

Victor Kugler (5 June 1900 – 14 December 1981) was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

In 1940, this allowed him to prevent the Nazi confiscation of Opekta and he accepted the directorship of the business, renamed Gies and Co, from Otto Frank.

Kugler and his first wife, Laura Maria Buntenbach-Kugler, lived in Hilversum during the war, a distance of about 26 kilometres (16 mi) from Amsterdam.

From July 1942 to August 1944, Kugler aided his colleagues Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl in the concealment of eight people, including Anne Frank, in a sealed-off annex in their office premises on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht.

In late 1943 Kugler was summoned to the local headquarters of the Nazi Party in his hometown of Hilversum, on the same night that the hiders on Prinsengracht were alarmed by an insistent ringing of the front doorbell.

In 1973, he received the Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous among the Nations and in 1977 the Canadian Anti-Defamation League awarded him a $10,000 prize in recognition of his assistance in the hiding of the Frank and van Pels families, as well as Fritz Pfeffer.