AMSTERDAM — She was a thirteen-year-old girl who dreamed of becoming a writer, and the diary she kept while hiding from the Nazis in a cramped Amsterdam annex would become one of the most powerful testimonies of the twentieth century. But the question that still haunts historians, students, and readers around the world remains as stark today as it was in the ashes of 1945: how did the Nazis murder Anne Frank, and what exactly happened to her in the final months of her short life?
The answer lies in a chain of events that began long before the Gestapo knocked on the door of Prinsengracht 263. It began with an invasion, a set of laws designed to strip human beings of their rights, and a system of industrialized killing that swallowed more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews, including a teenage girl whose only crime was being born Jewish.
Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. Her sister Margot was three years older. The family lived in an assimilated community on the outskirts of Frankfurt, and the two girls enjoyed a happy childhood, playing almost every day in the garden with neighborhood children.
The Franks were liberal Jews, and their lives were comfortable and secure until January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.
The Nazi regime moved quickly to restrict the civil and human rights of Jewish people, establishing the first concentration camps and imprisoning political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anyone classified as dangerous. Faced with growing antisemitism and mounting business problems, Otto Frank decided to leave Germany. In September 1933 he founded a franchise for the Amsterdam branch of the Opekta company, which traded in pectin, a gelling agent used in making jam.
The rest of the family joined him soon after.
The Franks were among roughly 300,000 Jews who fled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. In Amsterdam, the family settled in and the girls enrolled in Dutch schools. They made new friends and, despite initial difficulties with the language, became excellent students, especially Margot.
For the parents, however, life was harder. Otto worked relentlessly to build his company and a new future for his family. The financial situation improved in 1938 when he started a second firm, Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices.
Watching the aggressive expansion of Nazi Germany, Otto even explored setting up a business in Great Britain and moving the family there, but the plan never materialized.
Then came the war. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the Second World War began. Anne was ten years old when German forces invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940.
The Luftwaffe used paratroopers to seize tactical points and support ground troops advancing across the country. The invasion was accompanied by heavy aerial bombardment of Rotterdam, culminating on May 14 with the destruction of the city’s entire historic center. When the Germans threatened to bomb Utrecht in the same manner, Dutch forces surrendered one day later.
Soon the Nazis occupied the whole country and began passing anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude Jewish people from society and destroy their livelihoods. Fifteen thousand Jews who had fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands between 1933 and 1939 were once again under Nazi domination. Among them was the teenage girl who would become the world’s most famous diarist.
The criminal regime from which the Franks had fled in 1933 had finally caught up with them in the country that had become their home.
The Netherlands became an occupied territory, and it did not take long for the Nazis to introduce sweeping anti-Semitic regulations. Jewish civil servants were fired. Jewish businesses and Jewish citizens themselves had to be registered.
Jews were barred from parks, cinemas, and non-Jewish shops. Many places became off-limits to Anne, who could no longer attend the same school as before, because all Jewish children were forced into separate Jewish schools. Under the new laws, Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses, and the Nazis forced Otto Frank to give up his companies.
Otto had managed to transfer control of his businesses to his employees just in time to keep them out of Nazi hands.
The situation deteriorated further in 1941, when Jewish men were arrested during raids and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths soon followed. Otto understood that the situation was critical and tried to emigrate to the United States and Cuba, but he never managed to obtain the necessary documents.
It was in the spring of 1942 that Otto Frank, anticipating the deportation of his own family, decided to set up a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. On April 29, 1942, the Nazis announced regulations forcing Jews in the Netherlands to wear a yellow badge in the form of a Star of David as a means of identification. Those caught without the badge after May 5, when the measure came into effect, were arrested and detained for six weeks.
The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps began in the summer of 1942, with transports regularly leaving the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands at the start of the Second World War, 107,000, including small children, were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, by September 1944. Of those 107,000, only 5,000 returned after the war.
Before going into hiding, June 12, 1942, was probably the last happy moment for the Frank family. It was the day Anne celebrated her thirteenth birthday and received her diary, the book that would one day make her famous and in which she would record her feelings and thoughts during the difficult times ahead. Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up to report for a so-called labor camp in Nazi Germany.
Knowing the fate of friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did not hesitate. The next morning they went into hiding to escape persecution.
In the secret annex, the family would spend 761 long days. After seven days, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family, Hermann, Auguste, and sixteen-year-old Peter, from whom Anne would receive her first kiss in the secret annex. In November they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend.
It is Anne’s diary that allows the world to know how the Frank family and four others lived for more than two years in a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase.
The people in hiding were completely dependent on six helpers, employees and friends of Anne’s father who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary for the eight people in the Secret Annex between 1942 and 1944. Writing helped Anne pass the time, and thanks to her diary the world can glimpse the everyday life of the people in hiding. Silence was essential, especially from 8:30 in the morning, when the men in the warehouse below the annex started their workday.
Any sound could cause suspicion. Mornings were devoted to reading, studying, and preparing lunch. At 12:30, when the warehouse workers went home to eat, a few of the helpers came up to the Secret Annex to have lunch with those in hiding.
Miep Gies usually stayed in the office to keep an eye on things.
The people in hiding could see other faces and listen to Radio Oranje, a program broadcast by the BBC in which Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who had escaped the invading German troops on May 13, 1940, and traveled to England, spoke thirty-four times during the course of the war. In the afternoon some of those in hiding took a nap while Anne wrote or studied. Then they had coffee, prepared dinner, and at 5:30, when the warehouse workers went home, they could leave the Secret Annex and spread out through the building.
They cooked dinner and took turns using the bathroom, just as they did in the morning before the warehouse workers started their day.
The situation became more dangerous after September 1942, when special units made up of Dutch collaborators began hunting for hiding Jews. An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two-thirds of them survived, and one-third were betrayed and discovered.
The eight people in the Secret Annex belonged to the latter group.
To this day, the exact reason for the police raid remains unknown, but the hiding period came to an abrupt end on August 4, 1944. Dutch police officers headed by SS officer Karl Silberbauer went to investigate a tip-off that Jews were hiding in the upstairs rooms at Prinsengracht 263. The hiding place had been discovered, and Otto and the others were arrested.
While Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money, he scattered the papers and notebooks. After the people from the Secret Annex were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, two other helpers gathered the documents before the annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. Anne’s diary and her other manuscripts survived.
From a prison in Amsterdam, the eight were sent to the Westerbork transit camp. They ended up in the prison barracks, and the men and women were separated. Otto had to work during the day, but in the evening he could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne.
After a few weeks, they were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their train was the last one to leave Westerbork for the extermination camp located in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The train journey took three horrible days, during which Anne and more than a thousand others were packed closely together in cattle wagons. There was little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked to see who would and who would not be able to perform heavy forced labor.
Around 350 people from Anne’s transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. While Otto ended up in a camp for men, Anne, Margot, and their mother Edith were sent to the labor camp for women. After the war, survivors described them as an inseparable trio.
Otto would never see them again.
In early November 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, while their parents stayed behind at Auschwitz. Edith died of weakness and disease on January 6, 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne reunited with her friend Nanette Blitz, who survived the Holocaust and described Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering. She added that Anne did not wish to live any longer because she believed both her parents were dead. Yet Anne also told her that she hoped to one day write a book based on her diary when the war ended.
Sanitary conditions at Bergen-Belsen were terrible. There was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945, when prisoners were sent on death marches from other concentration camps, about one-third of the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station because they were too weak and sick to walk.
On one occasion, out of a transport of 1,900 inmates, more than 500 arrived dead. The prisoners received almost no food during these death marches, and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either.
The camp was so overcrowded that during the freezing winter months the prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands. Due to starvation, thirst, and outbreaks of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate among prisoners was between 250 and 300.
In these terrible conditions, Anne and Margot contracted typhus as well. After the war, Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen who worked in the camp hospital and knew Anne, remembered seeing her and, in her own words, said that Anne was delirious, terrible, and burning up. She also brought Anne water with which to wash.
But Anne and her sister did not survive. After Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock, Anne died one day later. They both died in February 1945 from the effects of typhus, Margot first, Anne shortly afterward.
It was initially believed that the sisters died a few weeks before the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945. However, it was later revealed that they may have died as early as February. Anne and Margot are among the millions of victims who were sentenced to death by starvation, thirst, illness, ill treatment, or extermination with Zyklon B gas.
Yet one person from the Secret Annex survived. It was Otto, Anne’s father. He was liberated on January 27, 1945, when Soviet forces entered Auschwitz.
On the way back to the Netherlands he learned that his wife Edith had died, but he hoped that Anne and Margot had somehow survived. He returned to the liberated Netherlands on June 3, 1945, nine days before what would have been Anne’s sixteenth birthday. All hope was lost one month later when he learned of the death of his daughters.
Miep Gies, one of the helpers of the Secret Annex, passed Anne’s diary to him. After he found enough courage to read it, he was astonished by her writing. He also read about Anne’s dreams of becoming a writer and journalist and her intention to publish her stories about their life in the Secret Annex after the war ended.
In the end, Anne’s dreams came true. The first 3,000 copies of her book, published in 1947, introduced the world to her story. Since then the book has been translated into more than 70 languages.
In 1960, the hiding place that for two years was home to eight people trying to survive the atrocities of the criminal Nazi regime became a museum: the Anne Frank House. Today visitors can see her room, its walls brightened with the picture postcards and movie stars Anne collected, and view her original diary and other manuscripts she wrote until her arrest.
Historians note that the precise date of Anne’s death will likely never be known with certainty, and that the camp’s chaotic final months destroyed much of the documentation that might have settled the question. What is certain is the mechanism of her murder: she was not killed in a gas chamber, but was deported, starved, denied medical care, and left to die of typhus in an overcrowded, freezing barracks as part of a deliberate Nazi policy of extermination. The same system that murdered six million Jews murdered her.
Anne Frank, a teenage girl who perished in a death camp and whose only sin was that she was a Jew, has become a symbol that will live forever and will always remind the world of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred toward one another. Her diary, recovered from the floor of the ransacked annex and kept safe by a helper, remains one of the most widely read books on Earth, a quiet voice from a hidden room that continues to speak louder than the regime that tried to silence her.