New research has shattered one of the most enduring assumptions about Anne Frank’s final days, revealing that the young diarist died weeks earlier than historians had believed for more than seventy years, and long before Allied forces could reach her. The Anne Frank House confirmed in 2015 that Anne and her sister Margot perished in February 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, not in March as had been widely accepted since the end of the Second World War. The finding means the sisters died farther from liberation than the world had long assumed, extinguishing the comforting notion that freedom had been only weeks away when their lives ended.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank. Her older sister Margot arrived three years earlier. The family lived comfortably in a middle-class Jewish household, and Otto, a decorated German officer from the First World War, believed his family’s roots in the country ran deep enough to weather any political storm.
That confidence would prove tragically misplaced as the Nazi Party tightened its grip on German society.
As anti-Semitism intensified throughout the 1930s, the Franks made the decision to leave Germany for the Netherlands. Otto established a business in Amsterdam selling pectin and spices, and the family settled into a new life. Anne attended a Montessori school while Margot enrolled in a public institution.
Friends from that period remember Anne as a sociable but occasionally shy child with an unmistakable talent for writing, a gift she often kept hidden from those around her.
Even at a young age, Anne filled notebooks with stories and observations, refusing to tell anyone what she had written. Her parents encouraged both daughters to read widely, and Otto maintained a substantial library at home. Those early habits of private composition would eventually produce one of the most influential documents of the twentieth century, a diary that has since been printed more than twenty million times and translated into dozens of languages.
The Franks sensed the danger closing in around them and made repeated attempts to emigrate to the United States or Britain. Those efforts failed, trapped by restrictive immigration quotas and bureaucratic obstacles that sealed the fate of countless European Jews. When war erupted in September 1939, the family was still in the Netherlands.
When German forces invaded in May 1940, there was nowhere left to run.
Occupation brought a cascade of punitive measures against the Jewish community. Anne and Margot were forced to transfer to a Jewish school, and Otto lost control of his business. Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David at all times, observe strict curfews, and surrender their bicycles, radios, and access to public spaces.
The family attempted once more to flee to America and was denied again.
In desperation, Otto and his Jewish business partner, Hermann van Pels, along with several trusted employees, constructed a hiding place behind the firm’s offices at Prinsengracht 263. The annex was a multi-story warren of small rooms concealed behind a movable bookshelf. To create the impression they had fled the country, the family left their apartment in disarray and Otto planted a note suggesting they had escaped to Switzerland.
On July 6, 1942, the Franks went into hiding, one day after Margot received an official summons to report to a German work camp. They were soon joined by Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste, and their son Peter, and later by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. Eight people in total would share the cramped quarters for two years, never venturing outside, never making a sound that might betray them to the warehouse workers below.
Before disappearing, Anne gave possessions to a neighbor for safekeeping: a tea set, a book, a tin of marbles, and the family cat. These small remnants of an interrupted childhood would survive the war. Around the same time, for her thirteenth birthday, Anne received a red-and-white checkered diary.
In her first entry, she wrote that she hoped the journal would become a great source of comfort and support.
The diary became far more than a pastime. In entry after entry addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, Anne documented the claustrophobia of the annex, the grinding fear of discovery, and the ordinary frustrations of adolescence unfolding in extraordinary circumstances. In March 1944, she wrote that the nicest part was being able to write down all her thoughts and feelings, adding that otherwise she would absolutely suffocate.
Life in hiding demanded relentless silence. During working hours, the eight residents whispered, walked on stockinged feet, and refrained from flushing toilets for fear the plumbing would be heard below. Tensions flared in the confined space.
Anne clashed with her mother, bickered with the van Pelses, and wrestled with her own shifting emotions as she moved through her teenage years in isolation.
She found unexpected companionship in Peter van Pels, the only other adolescent in the annex. The two developed a tentative romance, and Anne experienced her first kiss. Yet even in her diary she questioned whether her feelings were genuine or merely the product of confinement and desperation.
Her relationship with Margot, by contrast, deepened considerably, and Anne recorded in January 1944 that her sister had become a real friend rather than a distant figure.
A network of trusted helpers on the outside sustained the group, smuggling in food, clothing, and news of the war. As supplies grew scarcer, so did hope. The helpers kept spirits up while fully aware that discovery would mean arrest or death for everyone involved.
When word arrived that the Dutch education minister in exile had called on citizens to preserve diaries and documents, Anne began rewriting her journal with the title The Secret Annex, hoping it might be published after the war.
She never finished the project. On August 4, 1944, German security police and Dutch collaborators stormed the annex and arrested all eight residents. Two of their helpers were also taken into custody.
To this day, no one knows with certainty who betrayed them. Investigators have pursued multiple theories over the decades, including a stockroom manager named Willem van Maaren and a man named Tony Ahlers, both of whom have been named as possible informants.
One theory has proved especially painful. According to a biography of Bep Voskuijl, one of the annex’s most loyal helpers, her sister Nelly had collaborated with the Germans and disapproved of the family’s efforts to shelter Jews. The SS officer who allegedly received the tip-off by telephone reportedly described the caller as having the voice of a young woman.
The mystery remains officially unsolved, a wound that has never fully closed for the families involved.
The eight residents were transported to the Westerbork transit camp and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland. Upon arrival, they were stripped of their clothing, their hair was shaved, and numbers were tattooed on their arms. They were reduced to statistics in a machinery of genocide.
Of the 1,049 Jews who arrived on that transport, 549 were sent immediately to the gas chambers. Anne and the others were spared that fate, at least temporarily.
Because Auschwitz was divided by gender, Anne, Margot, and Edith were separated from Otto almost immediately. The women were assigned to punishing labor, hauling heavy stones and grass mats as punishment for having evaded deportation by hiding. Anne believed her father had been killed.
On one occasion she obtained extra bread and shared it with her mother and sister, but the bread was spoiled, and all three contracted scabies and were sent to an infirmary.
Conditions in the infirmary were grim, with rodents running freely and little medicine available. Edith rationed her own food to give her daughters more strength. Because of the scabies outbreak, a scheduled transfer for Anne to another labor camp was canceled, and Margot and Edith remained with her.
Later that month, however, the two sisters were selected for transport to Bergen-Belsen. Edith was not chosen and remained behind.
Edith Frank died of starvation at Auschwitz in January 1945, roughly three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp. She never learned what became of her daughters. At Bergen-Belsen, Anne and Margot found a camp overcrowded with Dutch prisoners, where food was scarce and sanitation virtually nonexistent.
Both sisters contracted typhus, a disease spread by lice that swept through the barracks with devastating speed.
Bergen-Belsen had no gas chambers. Prisoners died instead from overwork, disease, and starvation. In early 1945, Anne and Margot perished along with roughly 17,000 other inmates during a typhus epidemic that ravaged the camp.
After British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, the camp was burned to the ground to halt the spread of disease. The sisters were buried in an unknown location, their graves lost along with thousands of others.
Of the eight Jews who hid in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survived. He returned to the Netherlands after the war and learned that his wife and daughters were dead. He stayed for seven years with two of the helpers who had sustained the group in hiding.
One of them, Miep Gies, handed him Anne’s diary, which she had retrieved from the annex after the arrest and kept safe in the hope that Anne would one day return to claim it.
A friend convinced Otto that the diary deserved to be published. In June 1947, 3,000 copies of The Secret Annex were released in the Netherlands. The book eventually became known as The Diary of Anne Frank and went on to sell more than twenty million copies worldwide.
It has been adapted for stage and screen, translated into more than seventy languages, and incorporated into school curricula across the globe.
Anne had sometimes expressed a desire to become a journalist or a writer. That ambition never came to fruition, yet her words achieved a reach she could never have imagined. As Otto read through the diary, he discovered a version of his daughter he had never fully known.
He admitted that he had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings, and that reading her private reflections revealed a young woman far more complex than the child he had raised.
Otto also acknowledged that he had always gotten along more easily with Anne than with Margot, while Margot had been closer to Edith. Margot rarely showed her feelings and needed little support, whereas Anne was prone to mood swings and emotional outbursts. Anne’s relationship with her mother had been strained, as her diary entries make painfully clear, though she later revised her writing and began treating Edith with greater respect.
Sharing his daughter’s words became Otto’s life’s work, but it also forced him into a long and exhausting battle against Holocaust deniers who claimed the diary was a forgery. He took legal action repeatedly in the 1950s and 1970s to defend its authenticity. Courts and forensic examinations ultimately confirmed the diary’s legitimacy, but the accusations inflicted fresh pain on a man who had already lost everything.
Otto Frank devoted the remainder of his life to telling Anne’s story and emphasizing the importance of her words. He died in 1980 at the age of ninety-one. The Anne Frank House, including the secret annex, was slated for demolition after the war but was saved and transformed into a foundation.
It opened as a museum in 1960 and remains one of the most visited historical sites in Europe, drawing more than a million visitors annually.
The 2015 research by the Anne Frank House that revised the date of the sisters’ deaths relied on eyewitness accounts, Red Cross records, and survivor testimony. Researchers concluded that Anne and Margot likely died in February 1945, not March, meaning they passed away more than two months before the camp was liberated. The correction underscored how close they had come to survival and how much was stolen from them in those final weeks.
Only weeks before her capture, Anne wrote words that have since become among the most quoted of the twentieth century. She wrote that she felt the suffering of millions, and yet when she looked up at the sky, she somehow felt that everything would change for the better, that cruelty too would end, and that peace and tranquility would return once more. She was fifteen years old when she died.
Her diary endures as both a historical record and a moral testament.
The identity of the person who betrayed the Franks remains unknown, and the passage of time has made a definitive answer increasingly unlikely. Historians continue to examine documents and testimony, but the families most affected have long since passed away. What remains is the diary itself, a document written by a teenager in a concealed annex, which has outlived the regime that tried to erase her and continues to speak across generations.