Anne Frank Timeline

On August 4, 1944, the Secret Annex was raided following a tip-off from an informer whose identity remains uncertain. The eight residents were arrested by officers of the Sicherheitsdienst led by Karl Silberbauer, and after two days at a detention center, they were transferred to Westerbork transit camp.

After the arrest, helpers Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found Anne's diary papers scattered on the floor of the annex. Miep kept them safely in her desk drawer, hoping to return them to Anne after the war. She never read them while they were hidden.

Image source: Miep Gies

The eight residents of the Secret Annex were sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands. Because they had gone into hiding, they were treated as criminals and assigned to hard labor in the camp's punishment barracks.

Image source: Westerbork transit camp

On September 3, 1944, the Franks were placed on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland. After a three-day journey in crowded cattle cars, they arrived on September 6. Men and women were separated upon arrival, and Otto Frank never saw his family again.

Image source: Auschwitz concentration camp

Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne, Margot, and Edith survived the selection process and were assigned to forced labor. Conditions were brutal, with starvation rations, disease, and constant terror. Edith was later separated from her daughters and died in Auschwitz in January 1945.

In late October 1944, Anne and Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany as Auschwitz began evacuating prisoners. Their mother remained behind and died shortly before the camp's liberation. At Bergen-Belsen, conditions were catastrophic, with rampant typhus and starvation.

Image source: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Anne and Margot both contracted typhus in early 1945. Margot died first, and Anne died shortly afterward, likely in February or March 1945, only weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. Anne was fifteen years old.

British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, finding thousands of dead and dying prisoners. Anne had died just weeks earlier; had she survived a little longer, she might have been freed along with the other survivors.

Multiple investigations have attempted to identify who betrayed the residents of the Secret Annex. A major study published by the Anne Frank House in 2022 suggested the raid may have been triggered accidentally during an investigation into ration coupon fraud, though the question remains unresolved.

Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz, returned to Amsterdam after the war. By mid-1945 he learned that his wife and daughters had not survived. Miep Gies gave him Anne's diary papers, which she had saved since the arrest. Reading them, he was deeply moved by his daughter's writing.

After being rejected by several publishers, Anne's edited diary was published in the Netherlands on June 25, 1947, under the title 'Het Achterhuis' (The Secret Annex). It quickly sold out its first printing and was soon translated into numerous languages, becoming one of the world's most widely read books.

The English edition, titled 'Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,' appeared in 1952 with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. It became a bestseller in America and Britain, bringing Anne's story to millions of readers worldwide.

'The Diary of Anne Frank,' a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, opened on Broadway in October 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1956. The production brought Anne's story to international audiences and was later adapted into a 1959 film.

Until his death in 1980, Otto Frank devoted himself to preserving Anne's legacy, responding to thousands of letters, giving interviews, and speaking out against antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust. He remarried in 1953 and lived in Switzerland until his death.

The building at Prinsengracht 263, saved from demolition through public fundraising, opened as a museum on May 3, 1960. The Anne Frank House preserves the Secret Annex and has become one of Amsterdam's most visited museums, welcoming over a million visitors annually.

In 1986, the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation published the 'Critical Edition,' containing Anne's original diary text, her own revised version, and the published edition, along with extensive historical analysis confirming the document's authenticity.

In 1995, a new 'Definitive Edition' of the diary was published, restoring passages about Anne's developing sexuality and her strained relationship with her mother that Otto Frank had originally omitted. This fuller version deepened readers' understanding of Anne as a complex adolescent writer.

In 2009, Anne Frank's original diaries and manuscripts held at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, recognizing their outstanding universal value as a testament to human resilience and a warning against hatred.

Image source: Memory of the World Programme