Today 80 yrs ago: Holocaust victim Anne Frank got Arrested

Hiding from the Nazis for two years, Anne Frank was arrested on August 4, 1944. Her diary is a unique document of the Holocaust.

Amsterdam, Prinsengracht 263: This is where the Jewish girl Anne Frank hid from the Nazis from 1942 to 1944.

Having fled from Germany to the Netherlands, her father Otto Frank had been running the food company Nederlandsche Opekta here since 1940. In 1942, he decided to set up a hiding place for his family in the rear building, which was used as a laboratory. When Anne's sister Margot, who was three years older, was ordered to report to the Reich Labor Service on July 5 under threat of imprisonment for the entire family, the family went into hiding with other persecuted people.

The front door is hidden behind a bookshelf. Meanwhile, the Opekta employees in the front building keep the business running.

Anne Frank, born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, was 13 years old at the time. From the age of five, the family lived in Amsterdam, as it had become increasingly dangerous for Jews in Germany since the Nazis came to power. In the Netherlands, Anne initially led a completely normal life, went to school and found a close friend in Hannah Goslar. At school, Anne particularly enjoys writing stories - but she doesn't even show what she writes to her friend Hannah. Apart from that, the two girls share all their secrets in the years to come. Anne is clever and funny and sometimes a bit cheeky.

For her 13th birthday, she receives a small poetry album as a gift. It is red and white checkered with a fabric cover. From that day on, she writes everything that moves her in it - in the form of a letter to her friend "Kitty", who only exists in Anne's imagination. Just three weeks later, Anne's tranquil life is over. The National Socialists have invaded the Netherlands and are preparing to arrest all the Jews here too. The Frank family and four Jewish Dutchmen, the van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, barricaded themselves in the rear building of Prinsengracht 263. In the actual apartment in the front building, the Franks feigned an escape to Switzerland and left a note to that effect. They are supported by Otto Frank's secretary Miep Gies.

After two years of living in secret, the Franks' hiding place is revealed. Although there are several suspects, it is not known for a long time who it was. At the beginning of 2022, an international cold case team claims to have spent more than five years researching the case and discovered that the notary Arnold van den Bergh was the traitor - himself a Jew who wanted to save himself and his own family. However, historian Bas von Benda-Beckmann, for example, has doubts about this theory.

On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank, her parents Edith and Otto, her sister Margot and the four other residents of the Secret Annex were taken away, first to a prison and a few days later to the Westerbork transit camp. They had to do hard labor in the penal barracks for several weeks - and were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp on September 3. As Anne was already 15 years old at the time, she was not sent directly to the gas chamber and initially escaped death. She was sent to the Birkenau women's camp with her mother and sister. There, forced labor, cold and catastrophic hygienic conditions await her in the overcrowded barracks.

When the National Socialists decide to evacuate Auschwitz as the Allies approach, Anne and her sister are deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - and separated from their mother. In Bergen-Belsen, Anne meets her school friend Hannah Goslar again, but they only have brief contact at a fence, as Hannah, an "exchange Jew", is held prisoner in another part of the camp. The conditions in Bergen-Belsen were also disastrous: the barracks were overcrowded, dead bodies were lying around and diseases such as typhus and thypus were spreading rapidly. Both sisters fell seriously ill and died in the spring of 1945, first Margot and then Anne a few days later - just before the British liberated the concentration camp. Their grave is located on the site of today's Bergen-Belsen Memorial.

Her mother was already dead by then. She had died - also ill and weakened - in Auschwitz-Birkenau in January. Otto Frank is the only one of the Jews who went into hiding in his Secret Annex to survive the Holocaust - he is among those who are liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. After Kriesgende, he first returns to the Netherlands. There he meets Miep Gies again, who had helped the Franks go into hiding in 1942 - and she gives him a very special treasure: Anne's diary, which she had found and kept in hiding, scattered in individual sheets.

Otto Frank decides to publish the diary. It was first published in Dutch in 1947. Until his death in Switzerland in 1980, he took care of his daughter's legacy and carried on her legacy. Anne Frank's diary has since been translated into more than 50 languages and is read all over the world, including in schools and at memorial events.

Anne Frank herself has become a symbol for all Jewish people who were imprisoned and killed during the National Socialist era.