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Teenaged diarist Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp under mysterious circumstances sometime in late February or early March 1945, only a few days after her sister Margot. Frank is one of the most highly discussed Holocaust victims and her diary was published in 1947 by her father and became a bestseller.
Background[edit]
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June 1929 – February 1945) was a diarist and writer. She is one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Her wartime diary The Diary of a Young Girl has been the basis for several plays and films. Born in the city of Frankfurt in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Born a German national, Frank lost her citizenship in 1941. She gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published. It documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.
The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis gained control over Germany. By May 1940, they were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in some concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father worked. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot Frank, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (probably of typhus) in February or March 1945.
Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by one of the helpers, Miep Gies, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It has since been translated into many languages. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The diary, which was given to Anne on her thirteenth birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944.
Arrest[edit]
On the morning of 4 August 1944, following a tip from an informer who has never been identified, the Achterhuis was stormed by a group of German uniformed police (Grüne Polizei) led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst. The Franks, van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters, where they were interrogated and held overnight. On 5 August they were transferred to the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans. Two days later they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, through which by that time more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, had passed. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor.
In her book describing the betrayal and transportation to Auschwitz of her own family, Eva Schloss, whose mother Elfriede "Mutti" Geiringer married Otto Frank after the war, tells of the trial of Nazi collaborator Miep Braams:
Braams was the girlfriend of a Dutch resistance worker called Jannes Haan, and she was supposed to be helping him protect Jews and help the Resistance. As the war progressed, Haan became suspicious that his girlfriend was really a double agent for the Nazis: an awful lot of the Jewish families he entrusted to her were vanishing without trace, or being rounded up. When she became aware of his suspicions, Braams betrayed Haan to the Gestapo, and he was executed. It was later estimated that Miep Braams was responsible for betraying as many as two hundred Jewish families, including ours.
In April 1949, Braams received a sentence of six years.
Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were arrested and jailed at the penal camp for enemies of the regime at Amersfoort. Kleiman was released after seven weeks, but Kugler was held in various work camps until the war's end. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were questioned and threatened by the Security Police but not detained. They returned to the Achterhuis the following day, and found Anne's papers strewn on the floor. They collected them, as well as several family photograph albums, and Gies resolved to return them to Anne after the war. On 7 August 1944, Gies attempted to facilitate the release of the prisoners by confronting Silberbauer and offering him money to intervene, but he refused.
In 2015, a book by the Flemish journalist Jeroen de Bruyn and Bep Voskuijl’s youngest son, Joop van Wijk, alleged that Nelly Voskuijl, Bep's younger sister, may have betrayed Anne Frank's family. The authors found evidence that included that Nelly Voskuijl was a Nazi collaborator. She died in 2001.
Preceding Events[edit]
It is August 4, 1944, it was considered a lovely sunny day. An anonymous tip arrives that morning by telphone at the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD or Security Police). The SD-officer in charge, Julius Deetman, takes the call and orders the officer on duty SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer to the Prinsengracht. He is helped by Dutch policemen. The office employees are at work on the second floor when the door suddenly opens. Miep later describes this moment: “The door opened and a small man entered. He pointed the revolver in his hand at me and said: ‘Stay seated! Don’t move!’” Victor Kugler who is working in the adjoining office hears the commotion and goes to see what is going on. Victor Kugler: “I saw four police officers and one was wearing a Gestapo uniform.” One of the policeman points his pistol at Kugler and tells him to lead the way. They all go in the direction of the movable bookcase. It is swung open. The men enter the Secret Annex with their pistols drawn. The people in hiding are caught completely off guard. They have lived with the anxiety of being discovered for more than two years and now it is happening. Otto Frank describes that moment: “It was around ten-thrity. I was upstairs with the Van Pelses in Peter’s room and I was helping him with his schoolwork… Suddenly someone came running up the stairs…then the door opened and a man was standing right in front of us with a gun in his hand and it was pointed at us… Downstairs everyone was gathered. My wife, the children, the Van Pelses stood their with their hands up.” A few minutes later, Fritz Pfeffer is also escorted into the room.
The people in hiding were forced to turn over all their valuables. Silberbauer picks up Otto’s briefcase which contains Anne’s diaries and papers and he shakes it empty so he can carry away any valuables he collects. The pages of Anne’s diary fall onto the wooden floor. Otto Frank: “Then he said: ‘Get Ready. Everyone must be back here in five minutes.’” Miep Gies: “Later I heard everyone coming downstairs, very slowly.” After the raid, the people in hiding are taken away in an enclosed truck with both of the male helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, who have also been arrested.
Deporation and Death[edit]
On 3 September 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrived after a three-day journey. On the same train was Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Amsterdam native who had befriended Margot and Anne in the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. Bloeme saw Anne, Margot, and their mother regularly in Auschwitz, and was interviewed for her remembrances of the Frank women in Auschwitz in the television documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1988) by Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer and the BBC documentary Anne Frank Remembered (1995).
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the SS forcibly separated the men from the women and children, and Otto Frank was wrenched from his family. Those deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labor were immediately killed. Of the 1,019 passengers, 549—including all children younger than 15—were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne Frank, who had turned 15 three months earlier, was one of the youngest people to be spared from her transport. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival and never learned that the entire group from the Achterhuis had survived this selection. She reasoned that her father, in his mid-fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated.
With the other females not selected for immediate death, Frank was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved, and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. By day, the women were used as slave labour and Frank was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod; by night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks. Some witnesses later testified Frank became withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers; others reported that more often she displayed strength and courage. Her gregarious and confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother, sister, and herself. Disease was rampant; before long, Frank's skin became badly infected by scabies. The Frank sisters were moved into an infirmary, which was in a state of constant darkness and infested with rats and mice. Edith Frank stopped eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters and passing her rations to them through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.
In October 1944, the Frank women were slated to join a transport to the Liebau labour camp in Upper Silesia. Bloeme Evers-Emden was slated to be on this transport, but Anne was prohibited from going because she had developed scabies, and her mother and sister opted to stay with her. Bloeme went on without them.
On 28 October, selections began for women to be relocated to Bergen-Belsen. More than 8,000 women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transported. Edith Frank was left behind and later died from starvation. Tents were erected at Bergen-Belsen to accommodate the influx of prisoners, and as the population rose, the death toll due to disease increased rapidly. Frank was briefly reunited with two friends, Hanneli Goslar and Nanette Blitz, who were confined in another section of the camp. Goslar and Blitz survived the war, and later discussed the brief conversations they had conducted with Frank through a fence. Blitz described Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering. Goslar noted Auguste van Pels was with Anne and Margot Frank, and was caring for Margot, who was severely ill. Neither of them saw Margot, as she was too weak to leave her bunk. Anne told Blitz and Goslar she believed her parents were dead, and for that reason she did not wish to live any longer. Goslar later estimated their meetings had taken place in late January or early February 1945.
In early 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners. Other diseases, including typhoid fever, were rampant. Due to these chaotic conditions, it is not possible to say what ultimately caused Anne's death. Witnesses later testified Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died a few days after Margot. The exact dates of Margot and Anne's deaths were not recorded. It was long thought that their deaths occurred only a few weeks before British soldiers liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, but new research in 2015 indicated that they may have died as early as February of that year. Among other evidence, witnesses recalled that the Franks displayed typhus symptoms by 7 February, and Dutch health authorities reported that most untreated typhus victims died within 12 days of their first symptoms. After liberation, the camp was burned in an effort to prevent further spread of disease; the sisters were buried in a mass grave at an unknown location.
After the war, it was estimated that only 5,000 of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944 survived. An estimated 30,000 Jews remained in the Netherlands, with many people aided by the Dutch underground. Approximately two-thirds of this group survived the war.
Situation at Bergen-Belsen[edit]
Current estimates put the number of prisoners who passed through the concentration camp during its period of operation from 1943 to 1945 at around 120,000. Due to the destruction of the camp's files by the SS, not even half of them, around 55,000, are known by name. As mentioned above, treatment of prisoners by the SS varied between individual sections of the camp, with the inmates of the exchange camp generally being better treated than other prisoners, at least initially. However, in October 1943 the SS selected 1,800 men and women from the Sonderlager ("special camp"), Jews from Poland who held passports from Latin American countries. Since the governments of these nations mostly refused to honour the passports, these people had lost their value to the regime. Under the pretext of sending them to a fictitious "Lager Bergau", the SS had them transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were sent directly to the gas chambers and killed. In February and May 1944 another 350 prisoners from the "special camp" were sent to Auschwitz. Thus, out of the total of 14,600 prisoners in the exchange camp, at least 3,550 died: over 1,400 of them at Belsen, and around 2,150 at Auschwitz.
In the Männerlager (the male section of the "recovery camp"), inmates suffered even more from lack of care, malnourishment, disease and mistreatment by the guards. Thousands of them died. In the summer of 1944, at least 200 men were killed by orders of the SS by being injected with phenol.
There were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, since the mass killings took place in the camps further east. Nevertheless, current estimates put the number of deaths at Belsen at more than 50,000 Jews, Czechs, Poles, anti-Nazi Christians, homosexuals, and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies). Among them was Czech painter and writer Josef Čapek (estimated to be in April 1945).
The rate at which inmates died at Belsen accelerated notably after the mass transport of prisoners from other camps began in December 1944. From 1943 to the end of 1944 around 3,100 died. From January to mid-April 1945 this rose to around 35,000. Another 14,000 died after liberation between April 15 and the end of June 1945.
Eyewitnesses[edit]
- Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper: Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper (August 24, 1916 – August 15, 2003) was a Holocaust survivor and one of the last people to see Anne Frank. Janny and her sister Lientje were in the Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with Anne and Anne's older sister Margot. After the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Janny and Bob, along with Lientje, began to work in the Resistance. Janny kept Jewish people hidden in her home, and she never officially registered as a Jew. However, the Nazis often wanted to arrest Janny and her family, who made some narrow escapes. Finally, Janny and Lientje were arrested in the summer of 1944, and were transported to the Westerbork transit camp. In Westerbork, they were listed as "criminals" and had to work hard in the work barracks. In those barracks, Janny and Lientje met Anne and Margot and befriended them. From Westerbork, Janny, Lientje, and the Franks were transported to Auschwitz. Janny and Lientje were later transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne and Margot were also transported in October 1944. Janny, who was made a nurse in the camp, took care of the ill prisoners. In March 1945, Anne and Margot died within a few days of each other. Janny and Lientje buried them in the mass graves at the camp.
After the war, Janny was reunited with her husband and children. Through the Red Cross, she contacted Otto Frank and informed him about the deaths of his daughters, Anne and Margot. Janny gave interviews about Anne and Margot's final days in the documentary movie, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1987), which was directed by Willy Lindwer.
- Hanneli Golsar: Hannah 'Hanneli' Elizabeth Goslar (born November 12, 1928) is a former nurse who is best known for her strong and close friendship with Anne Frank. Both Hannah and Anne had attended the Sixth Public Montessori School (now the Anne Frank School) in Amsterdam and then the Jewish Lyceum. In 1943, Hannah, her father, her maternal grandparents, along with Hannah's younger sister Gabriela ("Gabi"), were arrested and sent to Westerbork, a transit camp, and then eventually to the exchange camp of Bergen-Belsen. Hannah was in a privileged section of the camp because her family had Palestine passports with them. Sometime between January-February 1945, Hannah was briefly reunited with Anne Frank, who was a less privileged prisoner imprisoned at the other side of the camp. Hannah passed Anne a package with some bread and socks in it. Hannah and Gabi survived 14 months at Bergen-Belsen. Her father and maternal grandparents all died of a sickness before the liberation. Hannah and Gabi were the only members of their family to survive the war, and in 1947, they immigrated to Jerusalem, Palestine.
- Nanette "Nanny" Blitz: Blitz was another schoolmate of Anne's. Nannette, by her own admission, was the girl given the made-up initials "E. S." in the early pages of Anne's diary. While they were not always on the best of terms during school days (their personalities were much too similar), Nanny had been invited to Anne's 13th birthday party, and when they met in Bergen-Belsen, their reunion was enthusiastic. With prisoners constantly being shifted around in the huge camp, Nanny quickly lost track of Anne. Nannette was the only member of her family to survive the war. While she was recovering from tuberculosis in a hospital immediately after the war, Otto Frank got in touch with her and she was able to write and give him some information about her encounter with Anne at Belsen. Nanette and her family, as of 1998, resided in São Paulo, Brazil.
Aftermath[edit]
Otto Frank survived his internment in Auschwitz. After the war ended, he returned to Amsterdam, where he was sheltered by Jan and Miep Gies as he attempted to locate his family. He learned of the death of his wife, Edith, in Auschwitz, but remained hopeful that his daughters had survived. After several weeks, he discovered Margot and Anne had also died. He attempted to determine the fates of his daughters' friends and learned many had been murdered. Susanne Sanne Ledermann, often mentioned in Anne's diary, had been gassed along with her parents; her sister, Barbara, a close friend of Margot's, had survived. Several of the Frank sisters' school friends had survived, as had the extended families of Otto and Edith Frank, as they had fled Germany during the mid-1930s, with individual family members settling in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The first transcription of Anne's diary was in German, made by Otto Frank for his friends and relatives in Switzerland, who convinced him to send it for publication. The second, a composition of Anne Frank's rewritten draft, excerpts from her essays, and scenes from her original diaries, became the first draft submitted for publication, with an epilogue written by a family friend explaining the fate of its author. In the spring of 1946 it came to the attention of Dr. Jan Romein and his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor, two Dutch historians. They were so moved by it that Anne Romein made unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher, which led Romein to write an article for the newspaper Het Parool: “ This apparently inconsequential diary by a child, this "de profundis" stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together. ”
—Jan Romein in his article "Children's voice" on "Het Parool", April 3, 1946.
This caught the interest of Contact Publishing in Amsterdam, who approached Otto Frank to submit a draft of the manuscript for their consideration. They offered to publish but advised Otto Frank that Anne's candor about her emerging sexuality might offend certain conservative quarters and suggested cuts. Further entries were also deleted. The diary was published under the name Het Achterhuis. Dagbrieven van 14 juni 1942 tot 1 augustus 1944 (The Secret Annex. Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944) on June 25, 1947. Otto later discussed this moment, "If she had been here, Anne would have been so proud." It sold well; the 3000 copies of the first edition were soon sold out, and in 1950 a sixth edition was published.
At the end of 1950, a translator was found to produce an English-language version. Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday was contracted by Vallentine, Mitchell & Co. in England and by the end of the following year her translation was submitted, now including the deleted passages at Otto Frank's request and the book appeared in America and Great Britain in 1952, becoming a bestseller. Translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Greek followed. The play based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize for 1955, and the subsequent movie earned Shelley Winters an Academy Award for her performance, whereupon Winters donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.