On August 4, 1944, German security police and Dutch collaborators stormed a canalside warehouse at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. Behind a movable bookcase, in a concealed annex, eight people had lived in hiding for twenty-five months. The raid was swift. Otto Frank, his wife Edith, their daughters Margot and Anne, and four others were arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation.
As the officers ransacked the annex, searching for valuables, papers and notebooks were thrown to the floor. Among the scattered documents was a red checkered diary kept by the thirteen-year-old Anne Frank. The arresting officers never examined the writings closely. To them, the pages were worthless next to the cash and goods they sought.
Anne had received the diary on June 12, 1942, for her thirteenth birthday. She had chosen it herself days earlier from a shop window on the Zuid-Amstellaan, a small autograph album bound in red and white checkered cloth. She named it Kitty and began writing immediately, addressing her entries as letters to an imaginary friend. Three weeks later, on July 6, 1942, Margot received a call-up notice for a labor camp in Germany.
The Frank family went into hiding the next day, moving into the concealed rooms behind Otto Frank’s business. They were joined soon after by the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. What Anne thought would be a temporary refuge stretched into more than two years of confinement. During those months, Anne wrote nearly every day.
She filled her original diary, then continued on loose sheets of paper and in additional notebooks provided by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two Dutch employees who risked their lives to bring food, news, and supplies to the annex. She documented daily routines, the tensions of close quarters, her evolving relationship with Peter van Pels, and her observations about human nature, war, and her own identity. On March 28, 1944, she heard a radio broadcast from the exiled Dutch government encouraging people to preserve diaries and documents as testimony of the occupation. Inspired, Anne began revising her entries, rewriting passages, expanding observations, and preparing what she hoped might one day be published as a book called Het Achterhuis, or The Secret Annex.
After the arrest, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl returned to the ransacked annex. Both women had been interrogated but released. Moving carefully through the debris, Miep gathered the pages, notebooks, and loose sheets she recognized as Anne’s writing. She did not read them.
Years later, she explained that she understood instinctively these were private, and that reading them would have been a violation. Miep placed everything in a desk drawer in the office downstairs and locked it, waiting for the day she could return the diary to Anne. She told no one except her husband Jan what she had saved. The eight people arrested were deported to Westerbork transit camp on August 8, 1944, and from there to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, the last transport to leave the Netherlands for the death camp.
Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive. After Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945, he began the long journey back to Amsterdam. On June 3, 1945, he returned to Prinsengracht 263, where Miep and Jan Gies had prepared a room for him. Otto spent weeks searching for news of his family, writing letters, checking Red Cross lists, and speaking with survivors.
He learned that Edith had died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, from starvation and exhaustion. For months, he held on to hope for his daughters. Then, in late July 1945, he met Janny Brilleslijper, a survivor who had been imprisoned with Margot and Anne at Bergen-Belsen. She told him both girls had died there of typhus in February or March 1945, just weeks before British forces liberated the camp.
It was only after Otto received this confirmation that Miep Gies gave him Anne’s writings. She handed him the papers and said simply that here was his daughter Anne’s legacy. Otto began reading slowly over many days, discovering a daughter he had known, and yet through her writing had never fully understood. He found humor, insight, self-criticism, and ambition.
He was startled by her observations about relationships, her reflections on identity, and her mature articulation of fear and hope. Later, Otto said no parent truly knows their child’s innermost thoughts, and reading Anne’s diary revealed sides of her personality she had never shown him directly. Otto initially shared excerpts with friends and family. Those who heard the entries urged him to seek publication.
He was hesitant. The diary was intensely personal, filled with frank observations about the people in hiding, criticisms of her mother, and intimate reflections on her own development. Anne had also written candidly about her emerging sexuality and her feelings for Peter van Pels, subjects that made Otto uncomfortable. But he remembered the radio broadcast Anne had heard, the one that inspired her to revise her work for publication, and he recognized this had been her explicit wish.
He prepared a typescript, drawing from both Anne’s original entries and the revised version she had been working on before the arrest. He made editorial decisions, removing passages he felt were too intimate, too critical of others, or potentially hurtful to surviving relatives. The path to publication was not straightforward. Otto approached Dutch publishers in late 1945 and early 1946, but initial responses were cautious.
The Netherlands was still recovering from the occupation, and publishers were uncertain about the market for a teenage girl’s diary. Some questioned whether readers would be interested in yet another account of the war. Otto persisted. Historian Jan Romein wrote a front-page article for the newspaper Het Parool on April 3, 1946, titled “Kinderstem,” or “A Child’s Voice,” describing the diary as a profound document that captured both the universal experience of adolescence and the specific horror of persecution.
His article generated enough attention that Contact Publishing agreed to take on the project. Het Achterhuis was published in the Netherlands on June 25, 1947, in an edition of three thousand copies. The first printing sold steadily but not spectacularly. Reviews were positive, with critics noting the diary’s combination of youthful innocence and mature reflection.
What distinguished Anne’s writing from other war testimonies was its focus not on the violence of camps or combat, but on the intimate experience of life in hiding: the boredom, the fear, and the hope sustained against impossible odds. A second printing followed in December 1947, and Dutch sales grew through word of mouth. International publication took longer. The first translation appeared in Germany in 1950, under the title Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank.
Otto believed German readers, especially young Germans growing up after the war, needed to confront what had been done in their country’s name. Reception was mixed at first, but the German edition gained traction, particularly in schools. The French translation appeared in 1950 as Le Journal d’Anne Frank, published by Calmann-Lévy. French readers responded strongly, and the book became a literary event, discussed not only as testimony but as a significant piece of writing.
In the United States, the path was even more difficult. Otto approached multiple American publishers in the late 1940s, and all declined. Some cited concerns about the American market’s appetite for war stories. Others felt a diary format would not appeal to readers accustomed to structured narratives.
One publisher reportedly said the American public was tired of war stories and wanted entertainment. Otto persisted. The breakthrough came in 1950 when Doubleday agreed to take it on after a young editor named Judith Jones championed the manuscript. Jones, who would later become famous for bringing Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to American audiences, had encountered Anne’s diary while working in Doubleday’s Paris office.
She read it in French, was immediately moved, and brought the manuscript back to New York. Her advocacy convinced Doubleday’s editorial board to take a chance on what they still considered a risky publication. The American edition, titled Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, was published in June 1952 with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. Her involvement was crucial.
As former first lady, human rights advocate, and chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Roosevelt brought immediate credibility and visibility. Her introduction positioned the diary within the broader narrative of human rights and moral responsibility. American reviews followed suit. The diary quickly became a bestseller, adopted by book clubs and recommended by educators.
Within a year, it had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States. The diary’s success brought complications. In the 1950s, a small but vocal group of Holocaust deniers and far-right activists claimed the diary was a fabrication, either written by Otto Frank himself or manufactured by publishers to generate sympathy for Jewish victims. The accusations were false, but they gained enough traction that Otto and his supporters felt compelled to respond.
In 1959, Lothar Stielau, a German teacher and Holocaust denier, published articles claiming the diary was a forgery. Otto sued for libel. The court required forensic examination of the diary’s physical materials. The Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, known as RIOD and later renamed NIOD, conducted a comprehensive forensic analysis of the diary’s paper, ink, handwriting, and binding.
Experts compared Anne’s handwriting with known samples from school papers and letters written before the family went into hiding. They chemically analyzed the ink and dated the paper stock. Linguists analyzed the text for anachronisms. The conclusion was unequivocal: the diary was authentic, written by Anne Frank during the period she claimed, with no evidence of forgery or later additions beyond Otto’s known editorial work.
The court ruled in Otto’s favor in 1961, and Stielau was forced to retract his claims. Over the following decades, other deniers repeated similar claims. Each time, researchers reaffirmed the diary’s authenticity. In 1986, NIOD published a critical edition of the diary presenting three versions side by side: Anne’s original entries, her own revised version, and Otto’s published edition.
The scholarly work, running to more than seven hundred pages, documented the diary’s history and addressed every claim of forgery in meticulous detail. It demonstrated that while Otto had made editorial choices, the voice, content, and observations were entirely Anne’s. The original notebooks and loose pages remained in Otto Frank’s possession until his death in 1980. In his will, he bequeathed the diary to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, where it has been housed ever since.
The original red checkered autograph book, along with the additional notebooks and loose sheets, are stored in climate-controlled conditions and rarely handled. The house at Prinsengracht 263 also became a focal point of preservation. By the late 1950s, there were plans to demolish the building. Otto Frank, along with Dutch supporters, launched a campaign to save it.
In 1960, the Anne Frank House Foundation was established, and the building was preserved as a museum. The annex was restored to approximate its appearance during the hiding period. The museum opened on May 3, 1960, and has since become one of the most visited historical sites in the Netherlands. The diary’s influence extended far beyond memorialization.
In 1955, a stage adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett premiered on Broadway. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. A film adaptation followed in 1959, directed by George Stevens and starring Millie Perkins as Anne. It was nominated for multiple Academy Awards and won three.
The film solidified Anne Frank’s place in popular memory, though it also contributed to a sentimentalized version of her story that sometimes obscured the brutal ending. Decades later, educators and historians worked to counterbalance this by emphasizing that Anne and seven others were murdered, and that the diary documented not just a girl’s coming of age but the systematic persecution of millions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the diary was translated into dozens of languages: Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and many others. In some countries, the diary was banned or restricted.
Soviet authorities initially hesitated to promote it, wary of how Jewish victimhood might complicate state narratives. In other regions, conservative or authoritarian governments censored the book. Yet the diary’s reach continued to expand, often through underground distribution or educational advocacy. The question of copyright became contentious as the diary’s popularity grew.
Under Dutch law, copyright lasts for seventy years after the author’s death. Anne died in 1945, meaning the diary would enter the public domain in 2016. However, the Anne Frank Fonds, a foundation Otto Frank established in 1963, argued that Otto should be considered a co-author due to his editorial work. In 2015, the Fonds extended copyright by listing Otto as co-author.
Other organizations, including the Anne Frank House, disagreed, maintaining that Anne was the sole author and that Otto’s role was editorial, not authorial. In 2016, the original Dutch text entered the public domain in most jurisdictions, though the Anne Frank Fonds continued to assert copyright over Otto’s edited version. The matter remains unresolved in some countries. The diary’s impact on Holocaust education has been profound and complicated.
For many young readers, particularly those outside Europe, Anne Frank is their first encounter with the Holocaust. Her age, her relatability, and her voice make the history accessible in ways that statistics and historical overviews cannot. At the same time, some educators caution against over-reliance on Anne’s story. Most Jews in occupied Europe did not have the option to hide for two years with the help of courageous rescuers.
The vast majority were deported immediately, murdered in mass shootings in Eastern Europe or killed in gas chambers upon arrival at death camps. Historian Yehuda Bauer noted that Anne Frank’s story is often the entry point to Holocaust education but should not be the end point. Some programs now pair the diary with other testimonies, survivor memoirs, oral histories, and perpetrator documents, to prevent Anne’s story from becoming the sole lens while still honoring its unique value. The diary continues to reach new generations through digital platforms.
In 2018, the Anne Frank House launched an online virtual reality tour of the annex. Social media accounts post excerpts on the anniversary dates Anne wrote them. Scholars continue to study the diary from multiple angles: literary critics analyze Anne’s development as a writer, historians mine the text for details about daily life under occupation, and psychologists examine her reflections on identity, adolescence, and trauma. As of 2026, the diary has sold more than thirty million copies and been translated into over seventy languages.
Anne Frank has become synonymous with the Holocaust in popular consciousness, a symbol that carries both power and limitations. Her face appears in textbooks, documentaries, and memorial contexts. Her name is invoked in speeches, editorials, and classroom discussions. The diary’s most quoted line, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” was written on July 15, 1944, less than a month before the arrest.
Some argue that quoting this line in isolation misrepresents the diary’s complexity. Anne also wrote about hatred, despair, and fear. Today, the original diary rests in a secure vault in Amsterdam, its pages carefully preserved. Millions of copies circulate in print, digital, and audio formats.
The annex at Prinsengracht remains a place of pilgrimage. Anne Frank wrote in her diary that she wanted to live on after her death, to be useful and bring enjoyment to people even after she was gone. Her diary did not simply survive the war.
It became one of the most important documents of the twentieth century, a voice that refuses to be silenced by history.