The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began on May 10, 1940, when German forces invaded the country. The Luftwaffe used paratroopers to capture tactical points and support the advance of ground troops.
The invasion was accompanied by heavy aerial bombardment of Rotterdam, culminating on May 14 with the destruction of its entire historic center. Because the Germans threatened to bomb Utrecht in the same way, the Dutch forces surrendered one day later.
Soon after, the Nazis occupied the whole country and passed new anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude Jewish people from society and restrict their livelihood. Among the 15,000 Jews who had fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands between 1933 and 1939, one was a Jewish teenager who would become the world's most famous diarist: Anne Frank.
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. She had a sister, Margot, who was three years her senior. The sisters had a happy childhood, playing almost every day in the garden with the children of their neighborhood.
The Franks were liberal Jews and lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Their life changed dramatically when, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg.
The Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of Jewish people and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others classified as "dangerous." Because of business problems and growing antisemitism, Otto Frank decided to leave Germany and move to the Netherlands.
In September 1933, he founded a franchise for the Amsterdam branch of the Opekta company, which traded in pectin, a gelling agent for making jam. The rest of the family moved to Amsterdam soon after. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.
After their experiences in the Third Reich, the family soon felt at home in Amsterdam, and the girls enrolled in Dutch schools. They made new friends and, despite initial problems with the Dutch language, became excellent students, especially Margot.
For the parents, the situation was more challenging. Otto had to work hard to get his company going and build a new life for his family. The family's financial situation improved in 1938 when Otto started a new company called Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices.
Seeing the development in Nazi Germany and its aggressive expansion, he even wanted to set up a new business in Great Britain and move there, but this plan did not work out. The Second World War started on September 1, 1939.
Anne Frank was 10 years old when Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The life of the Franks, who were once again under Nazi domination, changed completely. The criminal Nazi regime from which they had fled in 1933 finally caught up with them in the country that had become their new home.
The Netherlands became an occupied territory, and it did not take long for the Nazis to begin introducing new anti-Semitic laws and regulations restricting the lives of Jews. Jewish civil servants were fired, and Jewish businesses as well as the Jews themselves had to be registered.
They could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops. Many places became off-limits to Anne, who could no longer go to the same school, as all Jewish children had to go to separate Jewish schools.
According to new laws, Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses, and the Nazis forced Otto Frank to give up his companies. However, Otto had managed to transfer control of his businesses to his employees soon enough to keep his companies out of Nazi hands.
The situation got worse in 1941 when Jewish men were arrested during raids and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths would soon follow.
Otto understood that the situation was critical and tried to emigrate to the United States and Cuba. However, he never managed to obtain the necessary documents.
It was in the spring of 1942 when Otto Frank, anticipating the deportation of his own family, decided to set up a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. Regulations forcing Jews to wear a yellow badge in the form of a Star of David as a means of identification were announced in the Netherlands on April 29, 1942.
Those caught without the badge after May 5, when the regulations came into effect, were arrested and detained for a six-week period. The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps started in the summer of 1942.
Transports regularly left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught. Out of 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands by the beginning of the Second World War, 107,000, including small children, were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, by September 1944. Out of the 107,000, only 5,000 returned after the war.
Before going into hiding, June 12, 1942, was probably the last happy moment for the Frank family. It was the day Anne celebrated her 13th birthday and received her diary, a diary that would one day make her famous and in which she would write about her feelings and thoughts during the difficult times that were to come.
Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up to report for a so-called "labor camp" in Nazi Germany. Knowing the fate of their friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did not hesitate for a moment. The next morning, they went into hiding to escape persecution.
In the Secret Annex, the family would spend 761 days. After seven days, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family, made up of Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter, from whom Anne would receive her first kiss in the Secret Annex. In November, they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend.
It is Anne's diary that tells us how the Frank family and four others lived for more than two years in a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase. The people in hiding were completely dependent on six helpers, employees and friends of Anne's father who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary to the eight people in the Secret Annex between 1942 and 1944.
Writing helped Anne pass the time, and thanks to her diary we can glimpse the everyday life of the people in hiding. It was important to be silent, especially from 8:30 a.m. when the men in the warehouse below the Secret Annex started their workday. Any sound could cause suspicion.
The morning was devoted to reading, studying, and preparing for the lunch break. At 12:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home for lunch, a few of the helpers came up to the Secret Annex to have lunch with those in hiding. Miep Gies usually stayed in the office to keep an eye on things.
The people in hiding could see other faces and listen to "Radio Oranje," a program broadcast by the BBC in which Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who had escaped from the invading German troops on May 13, 1940, and traveled to England, spoke 34 times during the course of the war.
While in the afternoon some people in hiding took a nap, Anne used to write or study. Then they had coffee, prepared dinner, and at 5:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home, the people in hiding could leave the Secret Annex and spread out through the building. They would cook dinner and take turns using the bathroom, as they did in the morning before the warehouse workers started their working day.
The situation became more dangerous after September 1942, when special units made up of Dutch collaborators began hunting for hiding Jews. An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two-thirds of them survived, and one-third were betrayed and discovered. The eight people in the Secret Annex belonged to the latter group.
To this day, we do not know the reason for the police raid, but the hiding period came to an abrupt end on August 4, 1944. Dutch police officers headed by SS officer Karl Silberbauer went to investigate a tip-off that Jews were hiding in the upstairs rooms at Prinsengracht 263.
The hiding place had been discovered, and Otto and the others were arrested. While Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money, he scattered the papers and notebooks. After the people from the Secret Annex were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, two other helpers took the documents before the Secret Annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. Anne's diary and her other manuscripts survived.
From a prison in Amsterdam, they were sent to the Westerbork transit camp. They ended up in the prison barracks, and the men and women were separated. Otto had to work during the day, but in the evening he could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne.
After a few weeks, they were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their train was the last one to leave Westerbork for this extermination camp located in Nazi-occupied Poland. The train journey took three horrible days, during which Anne and over a thousand others were packed closely together in cattle wagons. There was little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked to see who would and who would not be able to do heavy forced labor. Around 350 people from Anne's transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. While Otto ended up in a camp for men, Anne, Margot, and their mother Edith were sent to the labor camp for women.
After the war, survivors described them as an inseparable trio. Otto would never see them again. When in early November 1944 Anne and Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, their parents stayed behind at Auschwitz. Edith died of weakness and disease on January 6, 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne reunited with her friend Nanette Blitz, who survived the Holocaust and described Anne as "bald, emaciated, and shivering." She added that Anne did not wish to live any longer, as she believed her parents were both dead. However, Anne also told her that she hoped to one day write a book based on her diary when the war ended.
Sanitary conditions were terrible, and there was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945, when prisoners were sent on death marches from the other concentration camps, about one-third of the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station as they were too weak and sick to walk.
On one occasion, out of a transport of 1,900 inmates, over 500 arrived dead. The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches, and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during the winter months, when it was freezing cold, prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands of prisoners.
Due to starvation, thirst, and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of prisoners was between 250 and 300. In these terrible conditions, Anne and Margot contracted typhus as well.
After the war, Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen who worked in the camp hospital and knew Anne, remembered seeing her and, in her own words, said that Anne was "delirious, terrible and burning up." She also brought Anne water with which to wash. But unfortunately, Anne and her sister did not survive.
After Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock, Anne died one day later. They both died in February 1945 owing to the effects of typhus, Margot first, Anne shortly afterward. It was initially believed that the sisters died a few weeks before the camp's liberation on April 15, 1945. However, it was later revealed that they may have died as early as February.
Anne and Margot are among the millions of victims who were sentenced to death by starvation, thirst, illnesses, ill treatment, or extermination with Zyklon B gas. However, there was one person from the Secret Annex who survived: Otto, Anne's father.
He was liberated on January 27, 1945, when the Soviets entered Auschwitz. On the way back to the Netherlands, he found out that his wife Edith had died, but he hoped that Anne and Margot had somehow survived. He returned to the liberated Netherlands on June 3, 1945, nine days before what would have been Anne's 16th birthday. All hope was lost one month later when he learned about the death of his daughters.
Miep Gies, one of the helpers of the Secret Annex, passed him Anne's diary. After he found enough courage to read it, he was astonished by her writing. He also read about Anne's dreams to become a writer and journalist and her intention to publish her stories about their life in the Secret Annex after the war was over.
In the end, Anne's dreams would come true. First 3,000 copies of her book, "Secret Annex," were published in 1947. Since then, the book has been translated into over 70 languages.
People all over the world were introduced to Anne's story, and in 1960, the hiding place that for two years became home to eight people who tried to survive the atrocities of the criminal Nazi regime became a museum: the Anne Frank House. Today, you can even visit her room, whose walls are brightened with picture postcards and movie stars that Anne collected, and see her original diary and other manuscripts she wrote until her arrest.
Anne Frank, a teenage girl who perished in the death camp and whose only "sin" was that she was a Jew, has become a symbol that will live forever and will always remind us of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred toward each other.