New research has shattered one of the most enduring assumptions about the final chapter of Anne Frank’s life, revealing that the teenage diarist died earlier than historians believed for decades and weeks before the liberation that might have saved her.
The Anne Frank House, the foundation that preserves the secret annex where the Frank family hid for two years, confirmed in 2015 that Anne and her older sister Margot perished in February 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, not in March as had been accepted for nearly seventy years. The revised timeline means the sisters died at least two weeks sooner than previously thought, and long before British forces liberated the camp in April 1945.
The finding, based on archival research, survivor testimony and Red Cross records, deepens the tragedy of a life already synonymous with the Holocaust’s cruelty. Anne was 15 years old. Margot was 19.
Both succumbed to a typhus epidemic that swept Bergen-Belsen in the chaotic final months of the war in Europe, killing an estimated 17,000 prisoners in a matter of weeks.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. As anti-Semitism tightened its grip on Germany in the 1930s, the family fled to the Netherlands, where Anne attended a Montessori school and her sister Margot enrolled in a public one. Friends from that period remembered Anne as a shy but relentless writer who hid her work and rarely told anyone what it was about.
Otto Frank encouraged both daughters to read, and kept a library at home. The family tried repeatedly to escape Europe entirely, seeking refuge in the United States and Britain, but those efforts failed. When war broke out in September 1939 and German forces occupied the Netherlands the following May, the Franks were trapped.
Restrictions on Dutch Jews escalated quickly. Anne and Margot were forced into a Jewish school, Otto lost his business, and the family was required to wear the yellow Star of David and observe strict curfews. A second attempt to reach the United States was denied.
In desperation, Otto and his Jewish business partner and associates built a hiding place behind his firm at Prinsengracht 263, a multi-story annex that would become the family’s entire world.
To disguise their disappearance, the family left their apartment in disarray and Otto planted a note suggesting they had fled to Switzerland. In July 1942, one day after Margot received an order to report to a German work camp, the Franks went into hiding. Eight Jews ultimately shared the annex: Anne, Margot, their parents, the business partner and his wife and son, and a dentist who joined them later.
They remained concealed for two full years behind a movable bookshelf. Before disappearing, Anne gave a neighbor possessions for safekeeping, including the family cat, a tea set, a book and a tin of marbles, small remnants of a childhood cut short. Around the same time, she received a diary as a birthday gift.
On the day she received it, Anne wrote that she hoped the diary would be a great source of comfort and support. In a March 1944 entry, she confessed that the nicest part was being able to write down all her thoughts and feelings, adding that otherwise she would absolutely suffocate. Most entries were addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, and they chronicled the segregation, discrimination and claustrophobia that defined life in hiding.
Conditions in the annex were punishing. The eight inhabitants had to whisper, walk quietly and avoid flushing the toilet during certain hours so warehouse workers below would not detect them. Tensions flared.
Anne shared her first kiss with Peter, the teenage son of Otto’s business partner, but questioned in her diary whether her feelings were genuine or merely a product of their circumstances. Her relationship with Margot improved markedly; by January 1944 she wrote that her sister had become a real friend and no longer treated her like a baby who did not count.
Outside helpers supplied food and news of the war, at enormous personal risk. After learning that the Dutch education minister in exile in London had urged people to keep wartime diaries, Anne began rewriting her entries under the title The Secret Annex. She never finished.
On August 4, 1944, all eight hidden Jews were arrested, along with two of their helpers. The identity of the betrayer remains unconfirmed. Theories have pointed to Tony Ahlers, a member of the Dutch Nazi movement; to warehouse manager Willem van Maaren, whom the group distrusted; and, more shockingly, to Nelly Voskuijl, sister of helper Bep Voskuijl, who had collaborated with the Germans.
An SS officer who took the tip-off by telephone reportedly said the informant had the voice of a young woman.
The captives were sent to the Westerbork transit camp and then to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. On arrival, they were stripped, shaved and tattooed with numbers, reduced from people to digits in a genocide. Because the camp was divided by gender, Anne, Margot and Edith were separated from Otto.
The women were assigned heavy labor, hauling stones and grass mats, punishment for having been in hiding and therefore classified as criminals.
Of the 1,049 Jews who arrived at Auschwitz with the Frank group, 549 were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne’s family was spared that fate initially. Anne, believing her father had been killed, once obtained extra bread and shared it with her mother and sister.
The bread was spoiled, and the three contracted scabies and were sent to an infirmary where rodents were common. Edith shared her rations with her daughters to keep up their strength.
Because of the scabies, Anne’s scheduled transfer to a labor camp was canceled, and Margot and Edith stayed behind with her. Later that month, the sisters were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Edith was not selected and remained at Auschwitz, where she died of starvation in January 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne and Margot found a camp filled mostly with Dutch prisoners, with little food and sanitation so poor that both soon contracted typhus. The camp had no gas chambers; prisoners died from overwork, disease and starvation. In February 1945, both sisters died in the typhus epidemic.
After British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, the camp was burned to the ground to halt the spread of disease. Anne and Margot were buried in an unknown location.
Otto Frank was the only one of the eight hidden Jews to survive. He returned to the Netherlands and learned that none of the others had made it. He stayed seven years with two associates, one of whom had safeguarded Anne’s diary.
A friend persuaded him to publish it, and in June 1947, 3,000 copies of The Secret Annex were released. The book, eventually known as The Diary of Anne Frank, has since been printed more than 20 million times.
Anne had sometimes expressed a wish to become a journalist or writer. That ambition never materialized, but her work outlived her in ways she could not have imagined. Reading the diary, Otto discovered a side of his daughter he had never known, saying he had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings.
He later acknowledged he had always gotten along better with Anne than with Margot, who was closer to Edith and less demonstrative, while Anne was prone to mood swings.
Otto devoted his life to sharing his daughter’s writing, but also to a more frustrating battle: refuting claims that the diary was a forgery. He took legal action repeatedly in the 1950s and 1970s against Holocaust deniers who challenged its authenticity. He continued telling Anne’s story until his death in 1980.
The Anne Frank House, with the secret annex at its rear, was slated for demolition after the war but was saved and turned into a foundation. It opened as a museum in 1960 and remains one of the most visited historical sites in Europe.
Only weeks before her capture, Anne wrote in her diary that she felt the suffering of millions and yet, when she looked up at the sky, somehow felt that everything would change for the better, that cruelty too would end, and that peace and tranquility would return once more. The 2015 research confirming her earlier death means she died without knowing how close liberation truly was.