How did Anne Frank die? Death of Jewish girl during Holocaust explained on anniversary of Anne Frank’s diary

Anne Frank’s diary was published on 25 June 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War and liberations of contentration camps and death camps across Europe. The diary, a first-hand account of the life of a Jewish girl living in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam for years, quickly became one of the most important contemporary texts about the Holocaust.

Anne wrote the diary between June 1942 and March 1944, years during which the Netherlands, where she and her family lived, was occupied by Germany . For almost the entire time that she wrote her diary, Anne was confied to one room, an annex attached to her father’s warehouse.

Tragically, Anne did not live to see the publication of her diary, which has sold around 30 million copies to date, as she was one of 6 million victims of the Holocaust.

Who was Anne Frank?

Anne Frank was a German-Dutch Jewish girl who was killed during the Holocaust - a campaign of genocide against Jews and other minorities carried out by the German government during the Second World War. She was born to Jewish parents Otto and Edith, and had one sister, Margot.

Anne is one of the most well-known victims of the Holocaust because of the diary which she wrote during the Nazi occupation of Holland. When Anne was four years old, she and her family moved from Frankfurt, Germany to Amsterdam in the Netherlands following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940 and persecution of Jews increased - in July 1942 the Frank family went into hiding in an annex in the building where Anne’s father, Otto, worked. The only outside help the Franks had came from six people - four of Otto’s fellow employees, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl, and Gies’ husband Jan, and Voskuijl’s father Johannes Hendrik.

Anne began writing her diary on 12 June 1942, her 13th birthday, and the last entry in the published diary was on 1 August 1944. In her diary she wrote about her friends, conversations and arguments with her family, the difficulty of adjusting to new people joining her in the annex, her fears, and her hopes for the future, which included becoming a writer.

How did Anne Frank die?

On 4 August, three days after Anne’s last diary entry, the German police, led by a member of the SS stormed the annex and arrested Anne, her family, and the others who had also been in hiding there.

They were interrogated before being sent to the Westerbork transit camp. The group were sent on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz concentration camp where the men and women were split up on arrival.

At Auschwitz arrivals were further split into those selected for immediate death in the gas chambers, and those selected for slave labour. Otto, Edith, Margot and Frank were all selected for slave labour. On 28 October 1944, Anne and Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Edith was left behind and died of starvation in Auschwitz.

Anne and Margot both died in Bergen-Belsen some time in early 1945 - it is believed that Margot died the day after Anne. It is not known for certain how they died but it is likely that it was from a typhus epidemic that had spread through the camp.

When was Anne Frank’s diary published?

Otto Frank survived Auschwitz, the only member of his family to do so, and when he returned to the Netherlands following the end of the Second World War, he learned that his wife and children had died.

Otto’s secretary, Miep Gies, had saved Anne’s diary and after reading it, Otto decided to publish most of the entries in order to fulfil her dream of becoming a writer. The diary was first published on 25 June 1947 and has since been translated into more than 70 languages. It was first published in English in 1952 under the title The Diary of a Young Girl.

The last line in Anne Frank’s final diary entry reads: “I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.”