Historical anniversary of the arrest of Anne Frank

On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and seven others were arrested in Amsterdam by the German Security Police, known as the Grüne Polizei. The group had been hiding in a secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 for more than two years to escape Nazi persecution. Their discovery was the result of a tip-off from an unidentified informer, a mystery that remains unsolved today.

Following their arrest, the group was initially held in a detention center before being sent to the Westerbork transit camp. In September 1944, Anne and her sister Margot were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and subsequently transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Both sisters died in early 1945, shortly before the liberation of the camp. Otto Frank, Anne's father, was the only member of the group to survive the war. He later retrieved and published his daughter's diary, which had been written during their time in hiding. The diary has since been published in over 30 languages and adapted into numerous plays and films, serving as a critical historical record of the Holocaust.