Following the end of World War 2, she would recount that Silberbauer pointed a pistol to her head and insisted on a search of the building. Miep Gies was the first of the confidents to be approached by the officers. It is not known whether van Maaren knew of the hiding place and its occupants. The Gestapo, headed by SS officer Karl Silberbauer, approached an employee named Willem van Maaren, who allowed the officers to inspect the building. The hidden space became known as the Achterhuis, and this space would effectively hide the Franks from oppressive Nazi rule for two years.īetween 10:30am and 11am on the 4th of August, 1944, Gestapo officers arrived at the building which housed the hidden family.

A bookcase was placed in front of the door to the hiding space to conceal its existence, and the only people who knew of the family’s whereabouts were a few trusted employees who worked in the building. This particular spot was a concealed room in a building where Anne’s father, Otto, worked. In 1942, the family resorted to living in a hiding space as to remain undetected by the German police, known as the Gestapo. By 1940, Amsterdam had too fallen under Nazi rule and the Franks were essentially trapped. Diary entries suddenly ceased just two days before her arrest.Īt the age of four, Anne and her family (consisting of her father, Otto her mother, Edith and her sister, Margot) relocated to Amsterdam as Germany was becoming increasingly controlled by the Nazis. Chronicling her life from 1942 to 1944, her first-person written recounts have provided the world with the immediate thoughts and feelings of a young Jewish girl living in Nazi-dominated Europe. To this day, she is one of the most recognisable and discussed victims of the Holocaust, and her published diary, ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’, remains immensely popular around the world. Annelise Marie Frank was born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany.

What happened to anne frank