The arrest of Anne Frank
Anne Frank (1929–1945) was a German-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim.
Anne Frank and her family went into hiding on 6 July 1942, when her sister Margot received a labor camp notice one day earlier. They were joined by Hermann van Pels, Anne's father Otto's business partner, his wife Auguste van Pels, and their son Peter van Pels on 13 July, seven days later. The Frank and van Pels families were joined by a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer on 17 November, four months later.
On the morning of 4 August 1944, sometime between ten and ten-thirty, a car pulled up at 263 Prinsengracht. Several figures emerged: an SS sergeant, Karl Josef Silberbauer, in full uniform, and at least three Dutch members of the Security Police, armed but in civilian clothes. It is unknown how they knew that someone was hiding there.
They arrested the eight people hiding in the annex, that included: Anne Frank, her sister Margot Frank, her mother Edith Frank, her father Otto Frank, her father's business partner, Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste van Pels, their son Peter van Pels, and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. They also arrested two people who helped hide them, which included: Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, though not Miep Gies and Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl. They took all of the valuables and cash they could find in the hiding place. After the arrest, Kugler and Kleiman were taken to a prison in Amsterdam. On 11 September 1944, they were transferred, without benefit of a trial, to a camp in Amersfoort in Holland. Kleiman, because of his poor health, was released on 18 September 1944. He remained in Amsterdam until his death in 1959.
Kugler managed to escape his imprisonment on 28 March 1945, when he and his fellow prisoners were being sent to Germany as forced laborers. He immigrated to Canada in 1959 and died there in Toronto in 1989.
Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl died in Amsterdam in 1983.
Miep Santrouschitz Gies died in Amsterdam in 2010, her husband Jan died in 1993.
Upon their arrest, the eight people who hid in the annex were first brought to a prison in Amsterdam and then transferred to Westerbork, a transit camp for Jews in the north of Holland. They were deported on 3 September 1944, in a transport to leave Westerbork, and arrived three days later in Auschwitz, Poland.
Hermann van Pels (named van Daan in Anne Frank's diary) was, according to the testimony of Otto Frank, gassed to death in Auschwitz in October or November 1944, shortly before the gas chambers were dismantled.
Auguste van Pels (named Petronella van Daan in Anne Frank's diary) was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, from there to Buchenwald, and then to Theresienstadt on 9 April 1945. She died in April or May 1945. It is certain that she did not survive, though the exact date of her death is unknown.
Peter van Pels (named van Daan in Anne Frank's diary) chose to take part in a death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in Austria on 16 January 1945, and not wait for Auschwitz to be liberated. He died in Mauthausen in April or May 1945, before the camp was liberated.
Fritz Pfeffer (named Albert Dussel in Anne Frank's diary) was transferred from either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen to Neuengamme, where he died on 20 December 1944.
Edith Frank died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 6 January 1945, from hunger and exhaustion.
Margot and Anne Frank were transported from Auschwitz in late October or early November 1944, and were brought to Bergen-Belsen near Hanover in Germany. The typhus epidemic that broke out in the winter of 1944–45, as a result of the horrendous hygienic conditions, killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot and, a few days later, Anne. They must have died in February or March 1945. The bodies of both girls were probably dumped in Bergen-Belsen's mass graves. The camp was liberated by British and American troops on 15 April 1945. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive the concentration camps. After Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops, he was transported to Amsterdam, via Odessa and Marseille. He arrived in Amsterdam on 3 June 1945, and stayed there until 1953, when he moved to Basel in Switzerland, where his sister and her family, and later his brother, lived. He married Elfriede Markovits Geiringer, originally from Vienna, who had survived Auschwitz and lost a husband and son in Mauthausen. He died on 19 August 1980.
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