Anne Frank Betrayed: Nazis Storm the Secret Annexe

German police climbed the stairs to a hidden annex behind a bookcase in an Amsterdam warehouse on the morning of August 4, 1944, and arrested the eight people who had been living in secret for over two years. Among them was a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank, whose diary would become the most widely read personal account of the Holocaust. SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer led the raid after receiving a tip from an informer whose identity has never been conclusively established despite decades of investigation. The Frank family — Otto, Edith, and daughters Margot and Anne — had gone into hiding on July 6, 1942, along with the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. They survived in the cramped space above Otto Frank's pectin and spice business, supplied by a small group of trusted Dutch employees including Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Anne documented their confinement, her fears, her adolescent emotions, and her observations about human nature in a diary she called "Kitty." After arrest, the eight were sent to Westerbork transit camp and then deported to Auschwitz on the last transport to leave the Netherlands. The men and women were separated on the platform. Anne and Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where both died of typhus in February or March 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces. Of the eight people hidden in the annex, only Otto Frank survived the war. Miep Gies had gathered Anne's scattered papers from the annex floor after the arrest, intending to return them. She gave the diary to Otto Frank after confirming that Anne had not survived. Published in 1947 as "Het Achterhuis" and eventually translated into more than 70 languages, the diary gave a human face to six million murders, ensuring that one teenager's voice would outlast the regime that tried to silence her.