Anne Frank Died of Typhus Not Murder

Anne Frank did die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945. The denier framing presents this as if it disproved the Holocaust, on the implicit assumption that disease deaths cannot be murders. The framing collapses on contact with what actually happened to Anne Frank between her arrest at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam on 4 August 1944 and her death in Bergen-Belsen approximately seven months later. She was arrested for being Jewish, deported to Auschwitz on the last transport from Westerbork on 3 September 1944, selected on arrival to live (her eight-year-old sister Margot also; their mother Edith was selected for the gas chamber and died there), kept in conditions designed to produce mortality, then transferred to Bergen-Belsen in late October 1944 where the conditions were known to be lethal. The typhus that killed her was a foreseen consequence of the regime that had detained her. Calling that “natural causes” is to misread the entire chain.

The arrest and deportation

The Frank family was arrested on 4 August 1944, after twenty-five months in hiding in the secret annexe at Prinsengracht 263. They had been betrayed (the identity of the betrayer is contested; the Anne Frank House investigation of 2016 to 2022 produced new candidates without definitive resolution). They were taken first to the Sicherheitsdienst office on Euterpestraat in Amsterdam, then to the Hauptsturmführer Willi Lages’ office, then to the Westerbork transit camp in the eastern Netherlands. They were processed at Westerbork as ordinary detainees from the punishment block (Strafblock), reflecting their status as Jews caught in hiding rather than as voluntary registrants. The Westerbork records show their arrival on 8 August 1944 and their departure on the transport of 3 September 1944, the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz before the Allied advance forced the camp’s closure. The Westerbork transport list is in the Netherlands Red Cross archive and at the NIOD.

The transport reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of 5 to 6 September 1944. The selection on the platform separated Anne and Margot from their father Otto Frank (selected for the men’s labour camp) and from their mother Edith (selected for what would shortly be the gas chamber, although she initially survived as a labour-camp inmate and died of malnutrition at Auschwitz on 6 January 1945). Anne and Margot were assigned to the women’s labour camp at Birkenau, registered, tattooed (the registration numbers survive in the Auschwitz records, although individual identification at this stage is partial), and put to work at the camp.

The Bergen-Belsen transfer

In late October 1944, with the Soviet advance approaching Auschwitz, the SS began transferring labour-camp prisoners westward. Anne and Margot Frank were on a transport from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, departing approximately 28 October 1944 and arriving approximately 1 November. Bergen-Belsen at this time was being converted from a small holding camp into a destination for evacuation transports; the population was rising rapidly without any corresponding increase in food, water or sanitary infrastructure. The conditions were known to the SS to be incompatible with prisoner survival; the camp commandant Josef Kramer was writing repeated reports to higher authority requesting additional resources and being refused.

Anne and Margot Frank survived at Bergen-Belsen for approximately three to four months. The camp records, partially surviving and reconstructed from witness testimony, indicate that they died in a typhus outbreak in late February or early March 1945, with Margot dying first and Anne dying days later. The Anne Frank House and the International Tracing Service have investigated the precise dates and have concluded that Margot died around 14 February 1945 and Anne around 18 to 28 February 1945 (the previously cited March dates have been revised by recent research). Their bodies were buried in one of the mass graves the British liberators found on 15 April 1945. The exact location of the burial is not known.

The mechanism of their deaths

The mechanism of Anne and Margot’s deaths was typhus. The medium of typhus was the conditions at Bergen-Belsen: overcrowding to approximately five times the camp’s design capacity, no clean water, no functioning sanitation, no food beyond a thin daily soup, no medical treatment, no quarantine for the sick. The camp had been deliberately operated in this state for the four months of the sisters’ detention there. The SS knew the conditions would produce typhus. The SS knew the typhus would kill prisoners in large numbers. The SS continued to send evacuation transports to the camp throughout this period, increasing the prisoner population and reducing the per-prisoner share of resources. The deaths were not a natural disaster; they were the foreseeable and foreseen consequence of an SS decision to operate the camp in this way.

The British post-liberation investigation, conducted by the British Army’s medical and intelligence officers in April and May 1945, found that approximately 35,000 prisoners had died at Bergen-Belsen in the camp’s final months, almost all from typhus, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis and starvation in conditions arranged by the SS. The investigation reported the deaths as deliberate killings by the means of arranging the lethal conditions; the British Military Court at Lüneburg in late 1945 convicted forty-five Bergen-Belsen personnel including the commandant Kramer of the war crime of producing the conditions in which the prisoners died. Eleven, including Kramer, were sentenced to death and hanged. The British court did not accept the framing that disease deaths were not killings.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that Anne Frank died of typhus rather than of the Holocaust is harmful because it asks the listener to detach the disease that killed her from the regime that had arranged the conditions of her detention. She was arrested for being Jewish, deported to Auschwitz, transferred to Bergen-Belsen, and held in conditions calibrated to produce mass mortality. The typhus was the immediate biological mechanism; the deportation, the camps and the conditions were the cause. The British Military Court that convicted the Bergen-Belsen personnel for the deaths did not accept the typhus framing as exoneration; the deniers’ use of the framing eighty years later attempts to revive a defence rejected at the time. The factual mechanism of Anne Frank’s death does not detach her from the millions of other Holocaust victims; it places her squarely among them as one of those killed by the camp system that arranged the conditions she died in.

How did Anne Frank reach Bergen-Belsen? Why were the conditions at Bergen-Belsen what they were? What did the British Military Court that tried the Bergen-Belsen staff find?

See also

• Anne Frank
• The Netherlands
• Anne Frank House Amsterdam
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• The Red Cross Reported Only 300000 Deaths
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

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Sources

• Anne Frank House Amsterdam, “How and When Did Anne Frank Die?”, with the revised dating, https://www.annefrank.org
• Westerbork Transit Camp records, Netherlands Red Cross archive and NIOD, with the transport list of 3 September 1944
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, women’s camp registration records, partial
• Bergen-Belsen Memorial archive, with the camp records reconstructed by the International Tracing Service
• Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, Routledge, 1998
• Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, contemporaneous medical reports on Bergen-Belsen, April to May 1945, Imperial War Museum and Wellcome Library
• The Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 Others (The Belsen Trial), Lüneburg, September to November 1945, full transcript published as The Belsen Trial, edited by Raymond Phillips, William Hodge, 1949
• Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, Penguin, 1999
• Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Biography, Henry Holt, 1998; revised edition 2013
• Willy Lindwer, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, Pantheon, 1991, with interviews of women who were with Anne at Bergen-Belsen
• Hannah Pick-Goslar, with Alison Leslie Gold, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend, Scholastic, 1997, with the Bergen-Belsen testimony
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Anne Frank” and “Bergen-Belsen”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org