The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is the museum at Prinsengracht 263, the building in which Anne Frank, her family and four others hid from the German occupation between July 1942 and August 1944. The hiding place, the secret annex (Achterhuis) at the back of the building, has been preserved substantially as it was found at the arrest of the eight inhabitants on 4 August 1944. The museum opened on 3 May 1960 and is now one of the most-visited museums in Europe, with around 1.3 million visitors per year before the COVID-19 pandemic. It is, with the Anne Frank Diary itself, the principal site through which non-specialist visitors first encounter the Holocaust.
The building and the hiding
The building at Prinsengracht 263 had been the premises of Otto Frank’s spice and pectin business, Opekta, since the late 1930s. The secret annex was a four-room space at the back of the building, accessed through a doorway concealed behind a movable bookcase, that had been part of the original commercial premises. From 6 July 1942, when the Frank family went into hiding to avoid the deportation of their elder daughter Margot to a German labour camp, until 4 August 1944, eight people lived in the annex: Otto and Edith Frank, their daughters Margot (born 1926) and Anne (born 1929), Hermann and Auguste van Pels with their teenage son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer (a dentist who joined the household in November 1942). They were sustained throughout by the help of Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, the four Opekta employees who knew of the hiding and who supplied food, books, news and emotional support across the twenty-five months.
The eight in hiding were arrested on 4 August 1944 by SS-Hauptscharführer Karl Silberbauer, acting on a tip-off whose source has never been definitively established. They were taken to the Westerbork transit camp and from there, on 3 September 1944, on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in late October 1944 and died there of typhus in February or March 1945. Edith Frank died at Auschwitz on 6 January 1945. Hermann van Pels was killed at Auschwitz in October or November 1944. Auguste van Pels died on a death-march in spring 1945. Peter van Pels died in May 1945, days before the liberation of the Mauthausen sub-camp where he had been transferred. Fritz Pfeffer died at Neuengamme in December 1944. Otto Frank, the only adult of the eight to survive, was liberated at Auschwitz by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945.
From hiding place to museum
Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam in June 1945. Miep Gies gave him the diary, which she had found scattered on the floor of the annex after the arrest and had kept untouched in case Anne returned. He arranged for the diary’s first publication in 1947 by Contact Publishers in Amsterdam under the title Het Achterhuis. The book reached a small Dutch readership initially; the German translation in 1950, the French in 1950 and the English in 1952 brought it to a wider international audience. By the late 1950s the diary was widely read and the building at Prinsengracht 263 had become the subject of pilgrimage by readers visiting Amsterdam.
The building had been used as commercial premises after the war. By 1957 the property was at risk of demolition for redevelopment. A campaign led by Otto Frank and supported by the City of Amsterdam and several Dutch institutions secured the building’s preservation. The Anne Frank Foundation (Anne Frank Stichting) was established in 1957 to operate the property as a museum; the museum opened to the public on 3 May 1960. Otto Frank served as honorary chair of the Foundation until his death in 1980 and was substantially involved in the museum’s design and educational programme.
The museum and what visitors see
The museum preserves the front part of the building (the Opekta offices and warehouse) substantially as it was used during the occupation, and the secret annex itself substantially as it was found at the arrest. The annex is empty of the household furniture, on the deliberate decision Otto Frank made when the museum was being designed: he had wanted the empty rooms to communicate the loss directly. The walls of Anne’s room still carry the photographs and pictures she had pasted up during the hiding (covered now by perspex for preservation), including the photographs of the Hollywood actresses Norma Shearer and Ginger Rogers, the British royal family, and Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine.
The museum has been progressively expanded over the decades to include exhibition galleries on the wider Holocaust, on the diary’s reception and translation history, on Anne Frank’s own life and writing, and on the contemporary issues of antisemitism and human rights with which the Foundation has aligned its educational programme. The 2018 redevelopment substantially expanded the educational facilities and visitor route and is the most recent major change to the museum.
The wider work and the standing of the institution
The Anne Frank Foundation operates substantial educational programmes worldwide, including the travelling exhibition Anne Frank: A History for Today (which has been shown in over 60 countries since the early 1990s), school visits and teacher training, and a research programme on antisemitism, human rights and the diary’s reception. The Foundation maintains the Anne Frank archive, which includes the original diary manuscripts (held in a special climate-controlled facility within the museum), Otto Frank’s correspondence, and the foundation records.
The museum is, by visitor numbers, one of the most-visited Holocaust sites in the world and is, for many visitors who would not otherwise visit a Holocaust museum, the entry point into the subject. The diary is the most-read Holocaust text. The museum is therefore positioned at a particular point in the wider Holocaust education landscape: the place where the personal, accessible, single-family story sits in the foreground, with the wider history of the killing mostly elsewhere on the visitor’s itinerary. The relationship between this point of entry and the wider historical record is something the museum’s educational programme has worked on continuously since the 1960s.
See also
- Anne Frank
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- The Anne Frank Diary is a Forgery
- Anne Frank Died of Typhus Not Murder
- The Jews of Amsterdam
Sources
- Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Biography, Henry Holt, 1998 (revised 2013)
- Carol Ann Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, William Morrow, 2003
- David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom (eds), The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Doubleday, 1989 (the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation’s definitive scholarly edition)
- Alex Sagan, “The Anne Frank House: Memorial Site as Tourist Attraction”, in James E. Young (ed), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, Prestel, 1994
- Anne Frank Stichting, The Anne Frank House: A Museum with a Story, Anne Frank Stichting, 1999
- Anne Frank House, https://www.annefrank.org
- Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), https://www.niod.nl