AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS, 26 October 2016: Anne Frank handwriting in her famous diary, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Amsterdam. Photo licensed to War History Network. (Click to enlarge)

Right: Anne Frank in 1940, while at 6. Montessorischool, Niersstraat 41-43, Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Photograph by unknown photographer. Photograph in the Public Domain. (Click image to expand)

Would it have made a difference to SS officials in 1944 that Otto Frank--Anne Frank's father--served Germany in the First World War as a lieutenant? Otto served in an artillery unit on the Western Front and later with the German infantry at the Battle of the Somme. Following the Somme, he was made an officer and served at the Battle of Cambrai. To the casual observer of history, one would think this man and his family would not have been deported from the Netherlands upon their discovery. But it did happen. Otto, his wife Edith, their two daughters Margot and Anne were betrayed and given up to the SS in August 1944.

Left: The memorial to Anne and Margot Frank at Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany. It is believed that Anne and Margot were buried with countless other Holocaust victims (by the Germans) in a mass grave beneath the memorial. Photograph licensed to War History Network. (Click image to expand)

The Frank family was initially sent to Westerbork and finally to Auschwitz Birkenau where Otto was separated from his family. Margot and her younger sister Anne were transferred on 1 November 1944 to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where both ultimately died in early 1945--either February or March of that year, is the best estimate according to survivors.

BBC Video: Anne Frank Betrayal Suspect Indentified

Anne's legacy has survived and grown over the decades that followed the Holocaust and Second World War through her diary, which was published in 1947 with her father's help. Otto was the family's only survivor, but he made sure Ann's writing would live on. The first Dutch edition was titled Het Achterhuis or "The Back House." The work was later translated into English as The Diary of a Young Girl.

Suggested reading: The Diary of a Young Girl by Ann Frank (still published today, in many formats). In 2022, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation was published by HarperCollins Publishers. Written by Rosemary Sullivan, the author sheds new light into the SS's discovery of the Frank family's hiding. The New York Times provided their review in January, 2022.