PAINFUL DEATH OF ANNE FRANK HARD TO WATCH JJ

She was 15 years old. She had never hurt anyone. She had done nothing wrong except being born Jewish. And the most powerful war machine in human history hunted her down, dragged her from her hiding place, and sentenced her to die. This is not just a story about Anne Frank. This is the story of how the Nazi regime systematically destroyed an innocent girl.

And how the words Anne wrote in secret became a weapon that outlived every single person who tried to silence her. Before we go further, if you’re new to Untold War Story, this channel exists to make sure these stories are never forgotten. Hit subscribe right now because what you’re about to hear is one of the most devastating and important stories of the entire Second World War.

May 10th, 1940, the Netherlands. At 3:55 in the morning, without any declaration of war, Nazi Germany launched a full-scale invasion of Holland. German paratroopers dropped from the sky, seizing bridges and airfields. The Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam so ferociously that 800 civilians died in a single afternoon, and 78,000 people were left homeless overnight.

When Germany threatened to do the same to the city of Utrecht, the Dutch military had no choice. They surrendered on May 15th, just 5 days after the invasion began. The Nazis now owned the Netherlands, and for 140,000 Jews living in that country, life would never be the same again. Among them was an 11-year-old girl named Annelies Marie Frank, known to everyone simply as Anne.

Anne was born on June 12th, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany to Otto and Edith Frank. She had an older sister named Margot, 3 years her senior. By all accounts, Anne was the livelier of the two, talkative, curious, dramatic, and obsessed with Hollywood movie stars. She taped pictures of Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin to her bedroom walls.

She dreamed of becoming a famous writer and journalist. She had a laugh that people remembered for decades. The Frank family had originally lived a comfortable, assimilated life in Frankfurt. They were liberal Jews, well-integrated into German society with friends of all religions and backgrounds. But on January 30th, 1933, everything changed.

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Within months, the Nazi regime began stripping Jewish citizens of their rights, banning them from public life, confiscating businesses, and establishing the first concentration camps for political prisoners, homosexuals, and anyone the regime classified as an enemy.

Otto Frank saw the writing on the wall early. In late 1933, he moved his family to Amsterdam and set up a branch of the Opekta company, which traded in pectin, a natural substance used for making jam. By 1938, he had expanded into a second business called Pectacon, dealing in herbs and spices. The Franks built a new life.

Anne and Margot enrolled in Dutch schools, made friends, and thrived. Otto even tried to move the family to the United States or Great Britain. He applied for American visas multiple times. The applications were denied. That bureaucratic rejection would cost them everything. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, their anti-Jewish laws followed like a shadow.

Jewish civil servants were fired from their jobs. Jewish-owned businesses were seized or forcibly handed over. Jews were banned from parks, cinemas, swimming pools, and restaurants. They could not ride bicycles. They could not use public transport. They were forbidden from attending non-Jewish schools. Anne, a girl who had always been surrounded by friends and laughter, was now forced to transfer to a Jewish-only school.

She couldn’t visit the cinema where she and her friends used to spend weekend afternoons. She couldn’t go to the ice cream parlor on the corner. Then, on April 29th, 1942, came the order that humiliated an entire people. Every Jew in the Netherlands was required to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing at all times.

Anyone caught without it would be arrested on the spot. The deportations began that same summer. Trains loaded with Dutch Jews began rolling east toward the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor. Of the 140,000 Jews who had been living in the Netherlands at the start of the war, 107,000 were deported. Only 5,000 came home.

Otto Frank understood exactly what those trains meant. He began quietly preparing a hiding place. June 12th, 1942, Anne Frank turned 13 years old. Her parents gave her a red and white checkered diary, which she immediately began filling with her thoughts, dreams, and fears. She called it her best friend. She had no idea it would one day be read by millions of people in over 70 languages.

Three weeks later, the world collapsed. On July 5th, 1942, Margot received an official call-up notice ordering her to report for a so-called labor camp in Germany. Otto and Edith knew the truth. Friends and acquaintances who had been sent to those camps had never come back. The family did not hesitate for a single moment.

The next morning in the pouring rain, the Frank family put on every piece of clothing they owned because carrying suitcases would attract attention and walked to Prinsengracht 263, the building where Otto’s business operated. Behind a movable bookcase on the third floor was a hidden door. Behind that door was a cramped, dark set of rooms that would become their world for the next 2 years.

They called it the Secret Annex. One week later, the Van Pels family joined them, Hermann, Auguste, and their 16-year-old son Peter, who would eventually share a tender first kiss with Anne in the attic of the hiding place. In November, they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend. Eight people, three floors, one bookcase between them and death.

Six helpers on the outside kept them alive, bringing food, clothing, books, and news from the world. Among them was Miep Gies, who became one of the most courageous ordinary people of the entire war. Life in the Annex followed strict existing rules. From 8:30 in the morning until 5:30 in the evening, complete silence was required because workers in the warehouse below had no idea anyone was living above them.

No footsteps, no flushing toilets, no raised voices. The smallest sound could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Anne wrote obsessively in her diary to fill the suffocating silence. She wrote about boredom and fear, about her complicated feelings for Peter van Pels, about her arguments with her mother, about her dream of one day publishing a book about their life in hiding.

She wrote with a maturity and self-awareness that stunned everyone who later read her words. They listened secretly to Radio Oranje, a BBC broadcast where Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who had escaped to England when the Germans invaded, spoke to her occupied nation 34 times throughout the war. Those radio broadcasts were one of the only threads connecting the people in hiding to the outside world.

For 761 days they survived. Then came August 4th, 1944. At around 10:00 in the morning, Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Silberbauer arrived at Prinsengracht 263 following an anonymous tip. To this day, the identity of the informant has never been definitively confirmed. One of the darkest unsolved mysteries of the Holocaust.

The hiding place was discovered. All eight people in the secret annex were arrested. Silberbauer confiscated their money and valuables. He tossed papers and notebooks carelessly across the floor. After the eight prisoners were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, two of the helpers, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, returned to the empty annex and gathered Anne’s scattered diary pages, notebooks, and manuscripts before the Nazis could take them.

They had no idea what those pages would one day mean to the world. From Amsterdam, the eight prisoners were transported to the Westerbork transit camp. They were put in the punishment barracks. The men and women were separated during the day, though Otto was able to spend evenings with Edith, Margot, and Anne. On September 3rd, 1944, the very last transport train to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz, all eight were loaded into cattle wagons alongside more than a thousand other prisoners.

The journey lasted three days, no proper food, almost no water. One barrel serving as a shared toilet for an entire wagon packed with human beings. Anne was 15 years old. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, SS doctors conducted their infamous selection on the platform. Around 350 people from Anne’s transport were sent immediately to the gas chambers.

They were murdered within hours of arriving. Anne, Margot, and their mother Edith were sent to the women’s labor camp. Otto was sent to the men’s camp. He would never see his daughters again. In early November 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. Edith stayed up behind at Auschwitz, where she died of starvation and disease on January 6th, 1945, just 3 weeks before Soviet forces liberated the camp.

Bergen-Belsen was, by every account, a place of absolute horror. There was no running water, almost no food. The camp was so catastrophically overcrowded that prisoners slept sitting upright on the floor in freezing temperatures, sharing just 200 blankets among tens of thousands of people. Between January and April 1945, the average daily death rate was between 250 and 300 prisoners.

On one single transport of 300 inmates, over 500 arrived already dead. A typhus epidemic tore through the camp. Anne’s childhood friend Nanette Blitz, who survived the Holocaust, encountered Anne at Bergen-Belsen during this period. She later described Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering. Anne told her that she believed both her parents were dead, and that she no longer wished to go on living.

But in the same breath, she also said she hoped to one day publish a book based on her diary once the war ended. A survivor named Gina Turgel, who worked in the camp hospital, remembered seeing Anne near the end. She described her as delirious, terrible, and burning up with fever. Gina brought Anne water to wash with, a small heartbreaking act of human kindness in the middle of hell.

Margot Frank died first. She fell from her bunk in her weakened state and the physical shock killed her. Anne died one day later. Both sisters died in February 1945. The camp was liberated by British forces on April 15th, 1945, just weeks after Anne drew her last breath. She was 15 years old.

Otto Frank was liberated from Auschwitz on January 27th, 1945. The only member of the secret annex to survive the war. He made his way back to the Netherlands. On the journey, he learned that Edith had died. He held onto hope for his daughters. He returned to Amsterdam on June 3rd, 1945. Nine days before what would have been Anne’s 16th birthday.

One month later, he received confirmation that Anne and Margot were gone. Miep Gies placed Anne’s diary in his hands. Otto later said he had no idea how much his daughter had been capable of. He read her words and discovered a mind and a voice he had never fully known. He read about her dreams to become a writer. He read about her determination that her diary would one day be published.

He made sure it was. In 1947, the first 3,000 copies of Anne’s diary were published in Dutch. Since then, it has been translated into more than 70 languages and has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. In 1960, the building at Prinsengracht 263 became the Anne Frank House Museum, where visitors can still walk through the hidden rooms, see the movie star cutouts still on the walls, and stand before her original diary under glass.

Anne Frank, a teenager whose only crime was being Jewish, became one of the most powerful voices against hatred and discrimination that the world has ever known. The Nazis tried to erase her. Instead, [clears throat] she became immortal. This has been Untold War Story, the channel dedicated to the stories history must never forget.

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