On the morning of August 4, 1944, Dutch police found eight people hiding behind a revolving bookcase in an Amsterdam warehouse, ending 761 days in hiding; the diary one of them left scattered on the office floor became one of the most translated books ever printed.

By the summer of 1944, eight people had spent 761 days above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam, rationing food and the sound of their own footsteps. What they did not have, come the morning of August 4, was any more time.

How did the arrest happen?

Between 10:30 and 11 a.m., a car pulled up outside Prinsengracht 263. Leading the group was Karl Josef Silberbauer, an SS-Hauptscharführer attached to the Sicherheitsdienst, with several Dutch detective sergeants under him. Downstairs, a warehouse worker named Willem van Maaren pointed them toward the office. There they found Victor Kugler, one of the businessmen who had kept the company running as a cover, and brought him along as they searched the building floor by floor.

The bookcase gave nothing away. It had been built to swing outward on a hinge, mounted flush against the doorframe of a back office, and by design it looked like exactly what an ordinary storeroom shelf looks like: crowded and dull. Someone in the search party found the catch anyway.

Behind it, a staircase led up to rooms where eight people had been living since July 1942: the Frank family, the van Pels family, and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. Otto Frank later recalled the moment a stranger appeared in the doorway with a pistol raised and ordered everyone's hands up while a child's lessons still lay open on the table. Silberbauer emptied Otto's briefcase onto the floor to make room for the jewelry and cash inside it; the loose papers he dumped out were pages from his younger daughter's diary.

What happened to the people who helped them hide?

Two of the four office staff who had spent two years smuggling in food and false ration cards were arrested alongside the family: Kugler and Johannes Kleiman. The other two, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, were questioned in the office and released. Gies later said she recognized Silberbauer's accent as Austrian and offered him money to look away; he refused it and told her, not unkindly, to stay out of it.

All eight from the annex and both helpers were taken to Gestapo headquarters on the Euterpestraat that afternoon for interrogation, then split between holding cells and, within days, the transit camp at Westerbork. From there, on September 3, a train carried them east: the last transport to leave the Netherlands for Auschwitz.

What became of the diary?

Anne had received the diary itself as a birthday present on June 12, 1942, three weeks before the family went into hiding, and had kept it (along with school notebooks and loose sheets she filled once the diary ran out) for the length of their confinement. After the arrest, Gies and Voskuijl went back up to the ransacked annex and gathered what was scattered across the floor of Anne's room. Gies did not read it. She locked the papers in a desk drawer downstairs and waited to see who, if anyone, came back.

Only Otto Frank came back.

Edith Frank died at Auschwitz in January 1945. Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where both died of typhus within weeks of each other in the camp's final winter; the exact dates are estimated, not recorded, since camp administration had broken down by then. Otto Frank was liberated at Auschwitz by Soviet troops and made his way back to Amsterdam by June 1945, where Miep Gies handed him the notebooks she had never opened.

Why did he publish it?

Otto Frank had not planned to. He read the diary that summer, once he had confirmed both daughters were dead, and began sharing passages with friends who urged him to seek a publisher. He had one other push toward that decision: in March 1944, a member of the Dutch government-in-exile named Gerrit Bolkestein had broadcast an appeal on Radio Oranje asking citizens to preserve their diaries and letters as material for a postwar history of the occupation. Anne had heard the broadcast in hiding and began revising her own entries with an eye toward eventual readers, giving the manuscript a title: "Het Achterhuis," the annex behind the house.

Otto Frank worked from both versions, Anne's original diary and her revision, to assemble the text Contact Publishing released in Amsterdam on June 25, 1947. The first printing ran to 3,036 copies and sold out. An English translation followed in 1952 under the title "The Diary of a Young Girl."

Who informed on them?

That question has never been settled. Historians and at least one retired FBI agent have spent decades on it, and a 2022 cold-case investigation named an Amsterdam notary, Arnold van den Bergh, as the likely source, based largely on an anonymous wartime note found among a detective's papers. The Anne Frank House itself pushed back within days, saying the evidence fell well short of proof and that the case remains open in every meaningful sense.

What the diary became

The diary has since appeared in more than seventy languages and sold well past thirty million copies, making it one of the most widely read works of nonfiction of the last century. The building at Prinsengracht 263 now draws over a million visitors a year, most of whom climb the same stairs behind the same bookcase to stand in rooms that have been kept largely bare on purpose, at Otto Frank's own request, so nothing distracts from what happened there. Each year brings new translations into languages the 1947 edition never reached, and new arguments over how the story should be taught to readers who were not alive for any part of the century that produced it.

Sources

• Anne Frank House, "Reconstruction: The Arrest of the People in Hiding" (annefrank.org)
• Anne Frank House, "Was Anne Frank Betrayed?" (annefrank.org)
• Anne Frank House, "Statement: Anne Frank House and Cold Case Investigation," January 17, 2022
• Rosemary Sullivan, "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" (2022)
• CNN, "Cold-case investigation names surprise suspect in Anne Frank's betrayal," January 17, 2022
• Anne Frank House, "Otto Frank and the Translations of Het Achterhuis" (research.annefrank.org)