Acting on a tip whose source remains disputed, Nazi officer Karl Silberbauer led a raid on the secret annex above a canal-side warehouse where the Frank family and four others had hidden since 1942. All eight were deported; only Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Anne's diary, recovered and published afterward, became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.
For two years, eight people lived in cramped silence above Otto Frank's spice business at Prinsengracht 263, dependent on a handful of Dutch helpers who smuggled food and news. Anne, a teenager with sharp wit and a diary given to her on her 13th birthday, chronicled the claustrophobia, family friction, and flickers of hope in prose so vivid it later stunned the world.
The raid itself took only minutes. Silberbauer, an Austrian SS officer, and Dutch collaborators stormed the building; miep Gies, one of the family's protectors, later recalled the eerie calm with which the residents were led away. Who betrayed the annex has never been conclusively proven, despite decades of investigation and several competing theories.
Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, weeks before liberation. Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam to find her diary preserved by Miep Gies and published it in 1947 as 'The Diary of a Young Girl,' ensuring her voice outlasted the silence the Nazis intended.