Ana Frank House

On the desolate expanse of the Lüneburger Heide, the former site of the Bergen-Belsen

concentration camp, stands a small memorial to Anne and Margot Frank. Flowers and tokens of

remembrance are often left there, as if it were their grave. In reality they, like tens of thousands of

other victims of Bergen-Belsen, died at an unknown time in an unknown place.

What we know of the history of Bergen-Belsen is largely based on a few preserved archive

documents, camp diaries and testimonies of survivors, because in March 1945 the camp guards

destroyed virtually all of the camp records in order to obliterate the evidence. Moreover, the British

troops who liberated the camp burned all the barracks to the ground soon after the liberation on 15

April 1945 to prevent the spread of epidemics, so almost all traces of the camp were erased.

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In the absence of adequate documentation, it is difficult to establish the facts. The complex history of

the camp has been charted, as far as possible, by Alexandra-Eileen Wenck in her book Zwischen

Menschenhandel und Endlösung: das Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen (‘Between Human

Trafficking and Final Solution: the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp’) and by researchers from

the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. After the war, the Dutch Red Cross had the task of tracing missing

persons, or confirming their deaths, and to this end they interviewed as many survivors as possible.

The former Dutch National Bureau for War Documentation also collected eyewitness statements.

To discover the fate of his daughters, Otto Frank did something similar on a smaller scale after his

return to Amsterdam. He tracked down survivors who had been in the same camps as Anne and

Margot. On 29 October 1945 he wrote to Nanette Blitz, a former classmate of Anne who was also a

fellow inmate of the camps: ‘Did you also see them in the last days, when they were sick? I would be

very grateful to hear something more from you about this’. Nanette had heard from a fellow camp

inmate that Anne and Margot arrived in Bergen-Belsen on 3 November 1944. She wrote to tell Otto

Frank this, and added: ‘I was not in their barracks, but I often visited them.’ These visits continued

until January 1945. In combination with the scarce camp diaries and administrative documents, such

memories can provide valuable information.

The Anne Frank House has carried out new research into the last months of Anne Frank and her

sister Margot, with the aim of gathering more information on their time in Bergen-Belsen and their

deaths. Official documents place their death on 31 March 1945, but where does this date come

from? The archives of the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen and the

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