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Timeline of Anne Frank
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Anne Frank
Anne Frank The diarist hid from the Nazis with her family in a secluded space for two years and one month (761 days) in 1942–44.

Timeline of Anne Frank

Written by
Shatarupa Chaudhuri
Shatarupa Chaudhuri is a deputy managing editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica, bringing over 15 years of editorial experience in news media and publishing.
Shatarupa Chaudhuri
Fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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History

Annelies Marie Frank, better known as Anne Frank, was a German Jewish girl who hid in a building with her family for two years during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Her diary, written during those years, became a classic of war literature.

1929

1933

Early days of power
Early days of powerAdolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, in 1932, shortly before he became chancellor of Germany.

  • January 30: Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party in Germany, is offered the chancellorship of the country by Pres. Paul von Hindenburg.
  • February 27: The Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin is set on fire. Hitler will use the incident to pass emergency laws that suppress his political rivals.
  • March 22: Seven weeks after Hitler is appointed chancellor, prisoners arrive at the first Nazi concentration camp, which has been established outside Dachau, Germany, near Munich.
  • March: Amid rising political tension, the Franks move in with Margot and Anne’s grandmother, Alice Frank, in Frankfurt.
  • July–August: Otto moves to Amsterdam to run the Dutch operations of the German company Opekta as Germany comes under Hitler’s absolute dictatorship.
  • September–December: Edith joins her husband in Amsterdam in September, and Margot follows in December. Anne stays on with her grandmother in Frankfurt.

1934

  • February: Anne arrives in Amsterdam, joining the rest of her family.
  • April 9: Anne begins her education with kindergarten at the Sixth Montessori School, which is close to her home. She will continue her primary schooling there until 1941.

1935

1938

  • November 9–10: Nazis launch an attack on Jews across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland (then a part of Czechoslovakia with an ethnic German majority) and take many to concentration camps. They destroy Jewish-owned businesses and homes as well as synagogues. The pogroms will become known as Kristallnacht (German: “Night of Broken Glass”), referring to the buildings’ shattered windows.

1939

1940

  • May 10: Germany attacks the Netherlands.
  • May 14: Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands escapes to London. The main body of Dutch troops surrenders.

1941

  • February: Following months of increasing restrictions on Jews in the Netherlands, and deportation of more than 400 Jews to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, people in Amsterdam launch a workers’ strike.
  • October: Anne transfers to the Jewish Lyceum because, under new laws, Jewish students are not allowed to go to the same schools as non-Jews.
  • November 25: The Franks, who have not become Dutch citizens, lose their German citizenship as the Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich declares that German Jews living outside the country will no longer be considered citizens.

1942

  • January 20: High-ranking German officials meet at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin to discuss implementing the “final solution” to the so-called “Jewish question”—a plan for the mass murder of European Jews.
  • April 29: All Jews in the Netherlands are ordered to wear a “Jewish star”—a yellow cloth Star of David marked with the word Jood (Dutch: “Jew”)—when in public.
  • June 12: Anne gets a red-and-white plaid diary as a present for her 13th birthday. That day she begins writing in the book: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”
  • July 5: Margot, age 16, receives a summons to report for duty, supposedly at a forced-labor camp. The family does not comply with the summons.
  • July 6: After leaving false clues about a hasty escape to Switzerland, the Franks go into hiding in the backroom office and warehouse of Otto’s food products business at Prinsengracht (Dutch: “Prince’s Canal”) 263. Having anticipated the move, Otto set up the “secret annex” that spring. Their friends the van Pels family will join them in a week. Anne refers to them as van Daan in her diary.
  • June 20: In her diary Anne mentions the yellow star and other requirements and restrictions the Jews are facing: “Jews must wear a yellow star, Jews must hand in their bicycles, Jews are banned from trams and are forbidden to drive. Jews are only allowed to do their shopping between three and five o’clock and then only in shops which bear the placard ‘Jewish shop.’ Jews must be indoors by eight o’clock and cannot even sit in their own gardens after that hour. Jews are forbidden to visit theatres, cinemas, and other places of entertainment. Jews may not take part in public sports. Swimming baths, tennis courts, hockey fields, and other sports grounds are all prohibited to them. Jews may not visit Christians. Jews must go to Jewish schools, and many more restrictions of a similar kind.”
  • November 16: German Jewish dentist Fritz Pfeffer moves in with the Franks and the van Pelses in the secret annex. In her diary, Anne uses the pseudonym Albert Dussel for Pfeffer.

1943

  • March 27: Anne writes about the orders that have been issued forbidding Jews to stay in a number of provinces in the Netherlands: “Rauter, one of the German big shots, has made a speech. ‘All Jews must be out of the German-occupied countries before 1st July.’
These wretched people are sent to filthy slaughter-houses like a herd of sick, neglected cattle. But I won’t talk about it, I only get nightmares from such thoughts.”

1944

  • March: After learning of plans to collect diaries and other papers to chronicle people’s wartime experiences, Anne begins to rework her diary for possible publication as a novel titled Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”).
  • June 6: The Allied powers (a coalition of countries that oppose the Axis powers led by Germany, Italy, and Japan) breach Hitler’s Fortress Europe (on the most celebrated D-Day of the war) when 160,000 troops invade Normandy, France, in a massive amphibious and airborne assault. Anne writes on the same day: “ ‘This is D-day,’ came the announcement over the British Radio and quite rightly, ‘This is the day.’ The invasion has begun!
Great commotion in the ‘Secret Annexe’! Would the long-awaited liberation that has been talked of so much, but which still seems too wonderful, too much like a fairy-tale, ever come true? Could we be granted victory this year, 1944?”
  • August 1: Anne writes her last diary entry.
  • August 4: The Gestapo (the political police of Nazi Germany), which received a tip from Dutch informers, discovers the secret annex. All the inhabitants are taken into custody.
  • August 8: The group is conveyed to Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands.
  • September 3: On the last transport to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz, the group is taken to the concentration and extermination camp complex in German-occupied Poland. Otto is separated from the family and will never see them again.
  • November 1: Margot and Anne, along with Auguste van Pels, are taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.

1945

  • January 6: Edith dies at Auschwitz.
  • January 27: Otto is found hospitalized at Auschwitz when it is liberated by Soviet troops.
  • February or March: Just weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen (April 15), Margot and Anne die at the camp in a typhus epidemic.
  • April 30: As Red Army forces close in, Hitler commits suicide in his bunker in Berlin. Two days later German Adm. Karl Dönitz will proclaim himself president of the Third Reich.
  • June 3: Otto, the sole survivor of the Frank family, returns to Amsterdam and receives Anne’s diary from Miep Gies, a Dutch woman who smuggled food and supplies to the secret annex. Gies preserved the diary after the arrest of the secret annex group.
  • September 2: World War II officially ends, upon Japan’s formal surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

1947

  • June 25: Anne’s diary is published in Dutch with the title she chose: Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”).

1952

  • June: Having been translated into English, the first American edition of the diary is published, under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It includes an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady of the U.S.

1960

  • May 3: The Anne Frank House museum officially opens to the public at the site of the secret annex.
Shatarupa Chaudhuri