Neuengamme enters the book through the fate of Fritz Pfeffer: after his arrest with the other residents of the Secret Annex and deportation from Westerbork to Auschwitz, he was transferred to Neuengamme, where he died on December 20, 1944. The camp is named in a concise postwar account rather than described as a setting of scenes; its significance lies in the precise point it marks in Pfeffer’s route and in the record of the residents’ dispersed deaths.

Place in the Deportation Sequence

The account establishes the sequence after the arrest of the eight people hiding in the Secret Annex. They were first taken to a prison in Amsterdam and then to Westerbork, the transit camp in the north of Holland. On September 3, 1944, they left Westerbork in its last transport and arrived three days later at Auschwitz in Poland. Neuengamme appears later in the chronology, not as their shared destination but as the camp where Pfeffer was held after a further transfer.

Fritz Pfeffer’s Transfer and Death

Pfeffer, identified in the diary under the pseudonym Albert Dussel, died at Neuengamme on December 20, 1944. The account does not establish the exact route by which he arrived: he had been transferred from either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen. That uncertainty is retained rather than resolved, while the date and place of death are stated directly. Neuengamme thus marks the final known destination in the account of Pfeffer’s deportation and death.

A Dispersed Aftermath

The postwar chronology traces the Annex residents through separate routes after Auschwitz. Hermann van Pels was killed there in October or November 1944, according to Otto Frank’s testimony; Edith Frank died at Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. Pfeffer’s transfer to Neuengamme belongs to this widening geography of persecution, in which the group’s shared life in hiding gave way to distinct destinations and outcomes. The account records the divergence without presenting Neuengamme as a place visited or described by Anne.

Record and Narrative Significance

The camp’s brief mention belongs to the book’s documentary framing as well as its narrative aftermath. The foreword explains that the diary passed through Anne’s original writing, her own edited version, and Otto Frank’s postwar selection; a later critical edition assembled the versions and included research into the family’s arrest and deportation. Against that layered history, the short statement about Pfeffer supplies a specific endpoint—Neuengamme, December 20, 1944—while preserving a gap in the transfer record. The place name makes visible the wider system of deportation, but the evidence offered here remains deliberately limited to Pfeffer’s route and death.