Allied bombing of Amsterdam in 1943

Allied bombing of Amsterdam in 1943 appears in Anne Frank’s diary as part of the war’s increasingly immediate presence around the Secret Annex: the Carlton Hotel was destroyed, and two British planes carrying firebombs hit a German Officers’ Club at the corner of Vijzelstraat and Singel. Anne connects the damage in Amsterdam to a growing pattern of air strikes on German cities and to the Annex residents’ loss of sleep, while the diary’s publication history shows how her account later reached readers in several edited and expanded forms.

The bombing in Anne’s account

Anne records the destruction of the Carlton Hotel and the attack on the German Officers’ Club at Vijzelstraat and Singel as concrete signs of the expanding air war. Her entry does not describe the bombing as an isolated episode: she notes that air strikes on German cities were increasing daily and that the residents had not had a good night’s rest in a long time. The juxtaposition makes the war’s reach legible from inside the Annex, where distant military developments intruded into the rhythms of daily life through the continuing disruption of sleep.

The diary also places the bombing amid other pressures in hiding. In the same passage Anne describes poor meals, including unbuttered bread and ersatz coffee for breakfast, and a monotonous lunch of greens and potatoes. These details do not establish that the bombing caused the food shortage, but they show how the account sets military danger beside the ordinary privations of concealed life. The air war’s significance lies partly in this proximity: the residents remained hidden, yet the surrounding city and the wider conflict repeatedly pressed into their limited, carefully managed routine.

The diary as a record of wartime knowledge

The bombing account belongs to a diary Anne kept from June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944. She first wrote for herself. In 1944, after hearing Gerrit Bolkestein of the Dutch government in exile call on the radio for postwar accounts of life under German occupation, she decided to prepare a book based on her diary. She began revising the original, improving passages, leaving some out, and adding material from memory, even as she continued to keep the first diary.

The distinction matters when reading the bombing entry as testimony. Anne’s diary records a hiding person’s view of events around her, not a comprehensive military account. The foreword explains that the first, unedited diary is called version a and the rewritten diary version b. The published text therefore has a history of composition as well as a history of war: Anne’s own revisions sought to shape a future book, and subsequent editors made further selections.

Publication and the record’s afterlife

After the eight people in the Secret Annex were arrested on August 4, 1944, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found Anne’s diaries on the floor and Miep put them away unread. After the war, when Anne was known to be dead, Miep gave the papers to Otto Frank. He decided to publish his daughter’s work, combining material from versions a and b in a shorter text, version c. His choices reflected the limits of the 1947 publication: the book had to fit a publisher’s series, passages about sexuality were omitted, and some unflattering remarks about his wife and the other residents were left out.

In 1980, Otto willed the manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. Following challenges to the diary’s authenticity, the Institute conducted a thorough investigation; after the diary was established as genuine, it published the versions together with research on the family, the arrest and deportation, and the handwriting and materials. The later definitive edition, prepared by Mirjam Pressler for the Anne Frank-Fonds, supplemented Otto’s selection with passages from versions a and b and contained about 30 percent more material. The bombing entry thus survives not only as a moment in Anne’s account of life under occupation, but within a layered documentary record shaped by her revisions and by postwar editorial decisions.

From the occupied city to deportation

The wider chronology makes clear how sharply the residents’ temporary refuge was bounded. Following their arrest, the eight were taken first to a prison in Amsterdam and then to Westerbork, the transit camp in the north of the Netherlands. On September 3, 1944, they were deported in the last transport to leave Westerbork; three days later they arrived at Auschwitz. That later fate does not turn the earlier bombing entry into a direct account of their arrest, but it gives the diary’s record of disrupted nights and a city under attack its tragic historical frame: the people writing and listening from concealment remained exposed to a war whose consequences extended far beyond the Annex.