August 4, 1944

August 4, 1944, was the date the hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht was discovered and its occupants arrested. The raid ended more than two years of concealment in the Secret Annex, separated the residents from the helpers who had sustained them, and set in motion the preservation of Anne Frank’s diaries and their later publication.

Causes and Context

The arrest came after a long period in which anti-Jewish decrees had progressively narrowed the lives of Jews in the Netherlands: restrictions governed movement, shopping, transport, education, and public activities, while Jews were required to wear a yellow star. In June 1942, the Frank family had planned to go into hiding on July 16; Margot’s call-up notice forced them to bring that plan forward by ten days. The hiding place was in Otto Frank’s office building, where a small circle of staff knew of the family’s arrival while warehouse workers were kept uninformed.

The concealed household relied on secrecy and strict routines, but its safety remained vulnerable. During an earlier break-in, Peter found the warehouse and street doors open; the intruders took cashboxes, blank checkbooks, and coupons for 330 pounds of sugar. After a later security scare, the residents faced tighter rules: Peter was assigned a night patrol, a window could no longer be opened, nighttime toilet flushing was prohibited, and a barricade was planned from the white bedsteads. These incidents show the precarious practical conditions surrounding the Annex, but the account does not establish that either burglary led to the eventual raid.

The Raid and Arrests

On the morning of August 4, between ten and ten-thirty, a car stopped at 263 Prinsengracht. An SS sergeant, Karl Josef Silberbauer, arrived in uniform with at least three armed Dutch members of the Security Police in civilian clothes. The account says someone must have informed on the residents, but does not identify that person.

The officers arrested all eight people hiding in the Annex, as well as Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, two of the helpers. Miep Gies and Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl were not arrested. The officers also took the valuables and cash they could find in the hiding place. The roundup therefore reached beyond the concealed household itself, striking at two of the people who had helped maintain it while leaving two other helpers outside custody.

Immediate Aftermath

Kugler and Kleiman were taken to a prison in Amsterdam. On September 11, they were transferred without trial to a camp in Amersfoort. Kleiman, whose health was poor, was released on September 18 and remained in Amsterdam until his death in 1959. Kugler escaped imprisonment on March 28, 1945, while he and fellow prisoners were being sent to Germany for forced labor; he later immigrated to Canada in 1955.

The raid also transformed the status of Anne’s diary. Her final entry is dated August 1, two days before the arrests. After the residents were taken away, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found the diaries scattered on the floor. Miep put them in a desk drawer for safekeeping and, after it became clear Anne had died, gave them unread to Otto Frank. The date thus marks both the end of Anne’s recorded life in hiding and the beginning of the manuscripts’ survival through others.

From Private Record to Public History

Before the arrest, Anne had begun revising her diary after hearing Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, call for the collection of wartime eyewitness accounts. She planned to make a book from her diary, editing passages and adding material from memory while continuing her original record. The arrest stopped that work in the setting where it had been written, but did not erase the two versions she had produced.

After the war, Otto Frank decided to fulfill his daughter’s wish to publish. He selected material from Anne’s original and revised diaries for a shorter edition, while later editions presented the manuscripts more fully. The arrests therefore have a lasting significance beyond the immediate destruction of the household’s safety: they form the dividing line between Anne’s own work on her diary and the subsequent chain of preservation, selection, authentication, and publication through which it became a public testimony.