Dan Snow's History Hit - Anne Frank's Life After Her Arrest

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Anne Frank’s diary is one of the most famous accounts of the Jewish experience during the Second World War, giving us a deeply personal glimpse into the life-in-hiding of a prolific young writer. But on the 1st August 1944, the diary abruptly ends - the Franks, van Pelses and Fritz Pfeffer had been discovered by the Gestapo. In this episode, we’ll find out what happened to them between their arrest and Anne’s tragic death in 1945. Dan is joined by Bas von Benda-Beckmann, historian and co-author of After the Annex: Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Beyond, to reconstruct Anne’s life after her arrest.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 27th of January this year we are marking Holocaust Memorial Day and as in previous years on the History Hit podcast we are going to be talking about the Holocaust. We're going to be talking about probably its most famous victim, young Anne Frank. Today I'm talking to a historian, I'm Bas von Bedebeckmann. He's a historian and researcher at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. He worked alongside Erika Prinz, Esther Goebel, and Gert-Jan Bruck to produce an extraordinary book which discusses her life after being discovered, betrayed, taken into custody by German forces. This is the story of a young girl and her family, sadly of a shrinking family, as it went from one camp to the next and ended with her death

and that of her sister within potentially hours or a couple of days of each other at the beginning of 1945. The story of Anne Frank is one that will be very familiar to many of you, but the story of her death, of her captivity, of her slave labour, is one, I think, that will be new. It's always so important to do these podcasts and to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. One German commander said during a roll call at Auschwitz to a Jewish man, even if you survive and you won't, no one will believe you. Well, thankfully, that German commander was wrong. But it's only because we continue to listen to the survivors of the Holocaust,

the accounts they've left, and historians and researchers working in this area, that we make sure he remains wrong for eternity. We do believe the horror that was meted out the Jews, Poles, Roma and other peoples during the Second World War. We believe ourselves as humans capable of it in the 1940s and we believe that we still are. That's why it matters. Here is Bas von Beda Beckman and the story of Anne Frank in captivity. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Bas, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Let's just talk briefly about the circumstances of Anne's hiding up until the point of her arrest. Where was she and what was life like for her?

Well, Anne's family had moved to the Netherlands in 1933, right? And they'd been living as so many other Jewish German refugees in Amsterdam. And then after the invasion, the German invasion of the Netherlands, life became more and more difficult and by 1942 the family decided to go into hiding. This was just at the moment when a deportation of Jews from the Netherlands had started. Her sister Margot had received a call to register for this deportation and that was the moment that the family decides to go into hiding in the office building actually of Anne's father who had a company and with the help of the non-Jewish associates of this company they went into hiding in what has become famous as the secret annex so it's a secret part of that building where they could live together as a family and also with another family, the Van Pels family, and one more person, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist, also somebody they knew, and also a refugee from Germany. And it's obviously very contested, but do we know how the Germans found Anne and her family in that hiding place?

That has been the subject for much speculation and much debate. I think we can conclude that we don't really know for sure. Otto, the only survivor, had always presumed that they somehow had been betrayed, but it's not exactly sure that that was the way it went. And I think you may be aware of that recently there was a book published which poses another hypothesis of a member of the Jewish council supposedly had known the address and betrayed the address to the Germans. But this book, which has caused a lot of controversy because the main theory is, yeah, you could say based on thin ice. It's based on assumptions which have been rightly criticized by a lot of historical experts. So I think in the end, we don't know for sure. historical expert. So I think in the end, we don't know for sure. One of my colleagues at the Anne Frank House also has posed a theory, I mean, a possibility that the German police may have found them more or less by accident because they were working on a police investigation concerning

forged food stamps. And this police investigation, many of the traces led to the annex because some of the people who were working there or associated with the company were involved in this trading in forged food stamps. So the German police more or less had this address in sight and they were investigating this. So we don't know for sure that's the way it happened, but it's also a possibility. We've always assumed that it must have been betrayal, but the truth is that we don't know for sure. What do we know about the moments of their, how were they found? Did the German authorities conduct a very thorough search of the house? They did search the house. They did question people who were

living there, but they were quite quickly there at the secret place behind the bookshelf. And then where did they take the family after they were taken into custody? The first place they went to was the headquarters of the secret police, the Sicherheitsdienst. All the people were in hiding. So the ape people were hiding and two of the helpers were questioned. And after that, the ape from the annex were brought to a regular Dutch prison. And in this prison, which was used by the Germans to collect them, but also other Jews in hiding, they were really looking for Jews in hiding very thoroughly. So they stayed there a couple of days until the cell was crowded, and then they were brought to Westerbork transit camp.

It's the most important transit camp, the central place where Jews from the Netherlands were concentrated and from which they were deported to camps in Eastern Europe. Did conditions kind of get worse through that process or were they very harsh straight away the moment they would have gone into custody? Well, the conditions in West Borg were very different from, for example, Auschwitz. In this camp, a certain sense of normality was still there. There was a hospital, there were schools, and this was done on purpose because the Germans didn't want to worry the Jews too early.

So they wanted them to feel more or less, well, secure is maybe not the right word, but not too worried in the hope that they would go along with the process. The thing, however, with Anne and her family is that because they were in hiding, they were considered to be criminal inmates and they were brought to a separate part of the camp, the criminal quarters, so to say. The conditions there were worse than in the other parts of the camp. They were harsher, there were less facilities. And of course, also they had to work there, but still, they could move around quite freely. In this camp, they would meet again with people they knew from Amsterdam.

So they would see people again. survivor later has said is that actually this moment when they were in West Borg, especially his daughters, felt more or less relieved there because they had been inside this very small space in the annex and after that in this prison for so long so that now they could move around in the open air freely and meet again people they knew. They had a sense of relief there, even though they, of course, were very afraid of what would happen to them afterwards. So that shows how miserable their hiding period must have been, that the kids could now at least get out, mingle with other kids, even if they were working in this forced labor situation.

So were Anne and the children being put to work at this point? Yes, they were, yeah. They had to work during the daytime. And they were working at a part of the camp where the prisoners had to work on recycling of batteries. So they had to knock off old fashioned batteries and different parts in different containers. It was quite hard work, but it's not the kind of fatiguing things that would happen to them later on in the process when they would come to Auschwitz camp, for example. What is also very important at this moment is that they, as a family, I mean, the women and the men were in different parts of a barrack, but they, during the evenings and after work, they could be together as a family. and after work they could be together as a family.

And that, of course, changed after they got to Auschwitz. So in a strange way, their time in Westerbork, this camp, the first camp they go to, was almost a brief respite in their journey through the German penal system. That's a very good question. I think it depends on, and this is very hard to pinpoint exactly, because some of the witness accounts we've used really stress this, like that was a kind of respite that Anne was more or less in good condition, had relatively high morals. And on the other hand, we should not forget the worry about being arrested and maybe being deported to the East in a very short time must have weighed very heavily on them.

And probably more so on the adults than on the children. Of course. Yeah, so that's such a good point. What did they know about the East? Was there information circulating about the industrial slaughter of Jewish people and others in the East? Yes, there certainly was. And we know this also from Anne's diary herself, because she writes about this, right? During her time in hiding place, they had a radio. And on this radio, they could listen to the BBC and the Dutch broadcast on the BBC. So they did hear about rumors, and they also had some access to illegal newspapers, so from the Dutch resistance, which were given to them by their helpers.

And from these sources of information, they did get a quite informed picture of what was happening. So they heard about gassing, they heard about mass murder. And of course, you have to realize that these were at that moment still considered rumors. But we also know that the people in the hiding considered them to be likely and probable. So they didn't know for sure. The real direct access to information was, of course, not available, but they thought it would be probable that they would be killed. So incredibly stressful for the adults. Does Otto Frank say that he tried to disguise that from the children?

He tended to be like a positive figure. But we also know from the diary that, especially when they were in hiding, right, these topics were discussed with the whole of the family. So they had heard about it for sure. How long were they there before they got the fateful order to move? So they arrived there at August 8, 1944. And then on September the 3rd, so after almost one month, they got the call to be deported to Auschwitz.

And this was to be the last big deportation from Westerbork to Auschwitz camp, because afterwards the war conditions didn't allow these large scale operations and deportations anymore. So they were among the last big group arriving from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Let's talk a little bit about that train journey, because the more I learn about Auschwitz, the more it strikes me that the train journey was part of the industrial process of murder. It would have been horrific. You would have been robbed of your senses, hunger, fatigue, softening you up, if you like, for what you were about to experience. Yes, I think that's very true what you're saying. First of all, it took a very long time, right?

It's a train journey that took almost three days. And they were brought there in overcrowded cargo carriages with about 70 people packed together in one room with just one bucket to do your business in, as one of the witnesses has put it into words. So it was smelly, it was fatiguing. There was hardly any food, hardly any drink. So it was a very hard and harsh trip towards our suites yes and very much part of the process as you rightly put it into words yeah and again what do we know about this period particularly with and we have so many other people's accounts of the horror of that journey and that the first the discomfort people dying in those wagons do we know anything about the family how were they able to cope during that?

Well, the thing is, and that's what characterizes the whole process of this research, right? We don't have like the direct witness accounts by Anne or her sister or her mother, only that of Otto Frank. And he has always been quite brief about the details of his camp experience. So we had to really reconstruct from the eyewitness accounts of the people, that because we lack her witness account, we had to get into sideways, get other perspectives to come as close as possible. So that's what we've done here too. So we don't have her account of her thirst and her fatigue and her hunger and her fear and anxiety, but we know directly of those directly around her, so we can come as close as possible. There's something hideous about that train journey. And the suggestion by this point of the war, they would have harbored no illusions that they were going to their death. There wasn't

this earlier on in the war, there were rumors that perhaps there was land or there were jobs out in the East, but they would have felt an inevitability, the oncoming of death. Yeah, I think you could say so, even though I think there are still different witness accounts. Some of them say, well, we knew for sure, we knew what was going on, we knew we were heading straight towards our deaths. And others were, afterward, they still stressed the doubts they still had, the uncertainty, the not knowing exactly what was going to happen as a primary experience in that period. So it's different from person to person. And it's also, I think, it must have been such an overwhelming experience

that really thinking too much about what was going to happen next was not part of that. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Anne Frank in captivity. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human

history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Tell me about those doors sliding open, the arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, because this is the tragic moment that it's about confusing, discombobulating the people that were arriving, because they didn't have a chance to rise up to fight, because the platform, the arrival is almost the key moment to Auschwitz. So they arrive there, they're tired, they're confused, they are almost blinded by the very strong lights they've seen there. There are dogs barking, people shouting, pushing them out.

Everybody who has experienced this stresses the chaos, the feeling of not knowing what was going on exactly. So they were pushed out. They were brought into this platform, and the men and the women were separated. And they almost immediately went to what, and this is also very typical for Auschwitz, is the selection procedure, right? So where camp doctors, just like Joseph Mengele and his associates, his co-workers there, they would pass by the newly arrived and point out who was fit for work and who was not. And those who were not fit for work were brought immediately into the gas chambers where they were murdered just after arrival.

Yeah. So the families were separated right there on that platform. And so many survivors have said to me that there was no suggestion that was the final moment. They thought they were being, you know, women and children this way, or some people this way, some people that way. But in fact, within minutes of that separation, many of them were dead. Yes. Yeah. It's typical for the confusion they face. And it's also, I think, a deliberate thing to do from the Germans, right? That they would confuse them. Otherwise, those who were being selected for immediate death would have, of course, panicked. And that's something they didn't want.

They wanted them to go along the process as good as possible. But there's also another very, I think, quite interesting conclusion about this procedure of selections is that the fact that Anne has a 15-year-old girl, child still, and also some of the older men, her father, who were over their 50 average, 20% of the newly arrivals would survive this first selection process. Only adults or older adolescents would survive, whereas elderly and children were all brought to the gas chambers immediately. Elderly and children were all brought to the gas chambers immediately. Whereas at the moment when Anne arrived there, this percentage started to change because the SS was under pressure to deliver more and more slave laborers.

So we've looked at this transport, which Anne was part of, and it turned out that from these people 65% survived the deportation so had she come earlier had they been discovered earlier she wouldn't have survived probably wouldn't have survived this selection process in the first place so we know she survived the degrading medical inspection the barking dogs the shouting of the guards. Did any members of her group perish at that point? Were they sent to the gas chambers? Well, at that point, no.

So at the point of arrival, they all survived this first crucial moment. But in the weeks that would follow, where they went through this whole process of delousing and this whole humiliating and incredibly harsh treatment. And they had to start doing this slave labor, this forced labor in this camp. One of the group would soon perish, and that is Hermann van Bell, so the father of the other family that was with the Franks in the hiding place.

He had to do very heavy street construction work. And a couple of weeks after they arrived there, he hurt his hand. And he asked for relief. He was treated. And soon after that, there was another selection. And this is very typical for this concentration camp situation. So every now and then then there would come very unexpectedly another selection where they would separate those who were fit and those who were unfit

from each other. And this happened early October already with Herman van Pels. And that moment he was, along with all the others who were wounded or some kind of illness, brought to the gas chamber. And it was actually the last group that was put to death in that way because soon afterwards the Germans started to dismantle the gas chambers. Also in anticipation of the nearing Red Army, so they were preparing for that, hiding the evidence. So one of the parties is dead already. Many, many other people, of course, that they would have got

to know slightly would be killed on a regular basis. She would have had her head shaved. She'd be working, would she, in Birkenau camp of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. What would she be doing there? Well, senseless work, right? Carrying heavy loads from this place to another, for the outside world, and also for the other parts of the National Socialist regime. SS had to claim that they were contributing to the German war effort, but much of the labor they had to do was completely senseless. And this is also true for what Anne and her sister and mother had to do in Auschwitz. When do we have our last confirmed, attested view of Anne and her mother and her sister? Where do we last see them?

The thing is that Anne didn't stay in Auschwitz. I just talked about all these selections. People could be selected to be fit or unfit, but also in this phase of the Holocaust, people were moved around all the time. So in November 1944, there was another selection where Anne's mother was considered not fit enough, but Anne and her sister, and also Auguste van Pelle, so Peter's mother, were brought to another camp, this time in Germany itself, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

So they were deported again, supposedly to do work there. In effect, when they arrived there, there was nothing to do. It was just plain nothingness. There was hardly any food. It was just in a very terrible condition, this camp. So they were more or less left there to perish. And that's eventually what happened to them. Their mother perished at Auschwitz then, never made the journey. Yes. And we know quite a lot about the last experiences of the mother

because she became friends with a woman who survived the war. And the interesting thing about the witness accounts of this woman, Rosa de Winter, is that she published a small witness account about her Auschwitz experiences in which she also talks about Edith, Anne's mother. But she does so before Anne Frank's diary was published. So it was not somebody who later on started to remember when Anne Frank's story became famous, started to remember, oh yeah, I knew that girl. And so we have quite a lot of witness accounts like that, but this was somebody who had already published her account before the

story had become so world famous. This woman, Rosa de Winter, also had a daughter and this daughter was also brought to another camp around the time. As mothers, they had more or less the same experiences and their friendship increased after that. So from Rosa de Winter, we know how later on Edith became ill and she was brought to a hospital where there was no treatment. She perished there in early January 1945. And Rosa Winter barely survived, but she did survive, and she was able to give witness to the story. And so Anne and her sister are transported to Belsen, which even by the standards of the Holocaust was a place of hell.

By that stage, virulent disease, no food, the system breaking down completely. Were they alone by that stage, the two sisters? They still had Auguste van Pels with them when they arrived there. This was somebody who's still there, probably taking care of them as good as she could. And they did also meet some people they knew from Amsterdam from before, some other girls, some other women they'd known in Westerbork and Auschwitz. But most of the witness accounts tell us that Anne and Margot held to themselves most of the time, that they become weaker and weaker. And at one point also, Auguste von Pels was brought somewhere else again.

And she eventually was brought to Ragoon concentration camp, where she had to do forced labor there, while Anne and Margot stayed behind in Bergen-Belsen. So this is really typical of this whole situation, a concentration camp situation where people were just brought everywhere all the time. And they just arrived there and then Augusta was brought somewhere else again. And so there are a couple of witnesses who still have seen Anna Margot and Delson who noticed that they become weaker and demoralized more and more, and eventually also became ill with the typhoid.

And there's a very interesting story because Bergen-Melsen was a camp divided in different sub-camps which had different conditions. There was also what was called a star camp. There was a Sternlager in which Jewish families with special status were brought. They had been there for a longer time and they were on a list where the idea was that they somehow could have

the possibility to be traded with German prisoners of war. And the conditions in that part of the camp were much better than, I mean, they were still terrible, but they were considerably better than where Anne arrived. These were separated with a fence from each other. And on both sides of the fence, Jews from the Netherlands were there.

So later in the evening, people will go to this fence to see if there's somebody on the other side. They knew. fence to see if there's somebody on the other side they knew and at some point and it got word that her friend hannah goslar which was one of her best friends from school was on the other side and hannah has accounted that they they had some kind of meeting there they couldn't really see each other because it was dark and there was this barbed wire fence with probably straw in between. But they, Hannah did manage to find some foodstuff and make a package and throw it over the fence, which Anne had to collect and had gotten some more food because at that point she had almost nothing. They did this twice because the first time this didn't work out, Hannah heard

Anne crying and it turned out that another prisoner, another woman had picked up the package and ran away with it. And then they organized a second instance where I think Anne got the package. So this is one of the last accounts we have of like a real encounter with Anne in this camp. We know that when the British arrived in the middle of April 1945, there were over 10,000 corpses lying unburied. There were tens of thousands of people dying, starving to death, dying of disease, lying around the camp. It's one of the most harrowing descriptions of any of the Second World War. Do we have any sense whether Anne would have survived that late or when she might have died with her sister?

For a long time, and this is also what Otto Frank, I think, assumed, that Anne and Margot, her sister, perished by the end of March. assumed that Anne and Margot, her sister, perished by the end of March. But based on the more detailed reconstruction done by my colleagues from the Anne Frank House, I really have tried to reconstruct as closely as possible the moment of Anne's death. And knowing in what kind of stage of typhoid she was by the end of January, of typhoid she was by the end of January and knowing what the moments were when she was last seen by the witnesses who had been around her there they have been able to reconstruct a more exact moment of death and that was by the beginning of February 1945 so it certainly earlier than was assumed for a very long time.

Is that case with both the girls, do you think? Yes, we know from witness accounts that they perished quite shortly after one another, first Margot, then Anne. But we are not exactly sure how much time between. But what we know from the witness accounts is that some said, well, the next day, or maybe it was a couple of days, but within a week from each other, that's pretty likely. So Anne would have known of her sister's death as well. It must have been a very difficult project, this one, because it's one of the most famous stories in history really now. And as a historian, it must have been difficult to separate some of the myth-making and get to the facts of what actually happened?

It is very important, I think, to note that even though this is such a famous story, almost everything we really know about her was up until the moment they were arrested. And this research really is the first attempt to comprehensively get together all the possible sources to reconstruct that period, which was until now really only told by separate eyewitnesses, sometimes brought together in a documentary, but not really evaluated systematically. And doing that, I think it shows us how difficult it is to reconstruct individual lives in the context of such a massive mass murder as the Holocaust was, a context also in which traces of individual lives and individual biographies were

erased. I think also the importance of reconstructing individual lives, because what was true for Anne Frank, right, that it is worth telling, trying to really reconstruct what happened to there. It's also true for all the other victims. It's really something important to do. Because it's Holocaust Memorial Day, it's that time of year. Why as a historian do you think it is important? Why do we need to keep telling these stories, remind ourselves of this hideous past? It is important, firstly, because this history really shows us where humanity can go, how bad it can get, and how, if we are not careful with thinking about our responsibilities as citizens and as people, where it can lead when you support a radicalized government

and what people are capable of. And I think once you really focus on what actually happens to people in this camp, I mean, we all know about 6 million Jews. We all know about generally about the system. But if you really go into what it actually meant to be there and what actually happened to these people and what actually their experiences were, only then you get an idea about the enormity and the severity of what happened then. And of course, something like that can always happen again. So I think it's a warning sign.

It's something that's important to know. I think it's a warning sign. It's something that's important to know. And part of the warning is acknowledging and facing what actually happened to individual lives. Well, Bas, thank you for helping us do that today. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Tell everybody what your book is called. The book is called After the Annex.

Thank you very much indeed. Okay. Welcome. Thank you very much indeed. Okay, welcome, thank you. If you're interested in this extraordinary story, please go back and listen to the Eva Schloss interview. That's Anne Frank's friend and stepsister who is still alive, living in London. I talked about Otto Frank and the whole family's experience, all of their family's experiences in the Dutch Holocaust. That was one

of the most harrowing interviews I've ever conducted for the podcast or for TV. And also, if you want to go back into our archive, we've got interviews with people like Max Eisen, sadly now no longer with us, an Auschwitz survivor. Thank you.