Anne Frank House

Canal-side façade of the former Opekta building on Prinsengracht canal in 2008. The Secret Annex (Achterhuis) is at the rear in an enclosed courtyard.

Model of the former Opekta front building (left) and rear building (right) where Anne Frank stayed

The rear building[5] (bottom-right) with light-tan walls and terra-cotta side-gabled roof (bottom right) and the large Anne Frank tree in the garden, further right, from the Westerkerk, 2017

The Twentieth Century

Otto Frank at bookcase with Daniel Schorr[6][7]

The (reconstructed) movable bookcase that covered the entrance to the annex, built by Bep Voskuijl's father Johannes Voskuijl in 1942.

The house – and the one next door at number 265, which was later purchased by the museum – was built by Dirk van Delft in 1635.[8] The canal-side façade dates from a renovation of 1740,[9] when the rear annex was demolished. It was a private residence until the nineteenth century - in 1821, for instance, a Captain Johannes Christiaan van den Bergh, plaats-majoor der tweede klasse (adjutant third class) resided there.[10]

Subsequently, the building became a warehouse, and the front warehouse with its wide stable-like doors was used to house horses. At the start of the 20th century, a manufacturer of household appliances occupied the building, succeeded in 1930 by a producer of piano rolls, who vacated the property by 1939.

On 1 December 1940, Anne's father, Otto Frank, moved the offices of the spice and gelling companies he worked for, Opekta and Pectacon, from an address on Singel canal to Prinsengracht 263.

The ground floor consisted of three sections; the front was the goods and dispatch entrance, behind it in the middle section were the spice mills, and at the rear, which was the ground floor of the annex, was the warehouse where the goods were packed for distribution. Directly above the ground floor were the offices of Frank's employees, with Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl (known in the early version of The Diary of a Young Girl as Elli Vossen) and Johannes Kleiman occupying the front office while Victor Kugler worked in the middle office. The rear office held a large radio that the people in hiding used until 1943, after which the radio was handed in by the employees when the Nazis began confiscating Dutch radios.[11]

The Achterhuis (Dutch for "back house") or Secret Annex – as it was called in The Diary of a Young Girl, an English translation of the diary – is the rear extension of the building. It was concealed from view by houses on all four sides of a quadrangle. Its secluded position made it an ideal hiding place for Otto Frank, his wife Edith, two daughters, Margot and Anne, of whom Anne was the younger, and four other Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. Though the total amount of floor space in the inhabited rooms came to only about 450 square feet (42 m²), Anne Frank wrote in her diary that it was relatively luxurious compared to other hiding places they had heard about. They remained hidden here for two years and one month until they were raided by the Nazi authorities, arrested, and deported to their deaths in concentration and death camps. Of the hidden group, only Otto Frank survived the camps.

After those in hiding were arrested, the hiding place was cleared by order of the arresting officers and all the remaining contents (clothes, furniture, and personal belongings) of the Frank family and their friends were seized and distributed to bombed-out families in Germany. Before the building was cleared, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who had helped hide the families, returned to the hiding place against the orders of the Dutch police and rescued some personal effects. Amongst the items they retrieved were books and papers that would eventually be compiled into The Diary of Anne Frank.[12]

After Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam in June 1945, he was given Anne's diaries and papers and subsequently compiled the two versions of his daughter's diaries into a book published in Dutch in 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis, which Anne had chosen as the name of a future memoir or novel based on her experiences in hiding. Achterhuis is a Dutch architectural term referring to a back-house (used comparatively with voorhuis meaning front-house). However, when the English translation began production, it was realised that many English-speaking readers might not be familiar with the term and it was decided that a more evocative term (the 'Secret Annexe') would better convey the building's hidden position. Otto Frank's contributions to the diary were such that he is recognized as a co-author.[13]