Anne Frank

• 1. Introduction

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  Anne Frank appears in exactly one piece of film, and it lasts about twenty seconds. The silent clip was shot on the 22nd of July 1941 and records a neighbour's wedding in Amsterdam. At the nine-second mark, a girl of 12 leans out of a window above the street, trying to get a better view of the bride and groom. The couple survived the war and later gave the film to the Anne Frank House museum, which put it online.

  Everything else the world knows about her comes from words. She wrote several times in her diary that she would never allow anyone to read it. Yet that notebook was translated into more than 70 languages and became one of the best-known books anywhere.

  How did a private record, kept in a concealed attic, reach so many strangers? Who led the police to that attic? And why did people feel the need, again and again, to prove in court that she had ever existed?

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• 2. Flight and Hiding

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  Annelies Marie Frank was born on the 12th of June 1929 at the Maingau Red Cross Clinic in Frankfurt. Her parents were Edith, born Holländer, and Otto Heinrich Frank, and she had an older sister named Margot. The family followed Reform Judaism and did not observe every custom. They lived among neighbours of many faiths. Both parents loved scholarship, kept a large library, and urged their daughters to read. At first the Franks rented two floors of a house at Marbachweg 307. In 1931 they moved to Ganghoferstraße 24, in a liberal district called the "Poets' Quarter". Both houses still stand.

  In 1933 the Nazi Party won the federal election and Hitler became chancellor. Edith took the girls to Aachen, where her mother, Rosa Hollander, lived. Otto stayed in Frankfurt until an offer arrived to start a company in Amsterdam. He went there to run the business and find housing. The firm was Opekta Works, which sold pectin, an extract from fruit. Edith found an apartment on the Merwedeplein, in the Rivierenbuurt district, where many Jewish refugees from Germany settled. She joined Otto in November 1933, and Margot followed a month later. Anne stayed with her grandmother until February, when the family finally came together in Amsterdam. They were among 300,000 Jews who left Germany between 1933 and 1939.

  At the 6th Montessori School in 1934, Anne soon felt at home. There she met Hanneli Goslar, who became one of her best friends. Margot had a harder start at her public school because of the Dutch language, but she became a star pupil. In 1938 Otto launched a second firm, Pectacon, which wholesaled herbs, pickling salts and spice mixes for sausage making. He hired Hermann van Pels as a spice advisor. Van Pels was a Jewish butcher who had fled Osnabrück with his family. In 1939 Edith's mother Rosa moved in with the Franks, and she stayed until her death in January 1942.

  Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. The occupiers soon passed discriminatory laws and then demanded registration and segregation. Otto saw only one realistic escape, the United States. But German bombing destroyed the American consulate in Rotterdam on the 14th of May 1940, and his visa application was lost with all the other paperwork. Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Although she spent most of her life in the Netherlands, she never became a Dutch citizen. After the summer holidays of 1941 she was barred from the Montessori School, because Jewish children now had to attend Jewish schools. She moved to the Jewish Lyceum, which had opened that September.

  On the 5th of July 1942, Margot received a call-up notice from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. It ordered her to report for relocation to a work camp. Her parents had planned to go into hiding on the 16th of July. Now they moved ten days early. Shortly before leaving, Anne gave her next-door friend Toosje Kupers a book, a tea set and a tin of marbles. Kupers later told the Associated Press that Anne said: "I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands. Could you keep them for me for a little while?" The family also left a note asking the Kupers to look after their cat, Moortje.

  On the morning of Monday the 6th of July 1942, the Franks left home for the Prinsengracht. Jews could not use public transport, so Otto, Edith and Anne walked several kilometres, while Margot cycled with Miep Gies. They left the apartment in disarray to suggest a sudden departure, and Otto left a note hinting that they had gone to Switzerland. The hiding place was a three-story space reached from a landing above the Opekta offices. Dutch speakers called it the Achterhuis, which English editions render as the Secret Annex. Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl later built the bookcase that covered its door.

  Four employees of Otto's firm knew about the hiding place: Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep's husband Jan and Bep's father, Johannes Hendrik, also helped. They brought news of the war and supplied the food, a job that grew harder as time passed. All of them knew that sheltering Jews could cost them their lives. Anne wrote of their devotion and of how they lifted spirits in the worst moments.

  On the 13th of July 1942 the Van Pels family joined the Franks: Hermann, Auguste and their 16-year-old son Peter. In November came Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend. Anne was glad of fresh company at first, but tensions soon built in the cramped space. She shared a room with Pfeffer and found him insufferable. She thought Auguste foolish, and she judged both Hermann and Pfeffer selfish about food.

  Peter van Pels, whom she first dismissed as shy and awkward, became something more. She came to feel a kinship with him, and the two began a romance that included her first kiss. Yet her infatuation faded as she asked herself whether her feelings were real or simply a product of confinement. Her warmest friendships were with the helpers, whose daily visits she awaited with impatience, according to her father. He singled out one of them, Bep Voskuijl, "the young typist... the two of them often stood whispering in the corner."

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• 3. The Notebook Called Kitty

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  The diary began as a gift for Anne's thirteenth birthday, on the 12th of June 1942. It was an autograph book bound in red-and-white checkered cloth, with a small lock on the front. She named it Kitty and started writing almost at once. By her entry of the 20th of June 1942 she was listing the restrictions that now bound Jewish life in the Netherlands.

  Her father, Otto, said he got on better with Anne than with Margot. He explained that Margot "rarely showed her feelings and didn't need as much support because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne did." Anne sometimes envied Margot's gentle, placid nature, especially when others in the household held it against her. As time passed, the sisters began to confide in each other. On the 12th of January 1944 Anne wrote: "Margot's much nicer... She's not nearly so catty these days and is becoming a real friend. She no longer thinks of me as a little baby who doesn't count."

  Her mother was a harder subject. On the 7th of November 1942, Anne described her "contempt" for her mother and her inability to "confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hard-heartedness." She concluded: "She's not a mother to me." Later, while revising the diary, she felt ashamed and wrote: "Anne, is it really you who mentioned hate, oh Anne, how could you?" She came to see that the misunderstandings were as much her fault as her mother's. From then on she treated her mother with more tolerance and respect.

  Most of Anne's days went to reading, studying and writing. Margot took an Elementary Latin course by correspondence, enrolled in Bep Voskuijl's name, and earned high marks. Anne used the diary to record events, but also to hold feelings, beliefs and dreams that she could share with no one. As her confidence grew, she turned to larger questions, including her belief in God and her definition of human nature.

  In March 1944 a radio broadcast changed how she saw the notebook. Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile in London, said that after the war he would assemble a public record of the occupation. He mentioned publishing letters and diaries. Anne decided to submit hers when the time came. She began editing, cutting some passages and rewriting others, and she used extra notebooks and loose sheets. She gave everyone pseudonyms. The Van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella and Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. Each entry was now addressed to Kitty, a fictional character from Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels, which Anne enjoyed.

  On the 5th of April 1944 she wrote down what she wanted from life. She wanted to be a journalist, though she wondered whether she had real talent. She added: "I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!" Her last entry is dated the 1st of August 1944. Three days later, the hiding place was raided.

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• 4. Who Opened the Door

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  The raid came on the morning of the 4th of August 1944. German uniformed police, the Grüne Polizei, entered the Secret Annex under SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst. The Franks, the Van Pelses and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters, questioned, and held overnight. On the 5th of August they were moved to the Huis van Bewaring, an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans. Two days later they reached Westerbork, a transit camp that more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, passed through. Because they had been caught in hiding, the guards treated them as criminals and sent them to the Punishment Barracks for hard labour.

  Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were jailed at the Amersfoort penal camp in the province of Utrecht. Kleiman went free after seven weeks. Kugler was passed through various Dutch camps and prisons until the war ended. Miep Gies was questioned and threatened but not held. Bep Voskuijl got away carrying a few documents that would have exposed their black market contacts. In the following days the two women went back to the Annex and found Anne's papers scattered on the floor. They gathered them up, along with several family photograph albums. Gies decided she would give everything back to Anne after the war. On the 7th of August she confronted Silberbauer and offered him money to intervene. He refused.

  How the hiding place was found has never been settled. In 2015 the Flemish journalist Jeroen De Bruyn and Joop van Wijk, Bep Voskuijl's youngest son, wrote a biography suggesting that Bep's younger sister Nelly could have betrayed the group. Nelly, who lived from 1923 to 2001, had collaborated with the Nazis from the age of 19 to 23. She had run off to Austria with a Nazi officer and returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when that relationship ended. She resented her sister and her father for helping Jews. In one quarrel she shouted, "Go to your Jews!" Silberbauer was reported to have said that the informer had "the voice of a young woman."

  In 2016 the Anne Frank House published research pointing to a different cause, an investigation into ration-card fraud. The report said that other activity in the building, including the work of Otto's company, might also have drawn the authorities. It did not rule out betrayal. A 2018 book named Ans van Dijk, a Dutch Jew who betrayed at least 145 other Jews to the Gestapo. The resistance fighter Gerard Kremer, a caretaker at an office building requisitioned by the Sicherheitsdienst, apparently saw her there in August 1944. He overheard her talking with her superiors about the Prinsengracht. Another book replied that many of her victims lived on or near that very canal.

  The most publicized claim came in January 2022. A team including the former FBI agent Vince Pankoke proposed Arnold van den Bergh, a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council who died in 1950. They argued that he gave up the Franks to protect his own family. Rosemary Sullivan told the story in The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. According to the BBC, the investigators spent six years applying modern techniques to the cold case. Several historians of the war and the Holocaust doubted the conclusions, calling the evidence "far too thin", according to The New York Times.

  Criticism of the Dutch edition came quickly from the scholars Bart van der Boom, David Barnouw and Johannes Houwink ten Cate. The publisher, Ambo Anthos, said in an internal email that it should have been more critical before publishing, and it delayed another print run. The investigator Pieter van Twisk replied that he was "perplexed by the email" and that the team had never claimed to have found the complete truth. In March 2022 a group of experts challenged the central claim that Amsterdam's Jewish council even held a list of hiding places for Van den Bergh to draw on. Ambo Anthos then recalled the Dutch edition.

  In August 2022 the researcher Natasha Gerson issued an 80-page report on the book's annotations and sources. She argued that the theory was flawed and the product of source fraud. In her view, Otto Frank's recorded agenda and a letter from Johannes Kleiman had been distorted to fit the conclusion. Several negative claims about Van den Bergh rested only on Anton Schepers, a Nazi collaborator twice diagnosed as insane, who had taken over Van den Bergh's notary practice. They included a supposed commission of 200,000 guilders on the sale of Jacques Goudstikker's art business. Gerson added that statements from two named Nazis, saying they had not known him, were left out. Plans for a German translation were cancelled soon afterward.

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• 5. Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen

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  The last transport ever to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz departed on the 3rd of September 1944, and it carried the people from the Secret Annex. The journey took three days. Also aboard was Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Amsterdam native who had befriended Anne and Margot at the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. She saw the Frank women regularly at Auschwitz. Decades later she described them in two documentaries: The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, by Willy Lindwer in 1988, and the BBC's Anne Frank Remembered in 1995.

  On arrival the SS separated the men from the women and children, and Otto Frank was parted from his family. Of the 1,019 people on the train, 549 were sent straight to the gas chambers, including every child under 15. Anne had turned 15 three months earlier, and she was among the youngest allowed to live. She soon realized that most arrivals were gassed, but she never learned that every person from the Annex had passed the selection. She assumed her father, in his mid-fifties and not robust, had been killed at once.

  Those spared were forced to strip for disinfection, and Anne's head was shaved and her arm tattooed with a number. By day she hauled rocks and dug rolls of sod. By night the women were packed into crowded barracks. Witnesses later disagreed about how she coped. Some remembered her withdrawn and tearful as she watched children led to the gas chambers. Others recalled strength and courage, and her outgoing nature won extra bread for her mother, her sister and herself.

  Disease spread quickly. Scabies badly infected Anne's skin, and the sisters were moved to an infirmary that was always dark and overrun with rats and mice. Edith Frank stopped eating. She saved every scrap for her daughters and passed her ration to them through a hole she had made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.

  In October 1944 a transport was scheduled for the Liebau labour camp in Lower Silesia, and Bloeme was due to go. Anne was barred because of her scabies, and her mother and sister chose to stay with her. Bloeme left without them. On the 28th of October, selections began for Bergen-Belsen. More than 8,000 women were sent, among them Anne, Margot and Auguste van Pels. Edith was left behind and died of disease, starvation and exhaustion.

  At Bergen-Belsen, tents went up for the swelling number of prisoners, and deaths from disease climbed fast. Anne briefly met two old friends, Hanneli Goslar and Nanette Blitz. Goslar had been held in the Sternlager since February 1944. Blitz was moved to Anne's section on the 5th of December 1944. Both women survived the war. Blitz spoke with Anne in person, while Goslar talked with her through a barbed wire fence, probably in late January or early February 1945. Blitz found Anne bald, emaciated and shivering under a blanket, having thrown away her lice-ridden clothes. She said that "the shock of seeing her in this emaciated state was indescribable". Anne told her she hoped to write a book from her diary when the war ended. She told both friends she believed her parents were dead, and for that reason she no longer wished to live. Goslar recalled that Auguste van Pels was with the sisters and caring for Margot, who was too weak to leave her bunk.

  Anne Frank died at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945. The cause is unrecorded, but the evidence points to the typhus epidemic that killed 17,000 prisoners. Gena Turgel, a survivor who worked in the camp hospital, told the British newspaper The Sun: "Her bed was around the corner from me. She was delirious, terrible, burning up." Witnesses said Margot fell from her bunk and was killed by the shock, and that Anne died a day later. Neither date was written down. The Red Cross estimated March 1945, and Dutch authorities set the 31st of March as the official date.

  For years it was assumed the sisters died only a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp on the 15th of April 1945. Research in 2015 suggested February. Witnesses recalled typhus symptoms in the sisters by the 7th of February, and Dutch health authorities reported that most untreated victims died within twelve days. Hanneli Goslar's father, Hans, died one or two weeks after her first meeting with Anne, and his death is known to have occurred on the 25th of February 1945. Anne and Margot were buried together in a mass grave.

  After the war, it was estimated that only 5,000 of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944 survived. About 30,000 Jews remained inside the country, many helped by the Dutch underground, and roughly two-thirds of them lived.

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• 6. From Notebook to Bestseller

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  Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam in June 1945, and Jan and Miep Gies took him in while he searched for his family. On the journey he learned that Edith had died, but he still hoped for his daughters. After several weeks he learned they were gone too. He then tried to trace their friends and found that many had been killed. Sanne Ledermann, often named in the diary, was gassed along with her parents, though her sister Barbara, a close friend of Margot, survived. Several school friends lived. So did the extended families of Otto and Edith, who had left Germany in the mid-1930s and settled in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

  In July 1945 the sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who had been with Anne and Margot in Bergen-Belsen, confirmed the girls' deaths. Only then did Miep Gies hand over the notebooks, including the red-and-white checkered one, with a bundle of loose pages. She and Bep Voskuijl had saved them in the hope of returning them to Anne. Otto said he had not realized how accurate and well written the record was. He recognized events and remembered hearing some of the funnier episodes read aloud. Of her private passages he said: "For me it was a revelation... I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings... She had kept all these feelings to herself."

  Otto, moved by Anne's repeated wish to be an author, began to think about publication. He combined her original text, known as version A, with her edited text, known as version B. He restored the real names of his own family but kept the other pseudonyms. The historian Annie Romein-Verschoor failed to find a publisher. Her husband, Jan Romein, wrote an article titled Kinderstem, or A Child's Voice, for the newspaper Het Parool on the 3rd of April 1946. He said the diary "stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together." Publishers took notice, and Het Achterhuis appeared in 1947, followed by five more printings by 1950.

  The path abroad was uneven. Germany and France published the diary in 1950. Several British publishers turned it down before it appeared in 1952, and it was out of print there by 1953. The first American edition, also from 1952, drew positive reviews. Japan was the surprise. More than 100,000 copies of its first edition sold, and Anne was soon seen there as a figure who stood for youth destroyed by war.

  A play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett opened in New York City on the 5th of October 1955 and won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A film followed in 1959. The biographer Melissa Müller later argued that these dramatizations contributed greatly to the "romanticizing, sentimentalizing and universalizing" of Anne's story. Schools, especially in the United States, added the diary to their curriculum, and new generations met her there.

  Early admirers included the dramatist Meyer Levin, who praised her for "sustaining the tension of a well-constructed novel". He worked with Otto on a dramatization and later wrote of his obsession with Anne in his autobiography, The Obsession. The poet John Berryman saw in the book a child becoming a person as it happens, in a style honest to the point of stunning. Eleanor Roosevelt, introducing the first American edition, called it "one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read".

  In 1961 John F. Kennedy said that among all who spoke for human dignity in times of suffering, no voice was more compelling than hers. The same year the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that "one voice speaks for six million" and that it belonged to an ordinary little girl. In 1994 Nelson Mandela, after receiving a humanitarian award from the Anne Frank Foundation, said he had read the diary in prison and "derived much encouragement from it". He compared her struggle against Nazism with his own against apartheid.

  Not everyone who knew her welcomed the symbolism. Miep Gies wrote that Anne's death was "an individual fate that happened six million times over", and she did not want Anne to stand in for all the victims. Primo Levi offered a gentler explanation for the pull of one face. A single Anne Frank moves us more than countless people who suffered the same fate but stayed in shadow. If we could take in all that suffering, he said, we could not go on living.

  Early editions also left out passages. Later ones restored her writing about sexuality and menstruation. In 1999 Cornelis Suijk, a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation, announced that he held five pages Otto had removed before publication. He said Otto had given them to him shortly before dying in 1980. They contained sharp remarks about her parents' strained marriage and her lack of affection for her mother. Suijk planned to sell them to fund his foundation. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the manuscript's formal owner, demanded them back. In 2000 the Dutch education ministry agreed to give his foundation US$300,000, and the pages were returned in 2001. In 2018 two more pages, which Anne had pasted over with brown paper, were deciphered. They held her attempt to explain sex education and a handful of "dirty" jokes.

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• 7. Proving It Real

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  In 1957 the Swedish magazine Fria ord, published by a neofascist group called the National League of Sweden, ran an article by the Danish author Harald Nielsen. He claimed that Meyer Levin had written the diary. It was among the earliest published attacks on the book's veracity, and others appeared in Sweden and Norway as the diary became widely known in the late 1950s.

  At a performance of the play in Vienna in 1958, protesters confronted Simon Wiesenthal. They insisted Anne Frank had never existed and dared him to find the man who arrested her. Wiesenthal took up the challenge and located Karl Silberbauer in 1963. Silberbauer admitted his role, identified Anne from a photograph, and gave a full account. He even remembered emptying a briefcase full of papers onto the floor. His statement matched what witnesses such as Otto Frank had already said.

  In 1959 Otto went to court in Lübeck against Lothar Stielau, a school teacher and former Hitler Youth member who had called the diary a forgery in a school paper. The case widened to include Heinrich Buddegerg, who wrote a letter supporting Stielau for a local newspaper. In 1960 the court examined the diary and matched its handwriting to letters known to be Anne's. It declared the diary genuine. Stielau took back his statement, and Otto did not press the case further.

  Otto brought two more cases in 1976. The first was against Heinz Roth of Frankfurt, who published pamphlets calling the diary a forgery. The judge warned that any further statements would bring a fine of 500,000 Deutsche marks and six months in jail. Roth appealed but died in 1978, and a year later his appeal was rejected. The second was against Ernst Römer, who distributed a pamphlet titled "The Diary of Anne Frank, Bestseller, A Lie". When Edgar Geiss handed out the same pamphlet inside the courtroom, he was prosecuted too. Römer was fined 1,500 Deutsche marks, and Geiss was sentenced to six months in prison. That sentence was reduced on appeal, and the case was dropped once the time limit for libel claims had run out.

  Otto died in 1980 and willed the original diary, with its letters and loose sheets, to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation. In 1986 the institute commissioned a forensic study through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice. Examiners compared the handwriting with known samples and found a match. They also found that the paper, glue and ink were all readily available in the years the diary was said to have been written. The findings appeared in what is known as the Critical Edition of the diary. In 1990 the Hamburg Regional Court confirmed its authenticity.

  The claims came back in 1991, when the Holocaust deniers Robert Faurisson and Siegfried Verbeke produced a booklet titled The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical Approach. It revived the idea that Otto wrote the diary himself. Its supposed evidence included contradictions in the text, a prose style and handwriting it said did not belong to a teenager, and the claim that hiding in the Annex would have been impossible. In 1993 the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel filed a civil suit to stop the booklet's distribution in the Netherlands. In 1998 the Amsterdam District Court ruled for them. It banned further denial of the diary's authenticity and unsolicited distribution of such publications, with a penalty of 25,000 guilders for each violation.

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• 8. Places, a Tree and Schools

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  On the 3rd of May 1957, a group of Dutch citizens that included Otto Frank founded the Anne Frank Foundation to save the Prinsengracht building from demolition. The Anne Frank House opened three years later, on the 3rd of May 1960. It takes in the Opekta warehouse and offices and the Secret Annex, and all of it is left unfurnished so visitors can walk freely through the rooms. A walkway leads from the small room that was once Peter van Pels's to neighbouring buildings the foundation also bought. These hold the diary itself and rotating exhibits on the Holocaust and on racial intolerance today. Between 2011 and 2020 the house averaged 1.2 million visitors a year.

  In 1963 Otto and his second wife, Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits, set up the Anne Frank Fonds, a charitable foundation based in Basel, Switzerland. Otto willed it the diary's copyright, on condition that the first 80,000 Swiss francs of its income each year go to his heirs. The Fonds educates young people against racism and lent some of Anne's papers to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for a 2003 exhibition. In 1997 the Anne Frank Educational Centre opened in the Dornbusch neighbourhood of Frankfurt, where she lived until 1934.

  The Merwedeplein apartment, home to the Franks from 1933 to 1942, stayed in private hands until the 2000s. After it appeared in a television documentary, a Dutch housing corporation bought the building, which was badly decayed. Using family photographs and Anne's descriptions in her letters, workers restored it to its 1930s appearance. Teresien da Silva of the Anne Frank House and Anne's cousin Bernhard "Buddy" Elias took part. It opened in 2005. Each year a writer who cannot write freely at home is chosen to live and work there, and the first was the Algerian novelist and poet El-Mahdi Acherchour.

  In November 2007 a horse-chestnut tree that Anne could see from the Annex was found to have a fungal disease and was scheduled to be cut down. The economist Arnold Heertje said: "This is not just any tree. The Anne Frank tree is bound up with the persecution of the Jews." The Tree Foundation, a group of conservationists, started a civil case, and the story drew international media attention. A Dutch court ordered the city and the conservationists to look for alternatives, and a steel support was built that was expected to prolong the tree's life by up to 15 years. Gale-force winds blew it down on the 23rd of August 2010, three years later.

  Eleven saplings from the tree went to museums, schools, parks and Holocaust remembrance centres through a project led by the Anne Frank Center USA. The first was planted in April 2013 at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Others went to a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, the scene of a desegregation battle, and to Liberty Park in Manhattan, which honours victims of the September 11 attacks. A separate horse-chestnut honouring Anne was planted in 2010 at Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama.

  The honours range widely. The Anne Frank Ballet by Adam Darius was first performed in 1959. Marcus Paus wrote the choral works Annelies in 2005 and The Beauty That Still Remains in 2015. Asteroid 5535 Annefrank was named for her in 1995, though it was discovered in 1942. Anne is one of fifty topics in the Canon of the Netherlands, presented to the education minister in 2006, with a revised version approved in 2020. In 1999 Time included her among its Heroes and Icons of the century. The magazine said she braved the Nazis with a diary kept in a secret attic. Philip Roth called her the "lost little daughter" of Franz Kafka. Madame Tussauds unveiled a wax likeness in 2012, and UNESCO added her writings to its Memory of the World register in 2009. On the 25th of June 2022, a Google Doodle marked 75 years since the diary's publication.

  As of 2018, more than 270 schools around the world bore her name. A hundred were in Germany, 89 in France and 45 in Italy. The Netherlands had 17, among them the 6th Montessori School she once attended. There were four each in Brazil and the United States, two in Bulgaria, and one each in a long list of other countries. By 2024 Mexico alone had 18. Children's Human Rights Memorials followed, first beside a high school in Maaleh Adumim outside Jerusalem in 2020, then in Antigua, Guatemala in 2021 and in Buenos Aires in 2024. Her name can still stir argument. In 2023 a plan to rename a daycare centre in Tangerhütte, Germany, which had carried it since 1970, met international outcry and was dropped.

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