Did Anne Frank die earlier than we thought?

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager whose diary recorded her experiences of hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, died at least one month earlier than previously believed, according to new research released on Tuesday.

The deaths of Anne and her sister Margo in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany were believed to have taken place sometime in March, the Red Cross said at the time, and their official date of death was later set as March 31 by Dutch authorities.

However, as Discovery News explained, new evidence indicates that their death must have taken place in February 1945. That conclusion comes following an investigation that attempted to trace the sisters’ horrific journey, which took them to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, then to Bergen-Belsen in November 1944 as Russian troops closed in from the east.

A case of typhus

The new study uses archived data from the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, as well as eyewitness testimonies and interviews with survivors. Four of those survivors reported that the Frank sisters had started showing symptoms of typhus by late January 1945. The disease is typically fatal less than two weeks after symptoms arise.

“It is therefore unlikely that they survived until the end of March,” the Anne Frank House said. The exact date when Anne and Margo died is unknown, but the study quotes one of the surviving witnesses, Rachel van Amerongen, as saying that “one day they simply weren’t there anymore.”

Erika Prins, a researcher at the museum, told The Guardian that the study puts to rest the notion that the 15-year-old girl and her sister would have been rescued had they only lived a little a little longer. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by Allied troops on April 15, 1945.

“When you say they died at the end of March, it gives you a feeling that they died just before liberation. So maybe if they’d lived two more weeks… Well, that’s not true anymore,” said Prins. However, the discovery changes little about the tragic tale of the Frank sisters, she added.

Crawling with lice

Frank’s famous diary tells the story of how the girl, her family and other members of the Jewish community hid from the Nazis behind a bookcase in her house, USA Today explained. After two years of hiding, they were turned over to Nazi occupiers and Anne and Margot, along with their mother, were first sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau in early September 1944.

A former classmate of Anne’s found her in early December after she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, and said that it was a miracle that they two girls recognized each other. The classmate, a woman named Nanaette Blitz, said that Anne “was no more than a skeleton by then.”

“She was wrapped in a blanket; she couldn’t bear to wear her clothes anymore because they were crawling with lice,” which are the primary carriers of typhus, Blitz recalled. By the last time she saw Anne in January 1945, Blitz said that the epidemic was spreading through the camp. Anne “was clearly already gravely ill,” she said, and Margot was in “even worse condition.”

Other inmates reported similar observations of the sisters’ health before they were transferred to the Raghun slave labor camp on February 7. There is no further information available, but based on the eyewitness accounts of Anne and Margot’s failing health, the study concluded that “it is unlikely that they survived until the end of March. In view of this, the date of their death is more likely to be sometime in February.”

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