The story of Anne Frank's death (and, mostly, that of her life in hiding during the days of the Holocaust in the Netherlands) has touched and fascinated generations of men and women since the release of her diary after World War II, and now the museum that honors her life has found that she may have passed away before it had been previously thought.
For years, experts and the Dutch government have stated that Anne Frank's death occurred at the end of March 1945, only a few weeks before the Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camp she was in, Bergen-Belsen; however, new information has come to the surface to disprove this long-held notion.
According to The Guardian, the museum made the announcement about Anne Frank's death in the day that had been previously thought to commemorate her passing, namely March 31.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, and with that the same amount of time from the day of Anne Frank's death in 1945, though it's been said now that she didn't die at the end of March but rather at some point of February.
Time Magazine reports that Anne Frank's death occurred in February 1945, after she had been suffering from typhoid at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Lower Saxony, in an area that nowadays is part of the Northern regions of Germany.
After World War II had ended, Anne's father was given his daughter's diary, which accounted for their time in hiding during the Holocaust, until a few days before they were ultimately found and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then Bergen-Belsen; her diary was later published and has since become one of the most iconic accounts of this dark time in history for the Jewish people.
Discovery News reports that the study that uncovered the truth about Anne Frank's death, along with that of her sister Margot, used archives from the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, using as many witnesses as they could find.