How Anne Frank's wartime hiding place was nearly torn down because it 'wasn't historically important'

The Diary of Anne Frank become one of the most important historical documents of the Second World War

The most famous shrine to Holocaust suffering in the world – the attic where Anne Frank hid with her family in Amsterdam – was nearly torn down by the Dutch government after WW2 because it was 'not an historical monument'.

Now the house is visited by millions each year and the foundation that supports it has become central to rebutting the lies of Holocaust deniers wherever they are.

Anne Frank hid with her family in the Amsterdam apartment from 1942 to 1944. Betrayed, the family were carted off to concentration camps where all died except her father.



He returned in 1945 to find Anne’s poignant diary among the few possessions the Nazis left behind. Her book has been published in dozens of languages and has sold over 100 million copies.



Now a letter released in Holland show that the Dutch government in the 1950s had no objections to tearing down the house where the diary was written.

Joseph Luns, the foreign minister at the time wrote that her house was "not an historical monument of the Netherlands and unremarkable from an architectural point of view.”



The letter was sent to the Dutch ambassador to the United States, informing him of the official position of the Ministry of Education, Art and Science towards the Anne Frank House.

The letter was discovered recently when the part of the ministry's=2 0 archives was being moved to a new home.

According to the Anne Frank Foundation, it was apparently written in response to questions by Americans why the house was not declared an historic building.

Located on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht, the house began attracting its first visitors shortly after the book was published in 1947.

In the mid-1950s, a real estate firm proposed knocking it down to make way for a modern building, but dropped the idea after a series of protests.

The firm signed over the rights of the house in 1957 to the Anne Frank Foundation, which collected donations and turned it into a museum three years later.

Anne Frank was deported to the German concentration camp at Belsen where she died in March 1945 at the age of 16.



