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Anne Frank’s Remains May Be in Mass Grave Found at Bergen-Belsen

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A new mass grave that has been discovered near the Bergen Belsen concentration camp may possibly contain the remains of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who wrote a diary of her experiencing while hiding from the Nazis in her native Amsterdam.

Dutch researchers said Friday they believe they have uncovered a new mass grave at the former Nazi death camp of Bergen-Belsen, almost exactly 70 years after it was liberated. They said that the grave could possibly contain the remains of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who wrote a diary of her experiencing while hiding from the Nazis in her native Amsterdam.

Researchers have said that she died in the infamous concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 15 along with her sister Margot although no exact date of death has been established.  However, in a recent statement issued by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam it appears that, “New research… has shed fresh light on the last days of Anne Frank and her sister Margot.”

“Their deaths must have occurred in February 1945,” the foundation said in a statement.

The new study attempts to trace the sisters’ terrible journey, first to Auschwitz-Birkenau in central Poland, then to Bergen-Belsen in November 1944, as the Russian army closed in from the east.

It uses archives from the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, together with “as many eyewitness testimonies and survivors as possible.”

Four survivors reported that Anne and Margot showed symptoms of typhus by late January 1945.

“Most deaths of typhus occur around 12 days after the first symptoms appeared,” the new study said, quoting the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

“It is therefore unlikely that they survived until the end of March,” the Anne Frank House said.

The mass grave, measuring 16 by 4 meters (52 feet by 13 feet) was pinpointed using ex-inmates’ testimony and is believed to be the final resting place of Dutch Resistance worker Jan Verschure, Dutch television news program Nieuwsuur reported, according to AFP.

The grave of countless Jewish victims was tracked by Verschure’s grandson Paul, who spoke to survivors of the concentration camp where some 70,000 people were murdered by the genocidal Nazis between 1941-45, located in northern Germany’s Lower Saxony region.

“One of them gave me a map on which he marked where my grandfather was buried,” Verschure told Nieuwsuur.

The spot is located at the end of the camp’s former main road and is today just a grassy field.

There are few signs left of the horror camp, torched by British troops shortly after it was liberated on April 15, 1945 to prevent the spread of deadly diseases such as typhus.

Many of the dead were bulldozed into unmarked mass graves around the camp, with up to 10,000 people believed to have been buried in the area.

Dutch archeologist Ivar Schute, who has done an initial probe said he believed there was indeed a mass grave on the spot.

“We’ve taken measurements and believe that the ground has been disturbed here. We think this is where the mass grave is,” he told Nieuwsuur.

But Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Bergen-Belsen memorial said further investigation was not possible.

“We have consulted the Jewish community of Lower Saxony and according to religious laws no digging is allowed. That’s why there’s a decision not to start a dig. In any case, the whole camp has been declared a cemetery,” he said.

(INN)

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