Anne Frank's diary was first published

On 25 June 1947, a slim Dutch book titled Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”) appeared from Amsterdam publisher Contact. Its author, Anne Frank, had been murdered at the Bergen-Belsen camp two years earlier, at age 15. The text was drawn from the diary she kept while hiding from the Nazis in a concealed set of rooms above her father’s business.

The first edition was unassuming: just 3,036 copies. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the only member of the hidden group to survive, had assembled the manuscript from the diary entries and personal essays his daughter left behind.

Anne had dreamed of becoming a writer; the book made her wish come true after her death.

Demand grew quickly. A second printing of 6,830 copies followed in December 1947 and a third in early 1948. English editions arrived in 1952, and the diary has since been translated into more than 75 languages, becoming a defining personal testimony of the Holocaust.