66 Questions and Answers about the Holocaust: Nizkor responds to Question 55

What caused Anne Frank's death just several weeks before the end of the war?

55. What caused Anne Frank's death just several weeks before the end of the war?

The IHR says (original):

Typhus.

The IHR says (revised):

After surviving internment in Auschwitz, she succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp, just a few weeks before the end of the war. She was not gassed.

Nizkor replies:

Anne was just one of eight Dutch Jews who had been in hiding for two years and thirty days when they were discovered and arrested by the Nazis and deported from Amsterdam to the death camps in Poland.
Herman Van Pels, a business associate of Anne's father, was gassed upon the group's arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, September 6, 1944 (Netherlands Red Cross, dossier 103586). His wife died "between April 9 and May 8, 1945, in Germany or in Czechoslovakia," (Netherlands Red Cross, dossier 103586). Their son Peter died on May 5, 1945, in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, after a forced march from Auschwitz (Netherlands Red Cross, dossier 135177).
Dr. Friedrich Pfeffer, a friend of the family, died December 20, 1944, at Neuengamme concentration camp (Netherlands Red Cross, dossier 7500).
Anne's mother died January 6, 1945, at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Netherlands Red Cross, dossier 117265). Anne and her elder sister Margot died of typhus sometime around March 31, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Netherlands Red Cross, dossiers 117266 and 117267). Of the eight, only one, Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived.
Two non-Jews, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Gustav Kugler, business associates of Otto Frank, were arrested as well, for aiding the Frank family. Both were sentenced to Arbeitseinsatz (labor service) in Germany, and both survived the war.
All references to the Netherlands Red Cross were cited in Frank, Anne, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, 1989, pp. 49-58 (full citation available).