The Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht is a museum honouring the Jewish war diarist Anne Frank, who hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in the attic and attic of the building, concealing the entrance with a false bookcase. Along with the preservation of the hiding location, also known as Achterhuis in Dutch, and a display on Anne Frank's life and times. The museum serves as a venue to draw attention to all types of oppression and discrimination.

With the aid of a public subscription, it opened its doors on May 3, 1960, three years after a foundation was set up to safeguard the house from a business looking to demolish the area.

Through a virtual reality headset application, it is now possible to tour the location virtually.

Anne Frank turned 90 years old on June 12, 2019. In this manner, the many rooms of the property can be visualised through 360-degree photographs, as well as the room where Anne and her sister Margot had to hide.

Dirk van Delft constructed the house at address number 263 and the one next door at address number 453, which was eventually acquired by the museum. The rear annexe was destroyed and a higher building was built in its place in 1740, which is when the façade facing the canal was renovated. Originally a private property, it was later converted into a warehouse, and in the 19th century, the front warehouse's large doors were used as a stable for horses. The building was occupied by a manufacturer of home items at the start of the 20th century. In 1930, a manufacturer of piano rolls moved in, and they remained there until 1939. Opekta and Pectacon, the spice and canning company Otto Heinrich Frank worked for, relocated its offices from this location along the Singel Canal to Prinsengracht 263 on December 1, 1940.

The ground floor was divided into three areas: the front had the merchandise and the entry for deliveries; the middle, where the spices were ground; and the back, a warehouse where the merchandise was kept for distribution. The offices of Frank's employees were located on the first floor. Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler were in the front office, while Otto Frank worked in the annex office above the warehouse and beneath the floors where he and his family would later hide for two years before being discovered by the Nazis.

The building's back addition is referred to as the Achterhuis (Dutch for "back house") or Secret Annexe in Anne Frank's Diary. Houses surrounded the inner courtyard on all four sides, obscuring it from view. Otto Frank, his wife Edith Frank-Holländer, their two daughters (Anne Frank and Margot Frank), the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer all sought safety there from Nazi persecution because of its remote location. Despite having only 46.45 square metres of living space overall, Anne Frank noted in her journal that it was comparatively opulent compared to other Amsterdam hiding places they had known of. Before being secretly turned in to the Nazi authorities, arrested, and sent to concentration camps, they were hidden there for two years and a month. Only Otto Frank, who passed away at the age of 91, survived the war of the group sheltering.

Following their arrest, the hiding place was ordered to be cleaned out by the arresting officers, and all of the Frank family's and their friends' remaining possessions—including clothing, furniture, and other personal items—were seized as government property and given to families in Germany that had been bombed. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who had assisted in sheltering the families, went back to the hiding site despite orders from the Dutch police and recovered some personal items before the building was completely evacuated. The items they found included Anne Frank's diary.

Anne had chosen Het Achterhuis as the title of her memoirs or a novel based on her experiences in the hiding place. Otto Frank received Anne's papers and diaries after his return to Amsterdam, and he later assembled portions of them into a book published in Dutch in 1947. A more evocative term (the "Secret Annexe") was chosen to better convey the idea of the building's hidden location. Achterhuis is a Dutch architectural term that refers to the back-house and is used in contrast to Voorhuis (front-house). However, when translation into other languages started, it was realised that readers would not be familiar with the term.

Soon after the book was published, people who wanted to see the hideaway started arriving to the house, and many of them were taken around by the same staff members who had concealed the families. The company chose to relocate in 1955, and the entire structure was sold to an estate agent who intended to serve a demolition order and erect a factory there. On November 23, 1955, the Dutch newspaper Het Vrije Volk launched a campaign to rescue the structure and recognise it as protected property. On the day of the demolition, protesters demonstrated in front of the building, and the property was given a stay for judgement. Otto Frank and Johannes Kleiman established the Anne Frank Foundation on May 3, 1975, with the main objective of raising enough money to buy and renovate the structure. The building was handed to the Foundation by the business that had bought it in October of the same year as a gesture of goodwill. Shortly before the building's public opening in 1960 and the demolition of the other structures, the money raised was utilised to buy the house next door, number 265.

From the beginning, there was a lot of interest in Anne Frank's former hiding location, especially after the diary's translations and dramatisations made her a household figure all over the world. Over 9000 people visited in the first year. The amount doubled in a decade. The structure had to undergo renovations throughout the years to safeguard it from the high volume of visitors, which led to its temporary closures in 1970 and 1999.

On September 28, 1999, Queen Beatrix I of the Netherlands reopened the museum, which had been expanded to include the entire structure in addition to exhibit halls, a bookstore, and a café. The front house offices had also been restored to their pre-World War II condition. More than a million individuals visited the museum in 2007.

The Oscar that Shelley Winters received for playing Petronella van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank—and later donated to the institution—is on view in the museum.

The Anne Frank House has an international relations department that, in addition to the museum's operations, runs educational programmes throughout the globe through travelling exhibits like "Anne Frank: A Living History," "Writing and Reading with Anne Frank," and "Anne Frank and You" that travel to various cities around the globe6 and other educational activities that seek to increase public awareness of Anne's story.

The Anne Frank House currently has five partner organisations: the United Kingdom, Germany (Berlin), the United States, Austria, and Argentina. These organisations carry out their own educational initiatives in addition to serving as organisers of the travelling exhibition "Anne Frank: A History in Force."