During World War II, when the Netherlands was occupied by Germany, Anne Frank hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in hidden rooms, in the rear building, of the 17th-century canal house, later known as the Secret Annex (Dutch: Achterhuis).

Ten years later, the Anne Frank Foundation was established to protect the property from developers who wanted to demolish the block.

At the start of the 20th century, a manufacturer of household appliances occupied the building, succeeded in 1930 by a producer of piano rolls, who vacated the property by 1939.

On 1 December 1940, Anne's father, Otto Frank, moved the offices of the spice and gelling companies he worked for, Opekta and Pectacon, from an address on Singel canal to Prinsengracht 263.

Though the total amount of floor space in the inhabited rooms came to only about 450 square feet (42 m2), Anne Frank wrote in her diary that it was relatively luxurious compared to other hiding places they had heard about.

[12] Shortly after the book was published, Otto Frank's employees showed visitors the secret rooms where the families hid.

A campaign to save the building and to list it as a protected monument was started by the Dutch paper Het Vrije Volk on November 23,1955.

The collected funds were then used to purchase the neighboring 265 Prinsengracht house, shortly before the remaining buildings on the block were pulled down as planned.

[13] The former hiding place of Anne Frank attracted a huge amount of interest, especially as translations and dramatizations of the diary had made her a figure known throughout the world.

Over the years, the building required renovations to manage such a large number of visitors, and it closed temporarily for this reason in 1970 and 1999.

To accommodate the growing number of visitors, in the late 1980s the City of Amsterdam proposed a new building be constructed on the corner of Prinsengracth and Westermarkt.

The first virtual reality tour was produced as a CD-Rom and consisted of photographs of an interpretation of the furnished house depicting the 1942-1944 years.