Gies was an honors student, and described herself as "reserved and very independent"; after graduating high school, she worked as an accountant and then in 1933 as a secretary with the Dutch branch of the German spice firm Opekta.

"[13] Otto Frank had just relocated from Germany and had been appointed managing director of Opekta's recently expanded Dutch operations.

After refusing to join a Nazi women's association, her passport was invalidated, and she was ordered to be deported back to Austria within 90 days (by then annexed by Germany, which classified her as a German citizen).

With her husband Jan and other Opekta employees (Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl), Miep Gies helped hide Otto and Edith Frank; their daughters Margot and Anne; Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels; and Fritz Pfeffer in several upstairs rooms in the company's office building on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht from 6 July 1942 to 4 August 1944.

Every day, she saw trucks loaded with Jews heading to the railway station, en route to Nazi concentration camps.

[citation needed] When purchasing food for the people in hiding, Gies avoided suspicion in many ways: for example, by visiting several different suppliers in a day.

[citation needed] At their apartment, close to the Merwedeplein where the Franks had lived before going into hiding, Gies and her husband Jan (who belonged to the Dutch resistance) also hid an anti-Nazi university student.

[16] On the morning of 4 August 1944, sitting at her desk, Gies, along with Voskuijl and Kleiman, was confronted by a man with a gun commanding "Stay put!

Gies and the other helpers could have been executed if they had been caught hiding Jews; however, she was not arrested because the police officer who came to interrogate her was from Vienna, her birth town.

[citation needed] Before the hiding place was emptied by the authorities, Gies and the younger secretary Bep Voskuijl retrieved parts of Anne Frank's diaries and saved them in their desk drawer.

Gies did not read the diaries before turning them over to Otto and later remarked that if she had, she would have had to destroy them because the papers contained the names of all five of the helpers as well as of their black-market suppliers.

[9] Miep Gies had assured Anne Frank's biographer Melissa Müller repeatedly that she did not think the main suspect, Willem van Maaren, was the culprit in the betrayal.

"[citation needed] On 30 July 2009, the Austrian Ambassador to the Netherlands, Wolfgang Paul, presented the Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria to Gies at her home.