ROOM WITH A VIEW: The view of the chestnut tree (above) from the window of Anne's 'secret annex'. -- PHOTOS: AP

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But fewer people know of the soaring chestnut tree that gave comfort to Anne while she and her family hid for more than two years during the German occupation.

On May 13, 1944, only three months before her family was rounded up, Anne wrote in her diary: 'Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.'

The tree, in the backyard of the house where Anne hid, gained fame more than a decade ago when an oil spill in the yard prompted the municipal government to cleanse its roots and the soil surrounding them, to prevent the tree from dying.

In recent years, fresh ills have befallen the tree: Fungi have turned almost half its trunk to white rot, and a moth infestation has attacked its crown.

The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported last year that botanists had spent months running tests and observing the tree, but their efforts did not improve its condition significantly.

So local officials said it had to be felled.

But now, endless administrative procedures appear to have given the tree, which has stood for 150 years, a fresh lease on life.

'We prefer thoroughness to haste,' said Mr Ton Boon, a spokesman for the borough council.

Tree lovers and admirers of Anne Frank had combined to contest the municipality's decree. This was not just any tree, they argued.

In the summer of 1942, her father, Otto Frank, a German Jew who had left Frankfurt for Amsterdam, decided that his family and several friends would hide in the rear rooms of his place of business, along the city's tree-lined Princes Canal, until the liberation of the Netherlands.

The tree's plight called forth reactions from near and far, said Mr Boon. Some asked for chips of the tree's wood, if it were cut; others sought grafted chestnut shoots. The offers were rejected, though the city did offer to plant a young tree, grafted from the existing chestnut, in its place.

Defenders of the tree, meanwhile, argued that its symbolism required that every measure be taken to prolong its life, short of endangering the buildings surrounding it.

The Dutch Tree Foundation, a non-profit organisation that looks after monumental trees throughout the Netherlands, is assembling a team of tree specialists to search for ways to extend the chestnut's life.

The immense tree, with a trunk the size of several elephant legs, had its crown cropped to reduce its exposure to high winds; its leaves curl golden in summer because of the horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth that infests it; two fungi, tinder polypore and honey mushroom, are rotting its trunk.

Last year, the Anne Frank House, now a museum, chose the tree's symbolism of branches and leaves for a new Anne Frank website. Viewers can create leaves on the digital tree, to emphasise the community of those who admire Anne and of schools throughout the world named for her.

'For Anne, the tree represented comfort, consolation, freedom, a longing for freedom,' said Ms Annemarie Bekker, an official of the house, adding that a florist had been hired to graft saplings from the tree, which will be sent to schools around the world dedicated to the memory of Anne Frank and the Holocaust.

The tree's power as a symbol came to Anne especially after she found consolation in a friendship with Peter van Daan, the teenage son of a family Otto Frank had taken along into the hiding place.

'The two of us,' she wrote on Feb 23, 1944, referring to Peter and herself, 'looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn't speak.'

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