New book claims to solve mystery of who betrayed
Anne Frank
Society
January 17, 2022 Anne Frank at school in 1940. Photo: Collectie Anne Frank
Stichting
The hiding
place of Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam during World War II was
probably given to the Nazis by Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh according to
a new book which claims to solve the 77-year-old mystery. The Betrayal of Anne
Frank, by Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan, is based on the work of a cold
case team led by a former FBI agent who spent years trying to solve one of the
most enduring mysteries of the war. The teenage diarist and her family went
into hiding on 6 July 1942 but they were found and deported in August 1944.
Most died in Auschwitz, Anne and her sister Margot in Bergen-Belsen. There have
been many theories about who betrayed Anne Frank and the seven others in hiding
and the name of Arnold van den Bergh appears on earlier lists of possible
suspects. Van den Bergh was a member of the Joodse Raad, or Jewish Council,
which was set up in 1941 ostensibly as an organisation for Jewish self
government. In fact it was an instrument for the occupiers to facilitate the
smooth selection and deportation of Jews. The team looked at some 30 possible
scenarios, including the one that the family was found by chance. ‘We can say
that 27 or 28 of them are extremely unlikely or impossible,’ journalist Pieter
van Twisk, one of the Dutch researchers, told the Volkskrant. Letter The theory
is based on an anonymous letter that was delivered to Otto Frank after the war.
The cold case team failed to trace the original but did find a copy of the text
made by Otto in the family archives of a policeman involved in an earlier
investigation. The note says that the family’s hiding place was ‘given to the
Jüdische Auswanderung by door A. van den Bergh, who lived at the time near the
Vondelpark… The JA had been given a whole list of hiding places by him.’ Van
den Bergh, the book claims, probably told the Nazis about the Frank’s hiding
place to keep himself and his own family safe. Public ‘As a founding member of
the Jewish Council, he would have been privy – to addresses – where Jews were
hiding,’ former FBI officer Vince Pankoke told CBS. ‘When Van den Bergh lost all his series of protections
exempting him from having to go to the camps, he had to provide something
valuable to the Nazis that he’s had contact with to let him and his wife at
that time stay safe.’ Otto only went public with the existence of the note in
1964, during a second investigation into the family’s betrayal. At the time the
claim was dismissed as slanderous towards Van den Bergh, who had died in 1950.
Anti-Semitism The book suggests that Otto did not press the issue out of
respect for Van den Bergh’s children and because he did not want to do anything
to stimulate anti-Semitism. ‘Perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up
again, with Arnold van den Bergh being Jewish, it’ll only stoke the fires
further,’ Pankoke said. ‘But we have to keep in mind that the fact that he was
Jewish just meant the he was placed into a untenable position by the Nazis to
do something to save his life.’ Emile Schrijver, director of the Jewish
Historical Quarter organisation in Amsterdam, told the Volkskrant the book had
thinned out the number of theories about the betrayal considerably. ‘Of all the
theories, you can say this one is the most likely,’ he said. ‘But the last word
has not yet been spoken.’
Watch the
CBS documentary on the cold case investigation. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anne-frank-betrayal-investigation-60-minutes-2022-01-16/
Read more
at DutchNews.nl:
History
The Betrayal of Anne Frank
Rosemary
Sullivan
€ 19.99
Less a
mystery unsolved than a secret well keptThe mystery has haunted generations
since the Second World War: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And
why?Now, thanks to radical new technology and the obsession of a retired FBI
agent, this book offers an answer. Rosemary Sullivan unfolds the story in a
gripping, moving narrative.Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a
Young Girl, the journal teenaged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with
her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the
Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many
works - journalism, books, plays and novels - devoted to Anne's story, none has
ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding
undetected for over two years - and who or what finally brought the Nazis to
their door.With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team
of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of
documents - some never before seen - and interviewed scores of descendants of
people familiar with the Franks.
Utilising
methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together
the months leading to the infamous arrest - and came to a shocking conclusion.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of
their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains
the behaviour of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of
suspects.
All the
while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter
how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could
trust.
Experts express doubt that Anne Frank was
betrayed by a Jewish notary
A new book by Rosemary Sullivan suggests that Arnold
van den Bergh could have revealed the family’s hiding place, but other
historians are not convinced
Daniel
Boffey in Brussels
Wed 19 Jan
2022 11.30 GMT
Historians
have voiced their scepticism about a book that has identified a Jewish notary
as the prime suspect for the betrayal of Anne Frank and her family to the
Nazis.
The
Betrayal of Anne Frank, by Rosemary Sullivan, based on research gathered by
retired FBI detective Vince Pankoke was published on Tuesday by HarperCollins
with some fanfare.
A CBS 60
Minutes programme on Sunday evening highlighted the book’s tentative findings
which were widely covered in the media, including the Guardian.
But
researchers have now raised doubts about the central theory that Arnold van den
Bergh, who died of throat cancer in 1950, probably led the police to the Frank
family’s hiding place above a canal-side warehouse in the Jordaan area of
Amsterdam on 4 August 1944.
The book
claimed that as a member of the Jewish council in Amsterdam, an administrative
body the German authorities forced Jews to establish, van den Bergh would have
had access to the places in which Jewish people were hiding.
But David
Barnouw, a Dutch author of the 2003 book Who Betrayed Anne Frank?, said he was
not convinced.
He said:
“The researchers rightly subject their findings to all sorts of caveats.
However, they are very firm in their conviction of that poor notary. While I
wonder whether he had access to a list of Jewish hiding places. The Jewish
Council was far too law-abiding to make such a list, I think.”
The book, a
result of a six-year investigation, suggests that van den Bergh, who acted as
notary in the forced sale of works of art to prominent Nazis such as Hermann
Göring, had been forced by risks to his own life to use addresses of hiding
places as a form of life insurance for his family. Neither he nor his daughter
were deported to the Nazi camps.
The
investigators said they had found references to addresses being kept by the
Jewish council. A further key piece of evidence was said to have been an
anonymous note delivered after the war to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the sole
survivor among the direct family.
The note
stated that van den Bergh had given away addresses to the Nazis including that
in which Otto, Anne, her mother Edith, sister Margot, Hermann, Auguste and
Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, had sought to evade capture. The Franks hid
for two years in a concealed annexe in the Jordaan area of Amsterdam before
their arrest.
Ronald
Leopold, director of the Anne Frank House, praised the investigation but he
also counselled against taking the findings as definitive.
He said: “I
have great appreciation for the impressive work of the team, the research has
been carefully carried out. A lot of new information has been found, sufficient
reason to follow the trail of notary van den Bergh.
“The most
special find is the copy of the note. But many puzzle pieces remain. About the
lists that would have been with the Jewish council, about the note and about
the notary himself. These are all things that need to be investigated in order
to strengthen the credibility of this theory.”
Despite a
series of investigations, including two by the Dutch police, the mystery of who
led the Nazis to the annexe remains unsolved. Otto Frank, who died in 1980, was
thought to have a strong suspicion of that person’s identity but he never
divulged it in public.
Following
the arrest of the family, Anne was sent to Westerbork transit camp, and on to
Auschwitz concentration camp before finally ending up in Bergen-Belsen, where
she died in February 1945 at the age of 15, possibly from typhus. Her published
diary spans the period in hiding between 1942 and her last entry on 1 August
1944.
Writing in
the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, Hanco Jürgens, a research assistant at the
Germany Institute Amsterdam, said: “It seems much more likely that the arrest
was coincidental. After all, five months earlier, two employees had been
arrested for the clandestine trade in coupons.
“It could
therefore equally be a regular check that resulted in the discovery of the
hiding place. The fact that the people in hiding had to wait a long time for an
arrest car points to this. But this theory is also based on
assumptions.”
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