Retired FBI agent has new theory about who betrayed Anne Frank’s family to Nazis

Former FBI particular agent Vincent Pankoke was wanting ahead to a soothing retirement hanging out on the seashore when he left the company. As an alternative, he was drawn into fixing a well-known chilly case: the query of who betrayed Anne Frank and her household to the Nazis, resulting in their arrest and deportation to a focus camp. Solely the daddy, Otto Frank, survived. To seek out his personal reply to that query, Pankoke assembled his personal crack staff of dogged investigators. They spent 5 years poring over each little bit of pertinent materials, organising an in depth on-line database, and growing an AI program to assist them sift by way of all of it and discover new connections.

Whereas admitting that the case is circumstantial and a few cheap doubt stays, Pankoke et al. consider the almost definitely offender is a person named Arnold van den Bergh, a neighborhood Jewish chief who might have handed over lists of addresses the place fellow Jews have been hiding to the Nazis as a way to shield his circle of relatives. The Pankoke staff’s story was featured in a section on 60 Minutes earlier this week (see video at finish of put up) and is roofed intimately in a brand new guide by Rosemary Sullivan, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Chilly Case Investigation.

Hundreds of thousands of individuals have learn The Diary of Anne Frank because it was first revealed posthumously in 1947. It has been translated into 70 languages and impressed a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 movie, that includes Millie Perkins within the title position. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, however the household fled the nation and settled in Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler got here to energy. They did not flee fairly far sufficient: the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands started in Could 1940 and finally pressured the Franks (and lots of different Jews) into hiding.

Anne obtained the well-known diary on June 12, 1942, for her thirteenth birthday, across the time the Gestapo started deporting Jews in Amsterdam. On July 6, the Frank household started their lives within the Secret Annex connected to the workplace constructing at Prinsengracht 263, the place Otto Frank had labored. It was solely accessible through a door on the touchdown, stored hidden by a bookcase. Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl have been the one staff who knew the place the Franks (and later, the Van Pels household) have been hiding. The 4 provided the households with meals and different requirements, figuring out full effectively that they might be condemned to loss of life by the Nazis for aiding Jews.

Anne chronicled their lives within the Annex in her diary for the following two years, making her closing entry on August 1, 1944. Simply three days later, German police led by SS officers stormed the Annex, arresting the Franks and the Van Pels household and transferring them to the Westerbork transit camp after interrogation. Kugler and Kleiman have been additionally arrested and held at a penal camp for “enemies of the regime.”

Gies and Voskuijl have been questioned, however not detained, and located the pages of Anne’s diary strewn across the ground once they returned to the Annex, preserving it for posterity. As the entire world now is aware of, 15-year-old Anne Frank died (possible of typhoid fever) at Bergen-Belsen between February and April 1945, the day after her older sister Margot. Their mom, Edith, had died of hunger the 12 months earlier than.

There have been two separate official investigations into who might have betrayed the household: one in 1947-1948 and the second (carried out by the Dutch police) in 1963-1964. In each circumstances, the findings have been inconclusive. Since then, there have been a number of impartial investigations figuring out completely different potential suspects.

As an example, Melissa Muller’s 1998 biography of Anne Frank concluded {that a} lady named Lena Hartog, spouse of the corporate’s assistant warehouse supervisor, betrayed the household. In 2003, Carol Ann Lee got here to a special conclusion in her biography of Otto Frank: the offender was a person named Anton “Tonny” Ahlers, a member of the Nationwide Socialist Motion within the Netherlands. Stockroom supervisor Willem van Maaren was one other suspect, and since a number of potential culprits knew one another, there may be additionally the likelihood that a couple of individual betrayed the Frank household.

A 2015 biography of Bep Voskuijl (co-authored by her son Joop) urged that one among Bep’s sisters, Nelly, might have snitched on the Franks. Nelly fell in love with a younger Austrian Nazi, had labored for a 12 months on a German air base, and had political leanings that had sufficiently estranged her from the household that she left their home. This concept holds that Nelly—who returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when her romance soured—might have been the nameless feminine caller who (allegedly) tipped off the SS concerning the secret Annex, per the testimony of SS officer Karl Josef Silbauer, who made the arrests.

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The Anne Frank Home undertook its personal investigation and arrived at a shocking new concept in 2017, due to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. It is potential, Brock urged, that there was no betrayal, and the SS raid was actually a part of ongoing makes an attempt to trace down purveyors of unlawful items. This concept holds that the officers simply occurred to come across the Jewish households hiding within the attic.