New insights: who betrayed Anne Frank?

On the morning of August 4, 1944, the Gestapo stood in front of the house at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. She came to arrest a family that was hiding in the back building. The case later became world famous when Otto Frank published his daughter Anne's diary. He was the only one who survived the deportation to the Nazi death camps. The world found out about the life of the family in the confinement, about the fears and hopes of the maturing girl. But one thing remained unclear for decades: Who betrayed the Franks back then? There were repeated suspicions about this, the Dutch police investigated twice, in 1948 and 1963. But the question remained unresolved.

Searched for the traitor for five years

Now there is a new study about it, the most extensive so far. A team of private investigators, mostly Dutch, searched archives and private estates for five years, evaluated hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewed seventy eyewitnesses. Criminologists were involved, forensic experts, historians, headed by a retired FBI agent. This Monday they presented their findings in the form of a book: The Betrayal of Anne Frank, written by Rosemary Sullivan. The book was initially published in Dutch and English, but it should also be available in German at the end of March.

The investigators investigated thirty scenarios.

The lead that appears to them to be the most plausible is quite surprising: it was not the cleaning lady and not the Jewish bounty hunter, who had already been suspected, who are said to have given the Gestapo the decisive clue to the hiding place.

Rather, the traitor himself is said to have come from the Jewish community in Amsterdam: the notary Arnold van den Bergh, a respected member and co-founder of the Jewish Council.

Former FBI agent Vince Pankoke was quoted as saying by the newspaper De Volkskrant on Monday that it was the "most likely scenario, the only scenario in which the traitor had the motive, knowledge and opportunity to break the three pillars." any criminal investigation".

The official got a copy

Pankoke found the most important clue in the estate of a Dutch investigator who investigated the case in the early 1960s. In a hand file was a copy of a note that Otto Frank had found in his mailbox after the war – an anonymous note. “Their hiding place in Amsterdam was then disclosed to the Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat, by A. van den Bergh, who then lived near the Vondelpark, O. Nassaulaan. There was a whole list of addresses at the YES that he passed on,” it said in Dutch. The Jewish Emigration, a euphemism, had organized the deportation of the Jews. Frank mentioned the note to an investigator, but he didn't follow up. He had deposited the original with a notary, the official received a copy,but did not include them in the official file.

As the current investigators reconstruct, Van den Bergh had contacts with the Nazi occupiers, as a notary and through his membership in the Jewish Council, which was founded in 1941 on her orders.

He was trying to protect his own family.

But in the summer of 1944 he himself came under pressure - and is said to have revealed the addresses of hiding places.

The council knew about it, it also forwarded the mail from prisoners who wrote to their family members in hiding.

The special circumstances seem to corroborate the trail.

The information about the hiding place was received by a senior official in the National Socialist Security Service (SD), whom only someone like Van den Bergh could have called directly.

Don't burden the children with their father's name

But why didn't Otto Frank, who lived until 1980, make the man's name public himself?

In fact, according to the investigators, he researched the man after the war, but did everything possible to hide his name.

They suspect that he didn't want to burden the notary's children with their father's mistake, who died in 1950.

But he also feared that a revelation would lead to anti-Semitism again – after all, the traitor had come from his own community.

"The notary was not a bad person, he faced a terrible dilemma, and Otto Frank must have recognized that," said one of the investigators "De Volkskrant".

"How would we have acted?" Incidentally, they did not find out who wrote the anonymous note, but hope for new clues after the publication of the book.