Anne Frank in 1940. Rosemary Sullivan's new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, claims that a retired FBI agent and a team of investigators have solved the mystery of who betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis.
When he left the FBI, Pankoke was looking forward to spending time at the beach. The question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to their arrest and deportation to a concentration camp, is a famous cold case. Pankoke assembled a crack team of investigators to find his own answer to the question. They spent five years poring over every piece of relevant material, setting up an extensive online database, and developing an artificial intelligence program to help them find new connections.
Pankoke et al. believe that the most likely culprit is a man named Arnold van den Bergh, a local Jewish leader who may have handed over lists of addresses where fellow Jews were hiding to the Nazis in order to protect his. The Pankoke team's story was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this week and Rosemary Sullivan wrote a book about it called The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.
The Diary of Anne Frank has been read by millions of people. It inspired a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 film, which featured the title role of Millie Perkins. After Hitler came to power, Anne Frank's family fled Germany and settled in Amsterdam. The Franks and many other Jews were forced to hide after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940.
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A model of the building where Anne Frank stayed.
Anne received her diary for her 13th birthday in 1942, around the time the Gestapo began deporting Jews in Amsterdam. The Secret Annex was where Otto Frank had worked and where the Frank family began their lives. The only people who knew where the Franks were hiding were the employees. The families were supplied with food and other necessities by four people who knew they could be condemned to death by the Nazis for aiding Jews.
Their lives were chronicled in Anne's diary for the next two years. The Franks and the Van Pels family were arrested by German police and taken to the transit camp after being questioned. Kugler and Kleiman were arrested and held at a camp for "enemies of the regime".
When Gies and Voskuijl returned to the Annex, they found the pages of Anne's diary strewn around the floor. Anne Frank died at Bergen-Belsen in February and April 1945, a day after her older sister. Edith died of starvation the year before.
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A reproduction of Anne Frank's diary is part of a permanent exhibition about the life of Anne Frank.
The Dutch police conducted two separate investigations into who may have betrayed the family. The findings were not conclusive. Several independent investigations have identified different possible suspects.
The biography of Anne Frank concluded that the wife of the company's assistant warehouse manager betrayed the family. Carol Ann Lee came to a different conclusion in her biography of Otto Frank, that the culprit was a member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands. There is a chance that more than one person betrayed the Frank family, since several possible culprits knew each other.
A biography of Bep Voskuijl, co-authored by her son Joop, suggested that one of her sisters may have snitched on the Franks. She fell in love with a young Austrian Nazi, had worked for a year on a German air base, and had political leanings that made her estranged from her family. According to the testimony of the officer who made the arrests, the anonymous female caller may have been the one who tipped off the SS about the secret Annex.
Gertjan Brock, a historian, helped the Anne Frank House arrive at a surprising new theory. Brock suggested that the raid was part of an ongoing effort to track down illegal goods. The officers stumbled upon the Jewish families hiding in the attic.
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