Who ratted out Anne Frank and her family? More than 75 years later, a team of investigators says they have a pretty good idea.
A team of researchers, co-led by retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke, dug into the cold case of who betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis while they were hiding in a warehouse annex in Amsterdam to escape the Holocaust in the 1940s. They settled on a man named Arnold van den Bergh as their main suspect after a five-year investigation.
ANNE FRANK MEMORIAL VANDALIZED WITH ANTI-SEMITIC IMAGES, INCLUDING SWASTIKAS
Van den Bergh was a Jewish notary who was part of Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, which worked with the Nazis until it was disbanded in 1943 and its members sentenced to concentration camps. But Van den Bergh was never sent to the camps and may have kept his family safe by exchanging information on other hidden Jews, Pankoke told CBS’s 60 Minutes.
“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,” Pankoke said.
The most striking piece of evidence they found was a note alleging that Van den Bergh gave up their hiding place to the Nazi authorities that Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only family member who survived the Holocaust, had in his possession.
Pieter van Twisk, a member of the investigation, speculated that Otto Frank, who died in 1980, knew who gave up his family’s hiding place but didn’t give up his name in turn because he “had been in Auschwitz. He knew that people in difficult situations sometimes do things that cannot be morally justified.”
The Anne Frank Museum said the study “generated important new information and a fascinating hypothesis that merits further research.”
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Others are skeptical of the findings. Dutch historian Erik Somers told CNN that the note cannot be authenticated and Van den Bergh may have not been deported for other reasons. A 2016 study suggested that no one tipped investigators to their hiding place and that they may have been discovered accidentally during a ration card fraud raid.
Anne Frank kept her famous diary during the two years she hid with her family. Their hiding place was raided in August 1944, and the entire family was deported, with all except her father dying within a year. Anne was 15 when she died of typhoid in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her father published her diary in 1947.
