Who betrayed Anne Frank? Suspect identified after 77 years
- Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh ‘most likely’ disclosed the teen diarist’s secret hiding place to the Nazis to save his own family, new book says
- A team of investigators spent years trying to solve one of the most enduring mysteries of World War II
A cold case team that combed through evidence for five years in a bid to unravel one of World War II’s enduring mysteries has reached what it calls the “most likely scenario” of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family.
Their answer, outlined in a new book called The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, by Canadian academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, is that it could have been a prominent Jewish notary called Arnold van den Bergh, who disclosed the secret annex hiding place of the Frank family to German occupiers to save his own family from deportation and murder in Nazi concentration camps.
“We have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario,” said filmmaker Thijs Bayens, who had the idea to put together the cold case team, that was led by retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke, to forensically examine the evidence.
Bayens was quick to add that, “we don’t have 100 per cent certainty”. “There is no smoking gun because betrayal is circumstantial,” Bayens said on Monday.
The Franks and four other Jews hid in the annex, reached by a secret staircase hidden behind a bookcase, from July 1942 until they were discovered in August 1944 and deported to concentration camps.