A six-year investigation led by a former FBI agent into who betrayed Anne Frank and allowed the Nazis to find her has pinpointed a notorious Jew as the prime suspect.
The book “The Betrayal of Anne Frank”, by Canadian Rosemary Sullivan, to be released this Tuesday (18), claims that Arnold van den Bergh may have revealed the secret annex where the young woman and her family hid in Amsterdam. The charges against the man, who died in 1950, are based on evidence such as an anonymous letter sent to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, after World War II.
According to Pieter van Twisk, a member of the investigation team, the document is a crucial piece because it specifically names Van den Bergh and says he was responsible for informing the Nazis where Jews were taking refuge. The letter also states that he, a member of the Jewish War Council in Amsterdam, would have given the addresses with a view to saving his own family.
Also according to the researcher, only four of the 32 names initially investigated remained relevant to the investigation, with Van den Bergh as the main suspect. Van Twisk speculates several reasons why Anne Frank’s father remained silent about the letter: he might not have been sure the allegation was true, the information could fuel anti-Semitism, and the alleged whistleblower’s three daughters could be blamed for something the father did. , not them, would have done.
Otto “was in the concentration camp at Auschwitz,” said the researcher. “He knew that people in difficult situations sometimes do things that cannot be morally justified.”
The Anne Frank Museum told AFP news agency that the investigation, led by retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and about 20 historians, criminologists and data experts, is a “fascinating hypothesis” but more research is needed.
Historian Erik Somers of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, for example, was skeptical of the conclusion. He questions the anonymous letter’s centrality in arguments for attributing responsibility to Van den Bergh and said the researchers made assumptions about wartime Amsterdam’s Jewish institutions that are not supported by other historical findings.
For Somers, there were many other reasons why Van den Bergh had never been deported, as he was “a very influential man.” Investigators, in turn, found that he managed to revoke a deportation order near the betrayal that allowed the Nazis to find the Frank family.
Theories about how the Nazis got to the hideout the Frank family held for nearly two years, until it was discovered on August 4, 1944, abound, but the name of Van den Bergh had not received much attention. This new research was made using modern techniques, including the use of artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of data.
After the attack, the family was deported, and Anne and her sister died in the Bergen-Belsen camp the following year. Her father published his diary in 1947, which has sold over 30 million copies, has been translated into 60 languages and captured the imagination of millions of readers around the world.
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