One of World War II’s most enduring mysteries might have been solved after a cold-case investigation identified a Jewish notary as the prime suspect in the betrayal of diarist Anne Frank and her family.
Arnold van den Bergh might have revealed the Franks’ hiding place in Amsterdam to the Nazis in a bid to save his own family, the six-year inquiry led by a former FBI agent showed.
The evidence comes from data-crunching techniques combined with a long-lost, anonymous note sent to Anne’s father Otto naming Van den Bergh, a new book about the investigation said.
Photo: AP
The Anne Frank House museum said it was “impressed” by the book published yesterday by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan titled The Betrayal of Anne Frank, but that further investigation was needed.
Theories have long swirled about the Nazi raid on Aug. 4, 1944, that uncovered the secret annex to an Amsterdam canal-side house where Anne and her family hid for two years.
Anne and her sister died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, but her diary became one of the most haunting accounts of the Holocaust, selling about 30 million copies.
Photo: Reuters
In 2016, retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke was enlisted by a documentary maker in the Netherlands to head a team to crack the “cold case” that two prior police investigations had failed to do.
“This was frozen,” Pankoke, who had previously investigated Colombian drug cartels, told the CBS 60 Minutes show.
The name of Van den Bergh, who died in 1950 of throat cancer, had previously received little attention.
However, it rose to the top of a list of four suspects in the investigation, which used modern techniques, including algorithms to find new links in troves of information, and employed experts in various fields.
Van den Bergh was a founding member of the Jewish Council, an administrative body that the Nazis forced Jews to establish to organize deportations.
Investigators found that he initially managed to get his family exempted from being transported, but that this was revoked around the time of the raid on the Franks, leading them to suspect he might have betrayed their hiding place.
He would also have had the opportunity to pass on the information, as he had been the notary for a German art dealer’s sale of a collection of looted Jewish art to the Nazis.
However, the most convincing element for investigators was the seriousness with which Otto Frank treated the allegation.
Anne’s father told detectives in 1964 that he had received a note shortly after the war naming Van den Bergh as the betrayer of his family and several other people.
A copy of the note made by Otto Frank was found by the team in a police officer’s archives.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS