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Investigators found that he initially managed to get his family exempted from being transported, but that this was revoked around the time of the raid on the Franks, leading them to suspect he might have betrayed their hiding place.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.
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