Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family that resulted in their deportation to Auschwitz camp in 1944 was one of the greatest mysteries in history… until now. A new investigation has pointed that it was a Jewish man in Amsterdam who “gave up” the Franks in order to save his own family.
A team of forensic experts, including criminologists, psychologists, data analysts, forensic scientists, and a retired FBI agent, Vince Pankoke, mobilized in 2017, aided by modern police techniques and artificial intelligence, in search of solving “the case oldest open in history.
After years of research, they concluded that the one who revealed Frank’s location to the Nazis was Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary from Amsterdam who was a member of the Jewish Council, a group forced to implement Nazi policy in Jewish areas and who, apparently, had a list of several addresses.
There is no evidence of DNA evidence or video images to implicate Van den Bergh, but this “theory has a probability of at least 85%,” Pankoke defended.
The argument: the notary would have accessed a list of hiding places drawn up by the Jewish Council and kept it as “life insurance.” There was also the Secret Annex, an extension of a warehouse that was located at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.
In addition, he had access to German officials. He acted as a notary in the forced sale of Jacques Goudstikker’s art collection to Nazis such as German military leader Hermann Göring. During the war, his family received a temporary pardon to avoid deportation to concentration camps, a special status they were later stripped of.
An intense historical research
Artificial intelligence was used to sift through 66 gigabytes of data, looking, for example, for connections between raids on other hideouts, dispelling the theory that the discovery was coincidental, and to map the residents of the Secret Annex or The Secret Annex, which the young Anne Frank described in her famous diary.
These conclusions have not yet been reviewed by independent experts. The director of the Anne Frank House, Ronald Leopold, stressed that the analysis is “very good and careful”, but believes that important pieces of the puzzle are missing and “more research is needed” on this theory.
“You have to be careful about placing someone in history as a traitor to Anne Frank if you are not 100 or 200 percent sure of it,” he added.
Other experts in the Netherlands have also been critical on public television, considering this conclusion “an assumption” due to the lack of irrefutable proof.
The address of the Secret Annex came into the hands of a German SS officer, who ordered his troops to go on August 4, 1944, to arrest the family of Anne Frank, but the researchers admit that conclusive evidence is still lacking on how the notary who leaked the address and who wrote the anonymous note that convinced Otto Frank of this theory.
Anne Frank died in February 1945, aged 15, in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany, and her diary, which covers her hiding place between 1942 and 1944 in a shelter in a building in the center of Amsterdam, was found later and published by his father, Otto, as an important testimony of that time.
