Opinion: We still dont know who betrayed Anne Frank – The Globe and Mail

Allan Levine is a historian and the author of Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival During the Second World War. His most recent book is Details Are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder.

It is quite unusual for the study of the holocaust and real crime to intersect. But that’s how it is in a new book by biographer Rosemary Sullivan – The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation – that attempts to solve one of the great mysteries of World War II: who betrayed Young Anne Frank, her family, and four others who were hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex to an Amsterdam warehouse on August 10. 4, 1944?

The now-famous annex was located in a building at Prinsengracht 263, where the German-born Otto Frank once ran his business; a bookcase hid his living room. the nazi occupation of the netherlands occurred in may 1940. about a year later mr. Frank, in compliance with anti-Jewish regulations, was able to transfer his business to various non-Jewish members of his staff and appoint Jan Gies, the husband of his secretary Miep, as the nominal director of the business.

In early July, 1942, Mr. Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Margot and Anne, hid in the annex along with their friends, Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their son, Peter. (They were joined later by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist.) The Franks did so because Margot, then 16, had received official notification from Nazi administrators that she was to be sent to a labour camp in Germany. Refusal to comply with the order would have led to her arrest. And so they hid – for two years.

When the Gestapo arrived that August morning in 1944 and removed the Franks and the others, 15-year-old Anne reached for her notebooks, which were in her father’s briefcase. the notebooks were her precious diary, which she had been writing diligently to pass the long hours. Her journals contained reflections on her dire situation, her family members and others with them, as well as her deeply personal feelings about becoming a young woman. Despite the terrifying thought of capturing her, she was always optimistic and planned to publish the diary in some form after the war.

as she was being led out, the ss officer in charge of the operation, karl silberbauer, grabbed the briefcase she was holding, opened it, and threw the notebooks on the floor. then he packed the briefcase with all the valuables she could find. In this moment of terror, there was a sad twist of fate: if Anne had been able to take her diary with her, it would surely have been destroyed or lost; Instead, after the Gestapo left, Miep Gies retrieved the diary and put it away, thinking that she would return it to Anne after the war. however, only mr. frank survived – mrs. Frank died of illness in early January 1945 at Auschwitz, while Margot and Anne died of typhus five or six weeks later at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

about mr. the return of frank, mrs. Gies gave him the diary, which was soon edited and published, first in Dutch and then in English in 1952. It quickly became enormously popular. To date, it has been translated into at least 60 languages ​​and has sold more than 20 million copies. it is taught in schools as a way to introduce the tragedy of the holocaust to young students. the building with the annex was converted into a museum and (at least until covid-19) attracted more than a million visitors a year. walking through the bookcase door and up to the area where the Franks hid (which I’ve done on two visits) makes you realize how limited the two years they spent there must have been.

Thousands of Dutch Jews in hiding were discovered and arrested. some were found thanks to the efforts of Nazi “Jew hunting units”, while others were turned in by neighbors or spies. The informants were mostly non-Jewish Dutch collaborators, but there were also several Jews, such as Anna (ans) van Dijk, who saved herself by agreeing to work for the Nazis. she was responsible for the arrest of at least 145 Jews, probably many more. Executed in 1948 for war crimes, the only Dutch woman to receive a death sentence, she was long considered the prime suspect in the revelation of the Frankish hideout. so was willem van maaren, who was hired in 1943 as manager of the warehouse where the annex was located. he later proclaimed his innocence, and there is enough evidence to believe him.

Five years ago, a team of filmmakers, historians, archivists, and criminologists led by film producer thijs bayens, financial executive luc gerrits, and journalist pieter van twisk, along with vince pankoke, a retired fbi agent who took over the role of lead investigator, he set out to solve the mystery of the traitor to the Franks. they used an artificial intelligence program to analyze thousands of disparate documents and facts for clues that two official investigations, not to mention many other historians and writers, might have missed. em. Sullivan was recruited to chronicle his journey.

mrs. Sullivan does an admirable job of providing historical perspective and an account of an impressive investigative effort. literally no stone or document is left unturned. but no matter how much she and the team members want to believe and are convinced that they have probably solved this mystery, they most certainly have not. it is for this reason that several Dutch holocaust historians have criticized the book and the team’s conclusions.

near the end of the book, mrs. sullivan identifies the most likely culprit, albeit not with “100 percent certainty”, mr. bayens recently told the associated press as arnold van den bergh, a prominent dutch jewish notary who was a member of the nazi-created amsterdam jewish council (joodse raad), which operated from early 1941 to late 1943.

the hypothesis is that to save himself and his family, mr. van den bergh, who died in 1950, provided the Nazis with a list of addresses of Jewish hideouts, one of which was where the Franks resided.

In the end, the case against you essentially boils down to a few pieces of evidence. however, it is all speculative and circumstantial at best, with many unanswered questions. (As has been pointed out by several reviewers, throughout the book, Ms. Sullivan uses phrases like “likely”, “probably”, and “although the team cannot be sure…”)

the main allegedly incriminating fact is an anonymous note sent to mr. frank in 1945, shortly after being released from auschwitz, stating that the traitor was “a. van den bergh,” who had “a complete list of addresses that he sent [to the Nazi-controlled central Jewish emigration office].” Mr. frank, who died in 1980, briefly investigated mr. van den bergh and much later shared information about the note with a few others, including a detective working on the official 1963-64 treason investigation (who made reference to it in his summary report) and probably mrs. gies (who died in 2010).

It is speculated that the existence of the note was not widely publicized because mr. Frank presumably did not want to implicate a Jew in this crime, especially after Anne’s diary became famous during the 1950s and its authenticity was publicly questioned (and still is by holocaust deniers). but mr. Frank’s motives are simply guessed at. and too much is attributed to an offhand comment by mrs. gies in 1994, when she was 85 years old. During a lecture she was giving at the University of Michigan, she was asked, “Who gave away the sausages?” and he said that the traitor had died in 1960. this hardly incriminates mr. van den bergh. furthermore, we don’t know who sent the note to mr. Frank or why. em. sullivan acknowledges that he may have been someone falsely accusing mr. van den bergh.

the biggest problem is the claim that mr. Van den Bergh and other members of the Jewish Council possessed a list(s) of Jews in hiding and possibly their location, which he provided to Nazi officials. “the team thought it was very likely” that mr. van den bergh had that list, mrs. sullivan writes. It is not clear if this alleged list originated with someone from the council, and the anonymous note, if genuine, does not indicate that he obtained it from the council.

a letter found in amsterdam city archives from sybren tulp, the pro-nazi police commissioner, to ss commander hanns rauter, dated september 1942, indicated that the council had provided names and addresses of mainly sick and elderly Jews who were to be deported, although there was no mention of their being in hiding. also, according to mr. pankoke, the cold case team “found at least five [file] references indicating that the address lists where the Jews were hiding existed, four of which are linked to the Jewish council.” these references do not mention mr. van den bergh (apart from the anonymous note), and three of them concern people identified as spies and informants: mrs. van dijk is one of them, so they should be considered with some caution. according to various historians, an actual list has never been discovered. Mr. Pankoke’s response to this criticism is that this is not surprising, given that thousands of documents were destroyed in November 1944 during Allied bombing. he argues: “just because we didn’t find the address lists doesn’t mean they didn’t exist”. fair enough.

on the other hand, while the members of the Jewish council might well have had a list of names of Jews in hiding, how could they have amassed a list of secret places where these Jews were hiding? who would have told them this? and why the hell would they have done that?

Many Jews “distrusted the council because it openly cooperated with the German occupier to prevent reprisals [and] raids,” said historian Laurien Vastenhout of the Amsterdam-based Niod Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and author of the forthcoming book between community and collaboration: “jewish councils” in western europe under nazi rule. “The presidents of the Jewish [council] were very clear about their policy of legality and urged people not to hide. [they] did not support clandestine activities.”

one of the so-called “bombshell” facts (and one of the five references mentioned above) offered by mrs. Sullivan and team proving that a list must have existed relied on testimony given in 1947 by Ernest Philip Henn, a German translator working for Luftgau-Kommando Holland (Dutch Air Force Command). but it is pure rumour. he claimed that he had overheard a conversation between a military policeman and a judicial adviser that the Jewish council “had a list of over 500 addresses of hidden Jews” and that the council had sent the list to the military officer’s department.

And how did the council get this list to begin with? Mr. Henn testified that a Jewish woman had told her that “one way” was because the Nazis’ Jewish guard at the nearby Westerbork transit camp sent letters through the Jewish Council office in Amsterdam to their hidden families, with addresses of their noted hiding places. this is impossible to accept. Why would someone in their right mind who she feared for her family’s safety do this? in short, they would not have. If the letters were sent from Westerbork, said Bart van der Boom, a professor at Leiden University’s Institute of History, they would have been “sent directly to the addresses and not channeled through the Jewish Council, as the book claims.” /p>

Also, it is unclear where mr. van den bergh was in the summer of 1944, when the francs were arrested. he could have been hiding, as some historians suggest.

is it possible that the anonymous note mr. that frank received in 1945 was correct: that it was arnold van den bergh who betrayed his family? And that he had a list of Jewish hideouts? of course, that may have been the case. But as anyone who has ever done historical research knows, no matter how much effort he puts into digging through archives and libraries and searching through old books, there are times when he still can’t determine the truth. the recent accusation of mr. van den bergh, according to the evidence presented, is one of those moments.

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