Van den Bergh is said to have betrayed the people in hiding in the Secret Annex to save himself and his family. The story of Anne Frank and her family is one of the best known from the Second World War. Thanks to her diary, in which she described how she went into hiding with her loved ones in a secret annex on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. What has remained a great mystery all these decades is who betrayed the Frank family and ensured that the German occupiers found and deported them. Anne Frank eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In recent decades, many theories have been passed about the betrayal of the Frank family and the other people in hiding in the world-famous Secret Annex. The number of suspects is now in the tens. But never before has such thorough research been conducted.
The Dutch documentary maker Thijs Bayens already proposed in 2017 a new investigation into the betrayal, and that call was followed. An international cold case team decided to search through 66 gigabytes of information, ranging from old and new interviews and diaries to directories and war files from archives, and examined dozens of previously formulated theories about who might have done it.
The international investigative team that comes to the conclusion after six years of research believes they have managed to solve one of the greatest mysteries surrounding the Second World War. Who betrayed Anne Frank? More than 30 investigators were involved in the investigation, including retired FBI detective Vince Pankoke.
Notary
The researchers had hoped that the traitor was “a bastard”, or “someone who had been executed years ago”, says ‘lead researcher’ Pieter van Twisk (59). But “very likely” it was the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh. Van den Bergh also had a daughter who was the age of Anne Frank.
Van den Bergh would have acted out of self-interest. The notary was a Jew himself, but convinced a German official that he was not and was granted a stay of deportation because he played an important role in the Jewish Council. Only when his deferment of deportation expired in 1944 and he got into an argument with a colleague, he was in danger of being exposed and he made a deal by giving the Germans hiding places. And it also contained the address of the Frank family.
“In an old case like that, you don’t have DNA evidence or video footage, so it will always come down to circumstantial evidence,” said retired FBI detective Vince Pankoke, who was part of the investigation team. “Yet our theory has a probability of at least 85 percent. We do not have any smoking gun, but a hot weapon with empty shells next to it.” In other words: Pankoke is very convinced of the researchers’ theory.
One of the research leaders, Dutch journalist Pieter van Twisk, adds that of the thirty theories examined, “27, 28 are very unlikely to impossible.”
note
Notary Van den Bergh did not often come up as a suspect in other investigations over the past decades. But an anonymous note about his action would, according to the researchers, show that Van den Bergh would very likely have betrayed the residents of the secret annex.
It is remarkable that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, received the note not long after the war in which the notary’s betrayal was already explained. “Your hiding place in Amsterdam was reported at the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat, by A. van den Bergh, who at the time lived near Vondelpark, O. Nassaulaan. At the JA there was a whole list of addresses he passed on,” it said.
Only in 1964 did father Frank come out with the note. Investigators found a copy of the note in a police officer’s family records. The reason that Van den Bergh’s option had never been taken seriously as a suspect before is because it was assumed that he was in a concentration camp in 1944. But that turned out not to be true, the researchers found, making the theory much more plausible.
The researchers also emphasize that this is not a definitive proof. But the theory does have “a probability of at least 85 percent,” according to Pankoke.
‘Need further investigation’
Ronald Leopold, general director of the Anne Frank House, believes that “further investigation is needed” into the theory that Anne Frank was betrayed by the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh. “You have to be very careful about sending someone into history as a traitor to Anne Frank if you are not 100 or 200 percent sure about that.”
He calls the investigation of the cold case team “very good and careful”, but according to him the important puzzle pieces are still missing. The book The Betrayal of Anne Frank, written by Rosemary Sullivan, will be released on Tuesday. In it, researchers state that the Amsterdam notary wanted to protect his own family by sharing hiding places with the German occupier. But there is no conclusive evidence for this theory.
Leopold calls the finding of the copy of the note “special.” But he also has many questions. “Where’s the original? Who wrote it and with what intention?” The general director also has many questions about the alleged list of hiding addresses that Van den Bergh may have possessed through the Jewish Council, of which he was a member, and that Van den Bergh would have shared it with the Germans. “We don’t know for sure if it existed and we don’t know if he had it.”