The end of a long mystery? Almost seventy-eight years after Anne Frank and her family were arrested in Amsterdam by the Nazis, a new book aims to lift the veil on one of the most famous pages of the Second World War. The investigation carried out by a former FBI agent thus reveals that the main suspect of this denunciation would be a Jewish notary, Arnold Van den Bergh. The man would have done so to save his own family. This is revealed by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, who publishes in January Who betrayed Anne Frank? (translated by Harper Collins editions in France).
The story of this investigation begins in 2016. Filmmaker Thijs Bayens and journalist Pieter van Twisk, both Dutch, decide to hire Vince Pankoke, a retired FBI agent in Florida. Bringing together a forensic psychologist, archivists, historians and criminologists, the team searches documents from the time and draws up a list of suspects. Among them, a name emerges: that of Arnold van den Bergh. To support their conclusions, Pankoke and his team rely in particular on an anonymous letter sent after the war to Otto Frank, the teenager’s father, and which identifies the notary as a traitor.
Big data and AI
From modern techniques such as artificial intelligence or big data, dozens of interviews and the consultation of private and public archives, the team would have retained the name of this Jewish notary from Amsterdam. After the invasion of the country by the Germans in 1940, the latter became a member of an organization set up by the Nazis bringing together Jewish personalities, the Jewish Council. In exchange for their collaboration, and in particular the denunciation of other Jews, these members and their families are spared.
As a teenager during the war, Anne Frank became famous throughout the world for having told in her Newspaper his two years spent with his family in a hiding place in Amsterdam, above a warehouse of pectin and spices. Denounced with her relatives in August 1944, she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she died a year later. Many theories have circulated about the origin of the denunciation, but no light has ever been shed.
Caution
Ronald Leopold, the executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, warned that questions remained about the anonymous letter received by Otto Frank, and that further investigation should be carried out. “You have to be very careful about writing someone down in history as the one who betrayed Anne Frank if you’re not 100 or 200 percent sure about that.”, he said on Monday.
The Belgian historian Chantal Kesteloot, researcher at the Center for War and Society Studies (CegeSoma), is also skeptical about these new elements. “Giving food for the name of this notary whose guilt we are not 100% sure” is not necessarily relevant, she reported to RTBF. “Don’t get the wrong target., she adds. Those responsible are indeed those who set up the system of extermination of the Jews of Europe.”