For fear of my own family
Jewish notary apparently betrayed Anne Frank
01/17/2022, 2:40 p.m
A betrayal caused the Nazis to discover Anne Frank in a secret annexe in Amsterdam in 1944. Investigators are only now tracking down the informers: the Jewish notary van den Bergh is said to have given the Nazi regime a list of hiding places.
According to new investigations, the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam from the National Socialists was most likely betrayed by a Jewish notary. This result of an investigation team has now been presented in the Dutch media. After that, the notary Arnold van den Bergh gave the German occupiers a list of where Jews were hiding in Amsterdam in order to save the life of his own family.
For five years, an international team investigated the case using the latest techniques. The main evidence is a copy of an anonymous letter that Anne’s father, Otto Frank, received in 1946. The name of the notary is already mentioned therein. The original of the letter has disappeared, but a copy was found in the Amsterdam City Archives. According to the investigators, this trace had never been examined in detail before.
The Jewish Frank family and four other people went into hiding in a rear building in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. It was there that Anne (1929 – 1945) wrote her world-famous diary. In August 1944 the hiding place was revealed. The family was deported to concentration camps and murdered. Only father Otto survived.
The notary was a member of the Jewish Council, so he had many contacts and was initially protected from deportation. But in 1944 this protection fell away, and in his desperation he is said to have revealed the hiding places in order to save his wife, his three daughters and himself. 77 years after the end of the war, there is no absolute certainty, said former FBI investigator Vince Pankoke, who played a key role in the investigation. “But our theory has a probability of more than 85 percent,” he said on the radio.