Cold-case investigation names suspicious of Anne Frank’s betrayal – Henry Club

Anne and seven other Jews were discovered by the Nazis on 4 August of that year, after they had been hiding for nearly two years in a secret annex above a canalside warehouse in Amsterdam. All were deported and Anne died Bergen Belsen Camp At the age of 15.

Investigative team member Peter van Twish said the key piece of new evidence was an unsigned note for Anne’s father. OttoA pre-war investigation found the dossier, specifically naming van den Berg and alleging that he provided the information.

The note states that van den Berg had access to addresses where Jews were hiding as members of the Wartime Jewish Council of Amsterdam and that he passed a list of such addresses to the Nazis in order to protect his family.

Twisk said only four of the initial 32 names were following research, with van den Berg being the prime suspect.

Investigators confirmed that Otto, the only family member to survive the war, was aware of the note but decided never to speak it publicly.

Van Twish speculated that the reasons for being silent about Frank’s allegations were likely that he could not be sure that it was true, that he did not want to create public information that could feed anti-Semitism, and He would blame the three daughters of van den Berg for what their father had done.

Otto “was at Auschwitz,” said van Twish. “He knew that in difficult situations people sometimes do things that cannot be morally justified.”

While other members of the Jewish Council were exiled in 1943, van den Berg was able to remain in the Netherlands. He died in 1950.

Historian Eric Sommers of the Dutch NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies praised the extensive investigation, but was skeptical of its findings.

He questions the centrality of the unknown note in van den Berg’s arguments for responsibility, and says that the team has made assumptions about wartime Amsterdam Jewish institutions that are not supported by other historical research.

According to Somers, there are several possible reasons Van den Berg was never deported because “he was a very influential person.”

One of the family’s assistants, Miep Gies, kept Anne’s diary until Otto returned and published it for the first time in 1947. It has since been translated into 60 languages ​​and has captured the imagination of millions of readers around the world.

The Anne Frank House Foundation was not involved in the cold case investigation, but shared information from its archives to assist.

Director Ronald Leopold said the research has generated “important new information and a compelling hypothesis that deserves further research.”

Using modern research techniques, a master database was compiled with lists of Dutch collaborators, informants, historical documents, police records and prior research to uncover new leads.

Dozens of scenarios and whereabouts of suspects were visualized to identify the fraudster based on information about the hiding place, motive and spot.

The findings of the new research will be published in Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan’s book The Betrayal of Anne Frank, which will be released Tuesday.

The director of the anti-Semitism organization CIDI, which combats anti-Semitism, told Reuters he hoped the book would provide insight into the wartime conditions of Amsterdam’s Jewish population.

“It would be unfortunate if this turns into ‘the Jews did’,” said CIDI’s Hanna Luden. The Nazis were eventually held responsible.