Retired FBI agent has new theory about who betrayed Anne Frank’s family to Nazis
Enlarge / Anne Frank in 1940. A new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan, claims that a retired FBI special agent and a team of investigators have solved the mystery of who betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis. (credit: Public domain)
Former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke was looking forward to a relaxing retirement hanging out at the beach when he left the agency. Instead, he was drawn into solving a famous cold case: the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to the Franks' arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Only the father, Otto Frank, survived. To discover the traitor, Pankoke assembled his own crack team of dogged investigators. He and his team spent five years poring over every bit of pertinent material, setting up an extensive online database, and developing an AI program to help them sift through it all and find new connections.
While admitting that the case is circumstantial and some reasonable doubt remains, Pankoke et al. believe the most likely culprit is a local Jewish leader named Arnold van den Bergh. In order to protect his own family, van den Bergh may have handed over lists of addresses where fellow Jews were hiding to the Nazis. The Pankoke team's story was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this week (see the video at end of this post) and is covered in detail in a new book by Rosemary Sullivan: The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.
Millions of people have read The Diary of Anne Frank since it was first published posthumously in 1947. It has been translated into 70 languages and inspired a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 film, featuring Millie Perkins in the title role. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but she and her family fled the country and settled in Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler came to power. They didn't flee quite far enough: the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940 and eventually forced the Franks (and many other Jews) into hiding.
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