A team of researchers led by FBI agent Vince Pankoke believe they have finally solved a decades-old question: Who exactly betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis during World War II?
The team has named notary Arnold van den Bergh as the likely suspect. The notary was part of Amsterdam's Jewish Council. During the war, members of the councils were often forced to carry out Nazi policy whether or not they wanted to.
As many know, Anne Frank and her family were living in an attic annex, hidden behind a bookcase that concealed a staircase leading to their space. Upon their discovery in August 1944, the family members were deported to different concentration camps. Of the family members, only Otto Frank, Anne's father, survived.
A diary that Anne Frank kept while in hiding was eventually found and published in dozens of languages around the world, but the mystery of who turned in the family has never been solved. Filmmaker Thijs Bayens decided to assemble a team of 20 specialists, who incorporated computer algorithms while digging through much of the same research that others have pondered over the decades.
The filmmaker told the New York Post that the team started with 30 potential suspects: "We have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario."
The team also uncovered a typed letter addressed to Otto Frank in 1950. The notary was named as the person who turned in the family in this letter. The note even details that the notary knew where various families were hiding and ended up giving that information to the Nazis in an attempt to protect his own family.
In that light, it's important to realize that the notary himself was in an impossible position because of the grip the Nazis had on the Jewish people. This is not a case of a Jew turning on a Jew — this is a case of frightened, terrorized people trying to live and breathe in a system that wants them dead.
Agent Vince Pankoke told CBS that the team also found out that Otto Frank knew about the letter but chose to never reveal it, and he theorized that might be because the person in question is also Jewish: "Perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up again … it’ll only stoke the fires further. But we have to keep in mind that the fact that [Van den Bergh] was Jewish just meant that he was placed into an untenable position by the Nazis to do something to save his life."
As the filmmaker put it, "We went looking for a perpetrator and we found a victim."
Not everyone agrees with this theory, with the Anne Frank House Museum commenting, "I think they come up with a lot of interesting information, but I also think there are still many missing pieces of the puzzle. And those pieces need to be further investigated in order to see how we can value this new theory."
