Fox on Parkinson's: "Every day it gets tougher" Since then, several independent investigations have identified different possible suspects. It's possible, Brock suggested, that there was no betrayal, and the SS raid was really part of ongoing attempts to track down purveyors of illegal goods. Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis It was an anonymous phone call in the hot summer of 1944 which led the Gestapo and Dutch security police to the concealed annexe in a canalside house where Anne Frank and her family had hidden for almost two years. A family's darkest secret sheds light on an enduring mystery, Were really pleased that youve read, Please use the following structure: example@domain.com, Send me The Times of Israel Daily Edition. Incorrect password. But Barnouw said Lee's case sounded credible enough for the institute to reopen its investigation into the betrayal. In theory, as Cleve R. Wootson Jr. notes in the Washington Post, the betrayer of the Frank family shouldnt be hard to find; Nazis kept detailed records of all arrests and informants. Searching for Anne Frank's betrayer, 80 years on - The Times For decades, historians have debated who betrayed Anne Frank and her family. Evidence of his involvement was never found. } There is no smoking gun because betrayal is circumstantial.. The warehouse workers were not to know that there were people hiding in the Secret Annex. Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Ahlers had discovered, says Lee, that Otto's herb and food preservative business had supplied the Wehrmacht throughout the war and that, she suggests, would have been enough to see Otto branded a collaborator. #inline-recirc-item--id-a4ef05fe-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d, #right-rail-recirc-item--id-a4ef05fe-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d { Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Pankoke and his team eliminated her as a suspect for a few reasons. Warehouse worker Lammert Hartog did undeclared work, and director Victor Kugler kept part of the company income out of the books. Dutch police launched two separate investigations focusing on van Maaren, but did not uncover any conclusive evidence. 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. Nelly knew that Bep and her father were helping Jews. One year before his death in 1980, Frank told an interviewer he believed a woman made the call to the Gestapo. During the next six months a team of experts from the Netherlands' Institute for War Documentation (NIWD) will pore over government records drawn up at the end of the war which detail the extent of Dutch collaboration with the Nazis. Many experts believe that someone alerted Nazi authorities to the hiding place, but the identity of the culprit has never been conclusively determined. That was quite a feat. Were they betrayed? Jennifer Ouellette Terms of Use Among Voskuijls other secrets that her son came to know, the clandestine affection shared by his mother and Victor Kugler, one of the other Secret Annex helpers, fills a page of the book. If Frank had known that Van Dijk had also betrayed his family, Pankoke reasoned, he would have had no incentive to keep the information quiet. Among other investigative strategies, they used artificial intelligence to sift through reams of data and original documents. 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Now, about 72 years later, the world may have an answer to the mystery: Maybe nobody betrayed them at all. Millions of people have read The Diary of Anne Frank since it was first published posthumously in 1947. Though the Nazis dissolved the council in September 1943, sending most of its members to concentration and death camps, van den Bergh and his family managed to escape deportationan exemption indicating that the notary had some kind of leverage, according to Pankoke. For almost 60 years, the identity of that informant, whose call had such tragic consequences, has remained a mystery to historians and the most dogged Nazi hunters. Who betrayed Anne Frank? Cookie Policy Advertising Notice Preview: Michael J. They asked SD chief Willy Lages whether it was common for his former service to jump to action upon receiving a telephone tip-off about people in hiding. Victor Kugler believed he placed small pieces of wood and other items in the warehouse, in such a way that in the morning he could see if anyone had been there. In the years since Anne Franks diary was published, investigators and historians have proposed several other potential informants. In a 2018 book,The Backyard of the Secret Annex,Gerard Kremer, the son of a member of the Dutch resistance of the same name, argues that a Jewish woman,Ans van Dijk, was responsible for the Franks' capture. "There was a lot of information that pointed to Tonny Ahlers as being a potential suspect," Pankoke said. - Jan 22, 2022 10:54 pm UTC. Lages answered that the credibility of the tip-off would have been checked first, unless it came from an informant who had proved to be reliable before. Writer Rosemary Sullivan chronicled the painstaking process in a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. After all, one of her sisters and her father joined the high-risk effort of hiding, feeding, and sustaining eight Jewish fugitives. "I think that people that are looking at this feel, 'Ah, maybe we can learn something if this case is solved,'" Pankoke said. The diary Frank kept during her confinement is now considered one of the most important accounts of the Holocaust, but the circumstances of her arrest have always been cloaked in mystery. Ars may earn compensation on sales from links on this site. The burglars had ripped a panel out of the warehouses street door in order to get in. Cookie Settings, Five Places Where You Can Still Find Gold in the United States, Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Otherand the Birds Loved It, Balto's DNA Provides a New Look at the Intrepid Sled Dog, The Science of California's 'Super Bloom,' Visible From Space, What We're Still Learning About Rosalind Franklins Unheralded Brilliance. After tracking down Hulsman for the book, Van Wijk learned of a heated conversation between Nelly and other members of the Voskuijl family during the hiding period. See: Barnouw, David & Stroom, Gerrold van der, Who betrayed Anne Frank? But despite suspicions, there was no conclusive evidence van Maaren betrayed the family. As the scarcity increased during the war, so did the number of burglaries. Fox on Parkinson's, and maintaining optimism She added that the people who were helping to hide the Frank family had been looking into the question of how to get this fellow out of the place from every possible angle. Van Maaren was later the subject of multiple investigations related to the betrayalincluding one by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthalbut he always maintained his innocence, and none of the cases ever produced any evidence against him. Anne and her family hid for 25 months in a canal-side warehouse in central Amsterdam, where the teen-ager wrote her thoughts, yearnings and descriptions of life in the cramped annex into notebooks. The Anne Frank House undertook its own investigation and arrived at a surprising new theory in 2017, thanks to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. The enduring mystery of the Anne Frank story is, who betrayed her to the Nazis? Kugler and Kleiman were also arrested and held at a penal camp for "enemies of the regime.". }. When the people in hiding put it back, it was brutally kicked in again. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Click the link in that email to complete your registration. The team hopes to reveal the results of its investigation on August 4, 2019the 75th anniversary of Anne Franks arrest. Only when he began research for the book in 2010 was the long-time marketing professional able to locate documents that contradict the family backstory on Nelly. Fifteen-year-old Anne, her sister Margot and her mother Edith died in Nazi concentration camps. | READ MORE. How were the people in hiding discovered? Maarten Kuiper was one of the major betrayers of Jews in hiding during that time.". It's been such a long time, and most of the people who knew are dead.". Out of all the warehouse staff, only Johan Voskuijl was aware of the presence of the people in hiding. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Anne Franks father Ottothe only member of the family to survive their subsequent deportation to the concentration campswas among the first to assert that a betrayal had led to their capture. Johan was important to them because he could keep an eye on the other warehouse workers to see if they noticed anything. Although the team's evidence points to Van den Bergh as the prime suspect, they concede this is a circumstantial case. [My mother] often lived in the past after the war and mulled over the split she found herself in: the loss of her Jewish loved ones from the Annex on the one hand, and her loyalty to her sister [Nelly] who had proven her services to the occupier on the other hand, wrote Van Wijk. Recently translated into English, Van Wijks family account adds what he calls a remarkable name to the list of people suspected of betraying the Secret Annex nearly 75 years ago: his mothers sister. The time will come when we will be people again and not just Jews! The burglars managed to take two cash boxes containing forty guilders, blank giro and bank cheques, and coupons for 150 kilograms of sugar. (public domain), Author Joop van Wijk with the biography of his mother, Bep Voskuijl (courtesy), Bep Voskuijl, lower right, with Otto Frank (middle) and the other Dutch helpers in October, 1945 (public domain), Nelly Voskuijl during World War II (courtesy: Joop van Wijk), View of the secret annex with its blacked out windows at the renovated Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nov. 21, 2018 (AP Photo/Peter Dejong), The Secret Annex in which Anne Frank wrote her diary, Amsterdam, January 2017 (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel), Otto Frank and Bep Voskuijl in 1978 (courtesy: Joop van Wijk), Anne Franks hiding place bedroom during the 1950s (left) and her restored bedroom at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam today (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel), Exterior of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, November 2014 (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel). A 20-person team for theAnne Frank House was led, in part, by two retired FBI officials; former special agent Vince Pankoke, and behavioral scientist Roger Depue. Van Dijk was executed after the war for collaborating with the Nazis and betraying dozens of fellow Jews. Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusion. Miep Gies :: The betrayal First Republic Bank seized by regulators, then sold to JPMorgan Chase, Reward offered as manhunt for Texas shooting suspect reaches "dead end", Louisiana's health care deserts put women, babies at risk, doctors say, Second convoy of U.S. citizens fleeing Khartoum arrives at Port Sudan, ISIS chief killed by Turkey's intelligence agency, Erdogan says, How a tall Texan became an unlikely Australian rules football star, General Mills issues Gold Medal flour recall over salmonella concerns, Investors sue Adidas over Kanye West Yeezy deal, Shaquil Barrett's 2-year-old daughter dies in drowning accident, Michael J. At one point, Kugler was prepared to end his marriage in order to move to South America with Voskuijl, but she did not want to wreck their marriage. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. But the evidence against Van Maaren was again inconclusive, and he died in 1971 professing his innocence. Van Maaren fought the accusations and rejected a settlement. I take both of these theories seriously enough to put them on paper but that is different from actually saying what happened. Vince Pankoke, who tracked Colombian drug traffickers in recentyears atthe FBI, will lead a multidisciplinary team of experts, among them historians, psychological profilers and police detectives. His aunts past as a Nazi collaborator, as well as her whereabouts during a key part of the hiding period, had been covered up by the family. Was Anne Frank's family betrayed? After 72 years, historians have a new Ahlers was a member of the Dutch Nazi NSB movement, appeared in Nazi propaganda films and was thrown out of his lodgings after his landlady discovered a swastika flag on the wall and a uniform bearing SS insignia hanging in his wardrobe. Immediately after the war, Willem van Maaren was the only suspect in the investigation into the raid of the Secret Annex by the Sicherheitsdienst. Ahlers own son endorsed the theory that his father was the culprit, but a subsequent investigation by Dutch authorities found no hard evidence of his involvement. For more than 20 years, employee Van Maaren was the main suspect. You couldn't just do that.". As the whole world now knows, 15-year-old Anne Frank died (likely of typhoid fever) a day after her older sister, Margot, at the Bergen-Belsen death camp between February and April 1945. Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern. Lee says Ahlers not only turned in the Frank family, but may have blackmailed Otto Frank for years after the war, receiving payment for his silence about Frank's business with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. Beginning in 2016, Pankoke led a team of expert investigators equipped with modern crime-solving techniques to try to crack the case. Pankoke's team wondered: Did the suspected betrayer know the location of the secret annex? Pankoke also showed Wertheim a note, which investigators say Otto Frank received after the war, that specifically names Van den Bergh as the betrayer. #inline-recirc-item--id-a4ef05fe-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d ~ .item:nth-child(5) { In this book, he's much more flesh and blood. Multiple people have been suspected of informing the Nazis of the Franks' hiding place, while one theory suggests it may have simply been bad luck. When Frank returned from Auschwitz in 1945, having lost his wife and two daughters, he may have feared his company would be confiscated if his prewar business with Germany became known. 'My aunt might have betrayed Anne Frank,' writes son of Secret Annex I think he got the information from Ahlers," Lee said. ", Ms Lee is also cautious but believes the secret of who shopped Anne Frank is there to be unearthed. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Ars Technica Addendum (effective 8/21/2018). Who betrayed Anne Frank? Artificial intelligence could finally solve For a long time, betrayal was considered to be the reason for the arrest of the people in hiding, but the focus is shifting, as there are several other options. Hermann van Pels hit the ground with an axe, which finally drove them away. A petty thief and unsavory braggart, Van Maaren was investigated shortly after the war, but nothing was proved. For example, it is certain that two representatives from whom the helpers bought illegal coupons were arrested for black marketeering. And who among us, if our families were on the line and heading to extermination camps, wouldnt do what we could? It takes just a few seconds. He was the warehouse manager as well as the father of Bep, who worked in the office and was one of the helpers. The case. (Amsterdam: NIOD, 2003). These include Lena Hartog, the wife of one of the warehouse employees; and Nelly Voskuijl, the sister of one of the Franks helpers. But, the Anne Frank House museum and research center were unable to confirm Van Dijk's involvement after its own investigation.
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