The evidence that led Pankoke's investigators to their conclusion pointed to the alleged betrayer as much as it ruled out other suspects including some who had previously been the subject of speculation. The Amsterdam home where she and her family hid is today a museum known as the Anne Frank House. But two police investigations - one immediately after the war and another in the 1960s - turned up nothing and Van Maaren died in 1971 professing his innocence. 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. "But whenever you actually dig into all the evidence, you find out that he wasn't antisemitic. Fox on Parkinson's: "Every day it gets tougher". ", Ms Lee is also cautious but believes the secret of who shopped Anne Frank is there to be unearthed. One of the people who has been most often scrutinized as the potential betrayer is Wilhelm van Maaren, a worker in the warehouse building where the Franks hid. And if what we could do would be to offer anonymous addresses, I dont know that I know many people who could resist it.. They were successful, and the burglars ran off. To discover the traitor, Pankoke assembled his own crack team of dogged investigators. In 1963, the SS officer. His name was Anton Ahlers. On this page we distinguish the facts from the unproven theories and the absolute falsehoods. According to Pankoke, Van Dijk had betrayed the family of Otto Frank's second wife. Jennifer Ouellette God truly protected us ,Anne wrote in her diary, much relieved. During his research for the book, Van Wijk learned that Nelly did far more than engage in flirtations with German soldiers. However, Pankoke told 60 Minutes he trusts the evidence shows those hiding in the annex were betrayed and that the Nazi discovery and arrest wasn't merely a coincidence. But Anne was not yet famous and staff were overworked. In April 1944 Anne wrote: "One day this terrible war will be over. After spending two years eluding Nazi capture while in hiding in Amsterdam, the Frank family was discovered on Aug. 4, 1944, and promptly deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. / CBS News. Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew where the Franks (and later, the Van Pels family) were hiding. 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. A petty thief and unsavory braggart, Van Maaren was investigated shortly after the war, but nothing was proved. The note came to authorities' attention during a 1963 investigation into the. Around the time of the investigation into the SS officer, Voskuijl ceased granting interviews, wrote Van Wijk. "However, after Otto Frank went into hiding, Tonny Ahlers was out doing other things in different parts of the city. "And maybe to the Holocaust survivors that are still out there, they understand that somebody still cares that these mysteries are solved. Hermann van Pels hit the ground with an axe, which finally drove them away. Born in 1949, Van Wijk remembers a childhood shrouded in mystery about what Nelly did during the war. Among other activities, the Frank sisters took correspondence courses in Voskuijls name, and the administrative assistant put aside filing for the sisters to do at night. Millions of people have read The Diary of Anne Frank since it was first published posthumously in 1947. "Van den Bergh wasn't deported," said Pieter van Twisk, a veteran Dutch journalist who co-founded the investigative project and led the research team. We have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario, filmmaker and team member Thijs Bayens tells Mike Corder of the Associated Press (AP). Now, according to Daniel Boffey of the Guardian, a retired FBI agent has launched an investigation into the enduring historical mystery, hoping to find out once and for all who betrayed the young diarist. In June 1947 1,500 copies of the Dutch edition of the diary were produced. Michael J. display: block; It is believed that an anonymous tip helped guide the Nazis to the secret annex, yet despite decades of investigations, the identity of the informant has never been proven. But then we'll want to be. They seem to work from the point of view that he was guilty and [find] a motive to fit that, Somers adds. ", Dutch historians investigate new claims to identity of person who revealed hiding place of Jewish family, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Frank and her older sister, Margot, died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp less than a year later, in February 1945. However, the investigation did not prove his guilt. The burglars had ripped a panel out of the warehouses street door in order to get in. Please enter valid email address to continue. Anne often wrote about good-natured Bep in her diary, including happenings in the large Voskuijl family of eight siblings. Now, about 72 years later, the world may have an answer to the mystery: Maybe nobody betrayed them at all. They had to act as if everything was normal. [Otto Frank] might have done this out of loyalty for my mother, wrote Van Wijk. Willem van Maaren was the traitor. display: none; 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. The Subdistrict Court dismissed the . "There's no smoking gun but we are going to make a comparison of the two theories and see what we can rule out and in. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the researchers who published the authoritative version the diary and the caretaker of the Frank papers, said Ahlers had not been a suspect until Lee started probing his background for her book, "The Hidden Life of Otto Frank," published in March. Writer Rosemary Sullivan chronicled the painstaking process in a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. It has been translated into around 67 languages and has sold over 31 million copies. Potential informants ruled out by the group ranged from Willem van Maaren, an oft-cited suspect who worked in the warehouse where the Franks were hiding, to Nelly Voskuijl, a Nazi sympathizer and the sister of Secret Annex helper Bep Vokuijl, to Ans van Dijk, a Jewish collaborator whose actions led to the arrest of some 145 people. (11 April 1944.) The team hopes to reveal the results of its investigation on August 4, 2019the 75th anniversary of Anne Franks arrest. 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. Ad Choices, Katie Falkenberg/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images. That, Ms Lee suggests, is more likely to have been a man called Maarten Kuiper, who made a living from the betrayal of Jews and who moved into Ahlers' flat with him the day before the raid. In her diary, Anne Frank wrote about Nelly on several occasions. Anne, her sister and parents, were caught in the two-story annex with Hermann van Pels, who had worked in Frank's company, with van Pels' wife and teen-age son, and with Friedrich Pfeffer, a dentist. .component--type-recirculation .item:nth-child(5) { Bep Voskuijl was only 18 when she started working for the spice and jam company owned by Otto Frank. 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. A long-held theory proposed that a new employee at her father's business, Willem van Maaren, tipped off the Nazis. In 2022,The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigationwhich details the findings of Pankoke's investigationcited Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish businessman and member of the Jewish Council in Holland, as the culprit. Shortly after World War II ended, Otto Frank suggested that the culprit was Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee who was not in on the secret. Photo collection: Nationaal Archief/ Anefo, access number 2.24.01.04, item number 919-6449. Johan was important to them because he could keep an eye on the other warehouse workers to see if they noticed anything. The team looked at dozens of potential suspects before arriving at the person they believe likely gave up the Franks' location: Arnold van den Bergh. We dont have 100 percent certainty. Erik Somers, a historian at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, praised the depth of the investigation but criticized its conclusion. Even during the early days of the war, the Voskuijl family faced trouble with Nelly. Willem van Maaren was one of the warehouse staff. 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. She was 15 at the time of her death. He vehemently denied any involvement and said that Victor Kugler had known about the pieces of wood and other things. Not only was she carousing with German soldiers, but Nellys rowdy behavior earned her a stint in police custody. This deterioration took place around the period in which a call was made to Gestapo headquarters by a young woman it was later claimed to inform on the Frank familys hiding place. Nevertheless, Lee's book "is interesting because it takes a more balanced view of Otto Frank," Barnouw said. The groups hideout was located inside a warehouse he had once owned, and they were aided by several of his employees as well as other Dutch sympathizers. In his 2018 book The Backyard of the Secret Annex author Gerard Kremer claimed that Ans van Dijk betrayed those hiding in the annex. But two police investigations - one immediately after the. The house where she and her family hid in a sealed-off room at Prinsengracht 263 in central Amsterdam was turned into a museum in 1960 and receives almost a million visits a year, mainly from the US. I take both of these theories seriously enough to put them on paper but that is different from actually saying what happened. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. On August 4, 1944, police in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam raided a warehouse and arrested eight Jews who were hiding in an annex disguised behind a bookcase. Van Wijk had always been told Nelly did not return to the Netherlands until the end of 1944 or early in 1945 after the betrayal of the annex. Previously, Voskuijl and others had placed suspicion on a disgruntled male warehouse employee, Willem van Maaren. During the day we always have to walk quietly and speak softly, the people in the warehouse mustnt hear us, Anne wrote in her diary (11 July 1942). HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. "There's no smoking gun, and the theory has too many loose ends," he said. The people in hiding shared their suspicion, without knowing him or even having seen him. Pankoke and his team eliminated her as a suspect for a few reasons. In Joop van Wijks psychological diagnosis of his late mother Bep Voskuijl, she spent her post-war life being her own therapist in a kind of conversation with her alter ego. Otto, for his part, never publicly named van den Bergh, who died in 1950, as the informant. It was clear that Tonny Ahlers had no knowledge that Otto Frank and the others were hiding in the annex.". However, the investigation did not prove his guilt. Terms of Use Per the New York Times Alexandra Jacobs, the team drew on a combination of big data and artificial intelligence analysis, old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, interviews, and archival research to narrow down the pool of suspects. Photo collection: Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam / photographer: Allard Bovenberg, All 8 of us were just pleased that we had slept so well that night and not heard a thing., We had all stopped breathing audibly by then., Reconstruction: the arrest of the people in hiding. Advertising Notice That report, written by senior historian Gertjan Broek, argued that the German Security Service might have simply stumbled upon the eight Jews while raiding the premises to search for fraudulent food-ration cards. Ahlers was among the suspects Pankoke and his team investigated and ultimately ruled out. 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. Van Maaren pointed up the stairs, but the police already seemed to know exactly where to go. Tellingly, the books title in Dutch was, Silent No More., The biography is my mission, said Van Wijk, who dedicated the book to Dutch resisters against Nazism. Ms Lee also claims that Ahlers was blackmailing Otto, first in 1941 by threatening to release a letter which would have led to his deportation, and astonishingly after the war too and even as recently as 1980 when Otto died. Did Willem van Maaren betray the Franks? SD big shot Willy Lages knew that the callerwas a well-known informant. After the war, Frank removed content from Annes diary regarding Nellys collaboration. I think he got the information from Ahlers," Lee said. Historians have proposed competing hypotheses without definitive proof . Frank wist wie hem weghaalde, De Telegraaf, 22 November 1963. Nobody knows for sure who betrayed the Franks, but after doing research, I believe that Tony Ahlers is guilty. Do you rely on The Times of Israel for accurate and insightful news on Israel and the Jewish world? This theory holds that Nellywho returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when her romance souredmay have been the anonymous female caller who (allegedly) tipped off the SS about the Secret Annex, per the testimony of SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, who made the arrests. Fox on Parkinson's, and maintaining optimism These include Lena Hartog, the wife of one of the warehouse employees; and Nelly Voskuijl, the sister of one of the Franks helpers. Who betrayed the Franks and why? If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. Johannes Kleiman (on the left) and Victor Kugler in front of Prinsengracht 263, 1954. "He was a Dutch Nazi, a well-known traitor and an anti-semite and was very anti-Jewish. He found Voskuijl in a desperate state with a mouthful of sleeping pills. She made him keep the episode their secret, he wrote. Suddenly, a passer-by used a flashlight to take a look inside. And probably wasn't capable of betrayal, because had he betrayed the annex, he knew that he would end up losing his job." The most believable suspect was Arnold van den Bergh, a prominent Jewish businessman in the city who lived a lavish life during the holocaust. I think he is the one who gave away the Franks' whereabouts to the caller although I don't think he physically made the call himself.". 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. 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. When did the Van Pels (Van . "She was out of town working not close to Amsterdam. Her motive for betrayal, according to Mller, was that she did not want to lose her husband too and he would have been deported for aiding the Franks if they were discovered, which she believed was only a matter of time. The people in hiding slept through the first one, in July 1943. For as little as $6/month, you will: Were really pleased that youve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month. Former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke was looking forward to a relaxing retirement hanging out at the beach when he left the agency. 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. Explanations for the discovery are mainly based on testimonies, because no documents about the raid on the Secret Annex have been preserved. Within five years, she was illegally buying bread and milk for her Jewish friends in hiding and just as important giving them her sought-after company. Fox on Parkinson's and how he finds "optimism is sustainable", Ed Sheeran plays guitar in court in bid to show he didn't steal Marvin Gaye song, Preview: Michael J. There was more going on in that building than just the hiding of Jews. The book by Carol Ann Lee, a British author living in Amsterdam, says the likely informant was a former business associate of Otto Frank, Anne's father. Apparently, the police were called next, because a little while later, they came inside to take a look around. ", By Arthur Max The sound might arouse suspicion. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, https://www.history.com/news/who-betrayed-anne-frank. Willem van Maaren was the traitor. Left unsigned, the message named van den Bergh as the person whod reported the Franks hiding place to the Nazis. Did they do it for money? Apparently, the police were called next, because a little while later, they came inside to take a look around. Suddenly, a passer-by used a flashlight to take a look inside. As the scarcity increased during the war, so did the number of burglaries. 2023 TIME USA, LLC. A six-year investigation posits that Arnold van den Bergh disclosed the diarists hiding place to protect his family from deportation, On August 1, 1944, 15-year-old Anne Frank penned a journal entry describing herself as a bundle of contradictions. Reflecting on the warring sides of her personality, the Jewish diarist wrote, Im guided by the pure Anne within, but on the outside Im nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether. She concluded with a pledge to keep trying to find a way to become what Id like to be and what I could be if if only there were no other people in the world.. The first theory, forwarded by British author and Anne Frank expert Carol Anne Lee, in her book The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, seems to have aroused the most interest. The authors suspicions were deepened during interviews he conducted for the biography. Lee says among the four men who raided the Prinsengracht warehouse on Aug. 4, 1944, was Maarten Kuiper, a Dutch policeman who was a friend of Ahlers. In the years following Nelly Voskuijls death in 2001, Van Wijk attempted to learn more about the relationship between his mother and his aunt from members of the large family. "Otto Frank was of no more use to him in that sense, so he betrayed them," Lee said in the television interview. Privacy Statement ", Barnouw told The Associated Press he and another colleague will review old files and testimony for new revelations. The German-born Frank, who moved to Holland in 1933, ran a spice-trading company that sold goods to the Wehrmacht, the German army. Now, a biographer of Anne Frank has published a new theory which has intrigued the nation and revived a dark chapter in Dutch history - the failure to protect Jewish citizens from the genocidal Nazis. The people in hiding decided not to wait but to take action. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. You have reached your limit of free articles. - Jan 22, 2022 10:54 pm UTC. Not only did he build the famous swinging bookcase to conceal the hiding place, but he served as an unofficial watchman over the annex through his employment in the warehouse below. Van Maaren was suspicious and would set "traps" to . Sign me up , CNMN Collection The people in hiding did not sleep a wink for the rest of the night. Only one of the people in hiding, Franks father, Otto, survived World War II. All Rights Reserved. It's been such a long time, and most of the people who knew are dead.". For decades suspicion centred on a man called Willem Van Maaren, who worked in the warehouse attached to the Franks' hiding place. "His own mother said he had a bad character from birth and that he was always parading his Nazi connections," the author told the Guardian yesterday. In Van Wijks assessment, there is no doubt Nelly knew about the Jews in hiding. Nelly fell in love with a young Austrian Nazi and had worked for a year on a German air base. ", Patricia Bosboom, of the Anne Frank Foundation which maintains the house where Anne hid, said Lee's theory was plausible, "but it's still only a theory. Terrified, the people in hiding kept very quiet. Downstairs they think it is too risky. As Pankoke tells 60 Minutes, the team managed to track down a copy of the note after reaching out to the son of one of the 1963 investigators. War diary of life in hiding became world bestseller The Diary of Anne Frank, first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, is one of the most widely read books in the world. Preview: Michael J. "Everyone, including his own family, condemned him as distinctly anti-Jewish and a thoroughly unpleasant character.". All rights reserved. Out of the seven others who hid with her, her father, Otto Frank, was the only one who survived the Holocaust. As fast as they could, they all fled back to the hiding place. The trove of information is so large that a human in their lifetime might not be able to review it, Pankoke tells Stephanie van den Berg andAnthony Deutsch of Reuters.