Who betrayed them? New revelations about Anne Frank family

Speculation over how the Frank family’s hiding place was revealed to the Nazis has haunted the world since that terrible day in 1944. Startling new revelations have come to light.

Diarist Anne Frank in the 1940s.

When my Auntie Ruth turned up for school on Monday July 3, 1942, one of her school mates was missing. It wasn’t an unusual event. At her school, children disappeared all the time and no one was ever quite sure what had happened to them.

Ruth, my mother’s oldest sister, was attending the Amsterdam Jewish High School and the Nazis had begun calling up people for “work in Germany”. As this was an invitation to a concentration camp and death, many didn’t go. Instead they tried their best to hide or abscond. So when a child didn’t show up for school, they might have been arrested, they might be hiding, they might have found some unlikely route to freedom. Who knew?

The missing pupil that Monday morning was Ruth’s friend Margot Frank. The story doing the rounds was that Margot, her sister Anne, and their parents Edith and Otto had somehow made it to Switzerland, where Otto had family.

In December 1944, Ruth realised that this is not what had happened. For one day, standing with my mother Mirjam at the wire in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, they saw Margot and Anne again, prisoners in the next door section of the camp. And later they learned that the Frank sisters had died there.

What the Franks had actually done in place of sending the girls to school is now well known. As related in Anne’s famous diary, they had moved into a secret annex attached to what had been Otto’s place of work. And they had stayed hidden there, supported by his former work colleagues and accompanied by his friends the Van Pels family, for more than two years. Until disaster struck.

On August 4, 1944, while Otto was giving English grammar lessons to young Peter van Pels and explaining that double is not spelt with two Bs, he heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and a man stood there, pointing a gun at them. The residents of the attic – the Franks, the Van Pels and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer – had been discovered by the German authorities. They had almost made it. On the radio they were hearing news of Allied advances. Now Otto was to be the only one of the eight hidden Jews to survive the war.

But how were they discovered? Were they betrayed? If so, who betrayed them? Why? From the moment he returned from Auschwitz, Otto was naturally keen to find answers to these questions.

The Dutch authorities were a good deal less keen to help him. They were short-staffed, having sacked a large number of Nazi collaborators, and they had a great deal to do. And, mildly investigated but completely unresolved, this is where the question would have remained, if the officer who had arrested the Franks hadn’t been so greedy.

Karl Josef Silberbauer, an SS man, and sergeant in the Jew-hunting unit, had told the family to prepare for the trip to the Gestapo headquarters and Anne had picked up her father’s briefcase. Silberbauer had grabbed it from her, thrown the papers inside it on to the floor, and used the case to collect the remaining valuables, including Fritz Pfeffer’s dental gold. If he hadn’t done that, the case with its contents would doubtless have been taken away by the Gestapo and never heard about again. As it was, Silberbauer had thrown on to the floor Anne Frank’s diary.

Otto Frank with his daughters Margot and diarist Anne in Frankfurt in 1930-31. Picture: AFF/AFS

The diary was rescued once the officers had gone, by one of the Franks’ helpers, Miep Gies, and later returned to Otto. After he published it, his daughter became one of the most famous people of the 20th century. And how she had been captured became of interest not just to Otto and a few listless Dutch police investigators.

Of interest, but never conclusively determined. Repeated attempts, none very carefully conducted, have produced numerous suspects, but each accompanied by compelling reasons to question their guilt.

In 2016, the Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens and his friend the journalist Pieter van Twisk decided that this wasn’t good enough. That they would make a documentary in which an expert team, using all the latest police techniques, would conduct a cold case investigation into the betrayal of Anne Frank.

The result is both a film and a book – The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan, published this week, and featuring startling new revelations and an intriguing new theory of what happened.

The arguments in favour of such a project are obvious. First, all research on what happened to Anne Frank helps to combat Holocaust denial. After the war Otto often met with my grandfather Alfred Wiener in London, having known him before the war, and the two would talk about the battle to prove Anne’s diary authentic. The attacks by deniers troubled Otto greatly and it is important to carry on this work.

Second, all research on Anne’s betrayers sheds light on the complicated story of wartime Holland. Those working on the film and the book were spurred on by a feeling that now, once more, it is possible to imagine people living in previously civilised countries finding ways to accommodate themselves to undemocratic authorities.

And, as it turns out, the account of collaboration that emerges from the investigation is fascinating.

The investigators – including a host of AI experts, forensic analysts, professional historians and former FBI investigator Vince Pankoke – began with some of the more familiar existing theories, before coming up with a new one of their own.

One of their earliest pieces of work was to take a careful look at the details of the raid itself. After all, the idea that the Franks were betrayed is only one possibility. Perhaps, as one theory has it, the officers were only there looking for valuables to steal and happened upon the Jews incidentally. They were able to establish from the way they proceeded to the annex that the raiders knew what they were looking for, and it wasn’t just valuables.

This same piece of the investigation helped them with their consideration of the suspect most often thought to have been the betrayer — warehouse manager Willem van Maaren. Certainly in 1945 Otto believed that Van Maaren was the most likely betrayer. And the case initially looks strong.

The man was known to be a petty criminal, who later admitted stealing from the warehouse. He certainly knew the annex existed, because a back annex was a feature of many narrow buildings in the area. He’d asked a lot of questions about what was going on, and people being in the building after hours. Most incriminating of all, he had left pencils balanced on desks and strewn flour on the floor, clearly seeking to prove there were people moving around at night.

The home in which Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis, in Holland during World War II

But the cold case study of the way the tip-off about the Franks had come in seemed to clear him. He wouldn’t have had access to a phone at the time the Germans say they took the call, and the officer receiving the information was too senior for a man like Van Maaren to reach. As for the pencils and the flour, his explanation was that he was trying to catch a thief.

The cold case team had more time for some of the other theories. One was that a notorious woman called Ans van Dijk had been responsible. Having been turned by the Germans, Van Dijk betrayed more than 200 people, her method being to pretend to be a resistance worker. Her area of operations had been near the hiding place, and she may have learned of the annex. But the team discovered Van Dijk wasn’t in Amsterdam at the right time, having been sent to Utrecht to infiltrate a large resistance network.

Another theory suggested the betrayer had been Nelly Voskuijl, the sister of one of the helpers, Bep Voskuijl. Bep’s son Joop thought so. Nelly had fallen out with her family over her relationship with an Austrian Nazi and had then gone to France to work for the Wehrmacht. During one family row she had shouted at her sister and father, both annex helpers, “you go to your Jews”, a comment that suggests she might have known what they were up to, despite their efforts to keep it secret.

In the end, the team felt the theory amounted to no more than speculation. But they rejected it entirely for another reason. They came to believe that Otto Frank and Miep Gies had found out who the betrayer was. And on the rare occasions they admitted to knowing, they had said the betrayer was Jewish, a man and dead. Nelly was none of those things.

Looking through the files of previous investigations, and using forensic techniques to authenticate documents, the team alighted on an anonymous note sent to Otto just after his return to Amsterdam. It said the annex hiders had been betrayed by a man called Arnold van den Bergh. And that he had given the Nazis a number of other addresses too. The cold case team became increasingly convinced they had their man.

Van den Bergh was a Jewish Dutch notary who had been a member of the Jewish Council, the body the Germans had insisted that the Jews establish to administer the communities’ affairs during the war. The council became very controversial among those who believed resistance was the only possible stance, and who argued the council helped administer the Holocaust.

But the council also made sure that Jews were able to live in the increasingly impossible conditions. When the Jews were forbidden from shopping in the market, the council provided an alternative way of obtaining vegetables. When Jews were excluded from schools, the council helped organise alternatives. When Jews were deported to camps without coats, the council helped provide coats. And it also provided jobs. Some people – my family’s home help Betty Lewin, for instance – were given unpaid council work because while they were doing it the Nazis wouldn’t send them to the gas chambers.

The cold case team traced Van den Bergh’s war and discovered that somehow he had managed to have himself designated as a non-Jew and had quit the council. Things hadn’t gone well. His business had earlier been confiscated and the new owner felt he’d been tricked. This man had managed to have Van den Bergh redesignated as a Jew. Now the notary and his family were without any protection. Yet somehow he didn’t go to the camps, nor did his daughter. Why?

The theory of the cold case team is that he used as leverage knowledge of the addresses of hidden Jews that he gained while on the Jewish Council. And one of these addresses was the annex. When Otto worked this out, they theorise, he decided to protect Van den Bergh’s identity for the sake of the Van den Bergh family. After all, wasn’t the notary just another Jew trying to save his family? Otto could understand that.

The theory is compelling. That Otto received this tip-off is unquestionable, as is the fact that he thought he knew who the betrayer was. But are the team right about Van den Bergh? The evidence that the council or he knew such addresses is pretty weak. It’s possible, but speculative.

That doesn’t mean the investigation was a failure, at all. They may be right, to start off with, and the new facts are important. But more than this, what they have shown is that literally dozens of people might have been the betrayer, accidentally or on purpose. The food suppliers, the neighbours, people passing by and glimpsing someone, business associates of the company.

What they have shown is that the incentives for collaboration – bounties, fascist instincts, intimidation, trickery, trying to save one’s own family – were so great they made hiding unbelievably perilous.

In 1943, some friends living in the Amsterdam suburbs offered to hide my mother. My grandmother decided it was too dangerous. Reading this book I understand why.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, is published by HarperCollins.