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Anne Frank – Names the presumed informant

NEW YORK (Dagbladet): The book “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” by Rosemary Sullivan points out a Jewish notary public, Arnold van den Berg, as the man who told the Nazis about the place where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding, reports several media, including other The Guardian.

Van den Bergh, who died in 1950, has been named after six years of “cold case” investigations led by a former FBI agent. He is appointed on the basis of an anonymous letter Anne’s father, Otto Frank, received after he returned to Amsterdam after World War II.

The hiding place

Van den Bergh was also a member of a Jewish council, which German Nazis forced the Jews to establish. The letter claims that he gave the Nazis the address of the Frank family’s hiding place and several other addresses of Jews who lived in hiding.

Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam from 6 July 1942 until the Nazis knocked on their door on 4 August 1944. Anne Frank, a teenager, documented it all in the very famous “Anne Frank’s Diary”. His father, Otto Frank, was the only one who survived the war.

After the Frank family was arrested, Anne (15) and her sister Margot (19) died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen death camp in February 1945, while their mother was being liquidated in Auschwitz.

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Van den Berg was a well-known notary public – one of six Jewish notaries in Amsterdam at that time. A notary public in the Netherlands is more like a very high-profile lawyer. He was respected. He worked for a committee to help Jewish refugees and before the war when they fled Germany, the author, Rosemary Sullivan, told The Guardian.

– Tragic figure

She says that Van den Berg managed to get the addresses of several Jews who lived in hiding.

And it was these addresses, without any name attached to them, or any guarantee that there were still Jews living there in hiding, he gave to save his own skin, to save himself and his family. Personally, I think he is a tragic figure, says Sullivan.

There have been a number of investigations to find out who led the Nazis to the family’s hiding place. Otto Frank, who died in 1980, is said to have had a strong suspicion of who identified them, but he never said anything publicly about the identity of this person.

According to the book, Otto Frank is said to have told the journalist Friso Endt a few years after the war that the one who betrayed the family was someone in the Jewish community. The new investigation also found that one of the people who helped the family go into hiding, Miep Gies, during a lecture is said to have said that the person who betrayed them had died by 1960.

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Life’s work

His father, Otto, survived the war and made it his life’s work to publish his daughter’s diary and turn the house into a museum. He wanted to remind the world of the extermination of the Jews and warn against anti-Semitism, writes NTB.

The diary tells vividly about life in hiding, at the same time as the Nazis tried to empty Europe of Jews and liquidate them in camps. The museum shows the cramped rooms where eight people stayed behind a hidden door.

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