On August 1, 1944, an SS non-commissioned officer, German and Dutch police discovered behind a shelf the entrance to the rooms where Anne Frank and her family had been hiding for two years and three months. For all those who looked into the event, they did not come across this shelf by chance, there was denunciation. But after two investigations by the Dutch police (in 1948 and 1963), this betrayal became the oldest closed case in the Netherlands. However, a new investigation recorded in a book, Who betrayed Anne Frank? by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, points to a new culprit in this historic cold case of almost 78 years: a Jewish notary. “Let’s wait to see the results of this investigation, let’s wait to read this book”, cautiously called Iannis Roder, head of training at the Shoah memorial and professor of history and geography in a college in Saint-Denis, Tuesday January 18 on franceinfo.
>> In 2015, a woman was named as the one who betrayed the Franks.
after six years of investigation, around thirty experts, including a former FBI agent, have come up with a name: Arnold Van den Bergh. It is he, according to them, who betrayed Anne Frank and her family, by revealing the address of the clandestine apartment in which they lived hidden. NOTotary and member of the Jewish council responsible for organizing the deportation for the Nazis, we now know that he had his special authorization withdrawn, sparing him and his family the deportation shortly before the arrest of the Frank. VSt is an anonymous letter received on his return from Auschwitz by Otto, the father of Anne Frank, the only survivor of the family, which designates him as the main suspect. UA copy of this letter was found in a box at the home of a former Dutch investigator by Vincent Pankoke, a retired FBI. Thanks to artificial intelligence, they have cross-checked tens of thousands of elements, arrests, denunciations, collaborators, SS. They even surveyed the entirety of the residents of the block in the middle of which Anne Frank’s hiding place was located. They arrived at four main suspects of which three were eliminated.
Arnold Van den Bergh’s granddaughter, who is still alive, does not comment and officials at the Anne Frank House museum also urge caution. “There have been many speculations about the arrest of Anne Frank, this young girl and her family who were hiding in this annex in Amsterdam, dozens of people were the target of these hypotheses”, pointed Iannis Roder. “It was even speculated that she had never been denounced”, added the professor of history and geography according to whom, Anne Frank is a “icon, ingenuous, naive and gentle” Who “shows the absurdity of Nazism, which seeks people who are not guilty of anything, except to exist”.
>> Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
For Iannis Roder, “it is above all necessary to recontextualize things”, car “It was the Nazis who put the Jews in Europe in an absolutely abominable situation, where sometimes they had to choose between the lives of their children and the lives of the children of the neighbor or the neighbor himself”. “Who would have reacted otherwise?”, he wondered while insisting on the need to “not to divert the guilt and the responsibility which is that of the Nazis, not that of the Jews”. “The Nazis are responsible, we must not deflect this guilt”, he concluded.
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