I Was Betrayed by a Jew Again

The multidisciplinary team suggests that Arnold van den Bergh, a notary and fellow member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council, gave the Underground Annex'south address to the Nazis to avert deportation. Tim Sloan / AFP via Getty Images

On August ane, 1944, 15-twelvemonth-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, "I'm guided by the pure Anne within, simply on the outside I'g nothing simply a frolicsome piddling goat tugging at its tether." She concluded with a pledge to "keep trying to discover a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if … if simply at that place were no other people in the world."

3 days after Frank wrote these words—the final entry in her beloved diary—SS officers raided her Amsterdam hiding place and arrested its eight inhabitants. Frank and her older sister, Margot, died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp less than a year later, in February 1945. Only i of the people in hiding, Frank's father, Otto, survived World State of war II. The Amsterdam home where she and her family hid is today a museum known as the Anne Frank House.

Scholars and the public alike accept long debated the identity of the individual (or individuals) who betrayed Frank, her family unit and the other residents of the then-called Secret Addendum. "[T]he list of people who were accused of being involved in the case is too long to include in its entirety," notes the Anne Frank House on its website. At present, reports Jon Wertheim for CBS News' "60 Minutes," a vi-twelvemonth investigation spearheaded past retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke has pinpointed the likely informant: Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary who may have revealed the Franks' hiding place to the Nazis to protect his own family unit from deportation.

Equally a member of the local Jewish Quango—administrative bodies established past the Nazis to govern Jewish communities in High german-occupied Europe—van den Bergh had access to lists of addresses where Jews were known to exist in hiding.

"​​There's no evidence to signal that he knew who was hiding at whatsoever of these addresses," Pankoke tells "60 Minutes." "[But] when van den Bergh lost all his series of protections exempting him from having to go to the camps, he had to provide something valuable to the Nazis that he's had contact with to let him and his wife at that fourth dimension stay safe."

Pankoke and his colleagues, including an investigative psychologist, a war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists and archivists, approached the historical mystery like a criminal common cold example. Per the New York Times' Alexandra Jacobs, the squad drew on a combination of large data and artificial intelligence analysis, "erstwhile-fashioned shoe-leather reporting," interviews, and archival research to narrow down the pool of suspects. Writer Rosemary Sullivan chronicled the painstaking process in a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.

"Nosotros have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 dissimilar scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario," filmmaker and team fellow member Thijs Bayens tells Mike Corder of the Associated Press (AP). "... We don't have 100 percent certainty. There is no smoking gun considering expose is coexisting."

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 Addendum helper Bep Vokuijl, to Ans van Dijk, a Jewish collaborator whose actions led to the arrest of some 145 people. The researchers also investigated the theory, start raised by scholars at the Anne Frank House in 2016, that the SS discovered the hiding place by chance while searching the warehouse for bear witness of illegal work and ration coupon fraud.

Anne Frank'southward May 1942 passport photo Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The key to the mystery proved to be a note sent to Otto Frank shortly later on his return to Amsterdam in June 1945. Left unsigned, the message named van den Bergh as the person who'd reported the Franks' hiding place to the Nazis. The annotation came to regime' attention during a 1963 investigation into the betrayal but received picayune notice, with police instead focusing their efforts on suspects such every bit van Maaren.

Every bit Pankoke tells "60 minutes," the squad managed to track downwards a re-create of the note after reaching out to the son of one of the 1963 investigators. Records discovered in the Dutch national archives by journalist Pieter van Twisk, co-founder of the research project, seemingly corroborated the claim, suggesting that a member of Amsterdam'south Jewish Council turned over lists of addresses where Jews were hiding. 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 displacement—an exemption indicating that the notary "had some kind of leverage," according to Pankoke.

Otto, for his function, never publicly named van den Bergh, who died in 1950, equally the informant. Merely a few years afterward the state of war, reports Hanneloes Pen for Dutch paper Het Parool, he told a journalist that his family had been betrayed by a member of the Jewish community. And, during a 1994 lecture, Hugger-mugger Addendum helper Miep Gies "let slip" that the informant died prior to 1960.

Speaking with Marsha Lederman of the World and Post, Sullivan says the researchers characterize the notary as "a tragic figure, not every bit some kind of villain." Bayens tells the AP that "[due west]e went looking for a perpetrator and we plant a victim."

Otto Frank (center) attends the 1977 inauguration of a statue of his youngest daughter, Anne, in Amsterdam. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Van den Bergh gave "that list every bit a manner of keeping him and his family out of the extermination camps," Sullivan says. "… And it really matters to me, and I think information technology mattered to the group, that that was an bearding list of addresses—there were no names. He was not betraying Otto Frank."

Ronald Leopold, director of the Anne Frank Firm, points out that "many missing pieces of the puzzle" remain, telling the AP, "I don't think we tin can say that [the] mystery has been solved now."

Erik Somers, a historian at the NIOD Constitute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, praised the depth of the investigation simply criticized its determination. As he tells Anthony Deutsch and Stephanie van den Berg of Reuters, van den Bergh was "a very influential homo" who could've avoided deportation for any number of reasons. "They seem to piece of work from the betoken of view that he was guilty and [detect] a motive to fit that," Somers adds.

Regardless of whether van den Bergh was the person who informed on the Franks, the ones ultimately responsible for their deaths—and those of the more than than 100,000 Dutch Jews murdered during the Holocaust—were the Nazis.

"I call back that nobody can judge van den Bergh who has not been in his position," Sullivan tells the Earth and Mail. "And who among us, if our families were on the line and heading to extermination camps, wouldn't practise what we could? And if what we could do would exist to offering anonymous addresses, I don't know that I know many people who could resist information technology."

Anne Frank Death European History genocide Holocaust Judaism Nazis Netherlands New Enquiry Warfare Globe War 2

Recommended Videos

turneraparich40.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-a-jewish-notary-betray-anne-frank-to-the-nazis-180979414/

Share this post