"You have to be very careful about writing someone down in history as the one who betrayed Anne Frank if you're not 100 or 200 percent sure about that."
The warning comes from Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House.
The revelation is very sensitive.
It's a historical secret almost 80 years old: the betrayal of the family that allowed the Nazis to discover their hiding place in a house in Amsterdam.
The young girl, known throughout the world, will end up dying in deportation at the age of 16 from typhus in 1945.
Vince Pankoke, after carrying out an investigation for 6 years, affirms it: it is a Jewish notary, Arnold Van den Bergh, who died in 1950, who would have denounced Anne Frank. "As a founding member of the Jewish Council, Van den Bergh would have had access to addresses where Jews were hiding," relates the former FBI agent. When he lost a whole host of wards that exempted him from being sent to the camps, he had to give the Nazis he had contact with something of value so he and his wife could stay safe. Investigators discovered that Arnold Van den Bergh's family had been granted a deportation waiver, thereby sparing them deportation. But this had been cancelled. The family therefore had to be deported. Yet at the time of the Franks' betrayal,the deportation ultimately did not take place for unknown reasons. Vince Pankoke also bases his investigation on an anonymous letter sent to Anne Frank's father. This missive, received after the Second World War, and therefore after the death of Anne Frank, identified the notary as a traitor.
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However, this survey is not unanimous.
“Defamatory nonsense” reacted Bart van der Boom, professor at the University of Leiden.
As for the granddaughter of Arnold Van den Bergh, she has, for the moment, refused to react to this revelation.
