Who Betrayed Anne Frank: Investigators Unravel One of World War II's Biggest Mysteries

By Mike Corder

A team of cold-case investigators has pored over five years of historical evidence to unravel one of the mysteries of World War II, arriving at the "most likely hypothesis" about who betrayed Jewish teenager Anne Frank and her family, who She was killed by the Nazis.

Her response, reflected by Canadian academic and writer Rosemary Sullivan in a new book titled

, points to

to the German occupiers to try to save his own family from deportation and death in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

“We have investigated more than 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one place that we like to refer to as the most likely,” said filmmaker Thijs Bayens, who came up with the idea of ​​putting together the cold case team under the direction of agent Retired FBI Vincent Pankoke.

A journalist takes pictures of Anne Frank paintings at the renovated Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam in 2018. Peter Dejong / AP

Bayens was quick to add that "we don't have 100% certainty."

"There is no smoking gun because the betrayal is circumstantial," he told The Associated Press on Monday.

Anne Frank's family and four other Jews hid in a secret room accessible only by a hidden staircase behind a bookstore, and remained there from July 1942 until they were discovered in August 1944 and deported to death camps. concentration.

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Only Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived the war.

The 15-year-old girl and her sister died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The diary that Anne Frank wrote while in hiding was published after the war and became a symbol of hope and resistance that has been translated into dozens of languages ​​and read by millions of people.

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But the identity of the person who gave away their location has always been a mystery despite previous investigations.

The team's findings suggest that Otto Frank was one of the first to learn of the possible betrayal of Van den Bergh, a prominent member of Amsterdam's Jewish community.

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A short note, a typewritten copy of an anonymous tip given to Otto Frank after the war, names Van den Bergh, who died in 1950, as the person who tipped German authorities in Amsterdam where to find the Frank family, the experts say. researchers.

The note was part of a decades-old police investigation in Amsterdam that was reviewed by the team, which used artificial intelligence to analyze and link files from around the world.

Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, gestures as he speaks next to the corridor of the secret annex during an interview Peter Dejong / AP

The Anne Frank House museum, in the Amsterdam canal-side building that includes the secret room, welcomed the new investigation, for which it provided access to its archives, but said it also leaves unanswered questions.

"No, I don't think we can say now that a mystery has been solved, I think it's an interesting theory," said museum director Ronald Leopold, "I think they've provided a lot of interesting information, but I also think there are still a lot of pieces missing." of the puzzle.

And those pieces need to be investigated further to see how we can value this new theory.”

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Bayens said the traitor hunt was also a way of seeking an explanation for how the horror of the Nazi occupation forced some members of a tight-knit Amsterdam community before the war to turn on each other.

How could fascism bring people “to the desperate point of betraying each other, which is a horrible, really horrible situation?” Bayens wondered.

"We went looking for a perpetrator and found a victim," he concluded.