The authors of a new investigation believe they have identified the person who incriminated Anne Frank and her family to Nazi authorities in 1944. The team of historians and other experts identified a prominent Jewish man who allegedly informed the Gestapo (Nazi German secret police) about the existence of the secret annex in exchange for protecting his family.
The Jewish girl, the author of the diary that is the most famous first-person account of the Holocaust, died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Anne, her family, and some friends managed to hide in her father’s attic. Company in Amsterdam for two years. Her hiding place was discovered by the Gestapo in August 1944. The 15-year-old died about two months before the camp was liberated.
During 77, it was unknown how the Nazi authorities discovered the existence of the attic. The new investigation ran for six years and used modern investigation techniques, including an algorithm that identified links between different people. This task would have taken hundreds of hours for a human to do, reports BBC.
The team of investigators then concluded that the family may have been denounced by Arnold van den Berg. A prominent Jew in the Dutch capital, he was a member of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, a body formed to implement Nazi policy in Jewish areas. This body was dissolved in 1943 and all its members were sent to concentration camps. The exception was Van den Berg, who stayed in Amsterdam, where he lived a normal life.
One explained: “When Van den Berg lost the protection that spared him from having to go to the camps, he had to give something of value to the Nazis whom he called to leave him and his wife, at that time, to safety.” From team members, former FBI agent Vince Bangkok to the program 60 minutes of American television CBS.
Investigators found evidence that a member of the Amsterdam Jewish Council was passing information on to the Nazis. The team said they had difficulty accepting that Frank’s family had been denounced by another Jew.
However, investigators also found evidence that Anne Frank’s father Otto (the only surviving resident) knew who the whistleblower was but kept a secret. Otto will receive an anonymous note specifying the whistleblower.
During an interview with CBS, Vince Bangkok speculated that Otto Frank might have chosen to remain anonymous so as not to “further fan the flames” of anti-Semitism. “We have to remember that the fact that [van den Bergh] Being Jewish just means he was put in an impossible position by the Nazis where he had to do something to save his life,” said the former FBI agent.
second of Dutch newspaper de VolkskrantArnold van den Bergh died in 1950.
Foto: TIM SLOAN / AFP via Getty Images
