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A Jewish notary has been named by a cold case team led by a former
FBI agent as the prime suspect for the betrayal of Anne Frank and
her family to the Nazis.

Arnold van den Bergh, who died in 1950, has been accused on the
basis of six years of research and an anonymous note received by
Anne’s father, Otto Frank, after his return to Amsterdam at the end
of the war.

The note claims Van den Bergh, a member of a Jewish council, an
administrative body the Germans forced Jews to establish, had given
away the Frank family’s hiding place along with other addresses used
by those in hiding.

He had been motivated by fears for his life and that of his family,
it is suggested in a CBS documentary and accompanying book, The
Betrayal of Anne Frank, by Rosemary Sullivan, based on research
gathered by the retired FBI detective Vince Pankoke and his team.

Pankoke learned that Van den Bergh had managed to have himself
categorised as a non-Jew initially but was then redesignated as
being Jewish after a business dispute.

It is suggested that Van den Bergh, who acted as notary in the
forced sale of works of art to prominent Nazis such as Hermann
Göring, used addresses of hiding places as a form of life insurance
for his family. Neither he nor his daughter were deported to the
Nazi camps.

Anne Frank hid for two years in a concealed annexe above a canalside
warehouse in the Jordaan area of Amsterdam before being discovered
on 4 August 1944, along with her father, mother, Edith, and sister,
Margot.

Photographs of Anne Frank taken in a department store booth.
Read more
The young diarist was sent to Westerbork transit camp, and on to
Auschwitz concentration camp before finally ending up in Bergen-
Belsen, where she died in February 1945 at the age of 15, possibly
from typhus. Her published diary spans the period in hiding between
1942 and her last entry on 1 August 1944.

Despite a series of investigations, the mystery of who led the Nazis
to the annex remains unsolved. Otto Frank, who died in 1980, was
thought to have a strong suspicion of that person’s identity but he
never divulged it in public.

Several years after the war, he had told the journalist Friso Endt
that the family had been betrayed by someone in the Jewish
community. The cold case team discovered that Miep Gies, one of
those who helped get the family into the annexe, had also let slip
during a lecture in America in 1994 that the person who betrayed
them had died by 1960.

There were two police investigations, in 1947 and 1963, into the
circumstances surrounding the betrayal of the Franks. The son of the
detective, Arend van Helden, who led the second inquiry, provided a
typewritten copy of the anonymous note to the cold case reviewers.


“The anonymous note did not identify Otto Frank. It said ‘your
address was betrayed’. So, in fact, what had happened was Van den
Bergh was able to get a number of addresses of Jews in hiding. And
it was those addresses with no names attached and no guarantee that
the Jews were still hiding at those addresses. That’s what he gave
over to save his skin, if you want, but to save himself and his
family. Personally, I think he is a tragic figure.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/17/anne-frank-betrayed- jewish-notary-book

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