Who tipped off about Anne Frank?

“Anne Frank’s Diary” was published seventy-five years ago – and yet one question remains open: Who alerted the Nazi search team about the hiding place of the Jewish girl who was hiding with her family in hiding behind a warehouse in Amsterdam? Over the years two Dutch police investigations and countless historians have come up with theories, but no definite conclusions have been drawn. Now, just ten days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a team of investigators led by a veteran FBI agent has announced that he has found an answer to a question that humiliates historians and haunts the Netherlands: Who was responsible for the betrayal?Veteran FBI agent Vince Pancock announced that he had managed to find out who had betrayed Anne Frank and her family and revealed their hiding place to members of the Nazi regime. “The investigation revealed that Arnold van den Berg, a prominent Jewish businessman who served on the Nazi Jewish Council, was the one who reported Frank and her family to the authorities,” Pancock said in an interview with CBS ’60 Minutes.

“I assembled an investigative team that included an investigative psychologist, a war crime investigator, historians, criminologists and military archival investigators,” the FBI agent stressed. “The goal is to figure out who revealed the family’s hiding place. The staff and I sat down and made a list of ways the hideout could be discovered. Was there carelessness on the part of the people living in the hideout? Maybe there was too loud a noise? Did they see them in the windows? Was it a betrayal?” ?

Historians’ investigation reveals that on August 4, 1944, a informant, whose identity had been kept secret for almost 80 years, led the Nazi police into the secret room. The Nazis arrested the Frank family along with another family living with them. Frank, who wrote a diary that would become over the years a testament to the plight of the Jewish community in Europe, died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp less than a year after she was captured.

“The fact that he was a Jew put him in an unbearable situation. He had to do something to save his life.”

Pancock comes out in defense of Van den Berg

Pankock said: “We used Dutch records from that period. The Nazis intended to cleanse the Netherlands of all Jews. That was part of the final solution. In 1942 there were about 25,000 Jews hiding around the country. The Nazis were skilled in their ability to get people talking,” he said.

He said regime officials would always ask anyone they arrested if they knew Jews hiding. It was an “effective” way to get people to talk in hopes of a lighter sentence. This method led to the capture of masses of Jews and today – led Pancock and the team to answers and marking dozens of suspects.

According to a passage on these records – Pancock marked Van den Berg as a suspect, whose family had never been sent to the concentration camps. Pancoca said that Van den Berg lived a routine and normal life in Amsterdam, even when the raid against Jews took place. Pankock later defended Van den Berg, emphasizing: “It should be remembered that the fact that he was a Jew put him in an intolerable situation by the Nazis. He had to do something to save his life.”