Arnold van den Bergh, a reveal the existence of the Secret Annex to the Gestapo, the niche created in a building in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family were hiding. He would have done so, it turns out nearly 80 years later, to ensure the safety of his family.
A team of international investigators, including retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke, have been investigating for six years in an attempt to uncover who in 1944 put the Gestapo in the footsteps of the Frank. The results, just published, point the finger at the notary, but in part they absolve him because he would have betrayed “in self-defense”, a theory that Otto Frank, Anna’s father, believed to be valid. After all, who more than him could understand it?
In the research, it has not yet been scrutinized by independent experts, a lot of information, taken for lost and accounts of deceased witnesses, has been examined, and the ‘smoking gun’ would be the copy of an anonymous note which was given to Otto Frank after World War II and which investigators found in the archives of a police officer.
The Jewish Council had drafted address lists of Jewish families in an attempt to show the Germans that he was cooperating and, as a member of this body, Van den Bergh may have obtained it and used it to try to protect his own family. As a member of the Council, Van den Bergh had gone to great lengths to secure temporary reprieve from the deportation.
The Frank’s address ended up in the hands of a German SS officer who ordered his men to arrest the Frank family on August 4, 1944. Investigators admit that there is still no conclusive evidence on how the notary leaked the address and who wrote the anonymous note delivered to Otto Frank.
Artificial intelligence was used to sift through 66 gigabytes of data, looking for, for example, connections between forays into other hiding places, disproving the theory that the discovery was accidental.