Did a Jewish Notary Betray Anne Frank to the Nazis? It was clear that Tonny Ahlers had no knowledge that Otto Frank and the others were hiding in the annex.". Ed Sheeran plays guitar in court in bid to show he didn't steal Marvin Gaye song She was 15 at the time of her death. Who betrayed Anne Frank? A new book tracks history's most - MSN But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community. In the authors opinion, his mother had an internal conflict that led her to opt for as little attention as possible, practically complete radio silence, from the beginning of the Sixties, he wrote. [Otto Frank] might have done this out of loyalty for my mother, wrote Van Wijk. believe the most likely culprit is a local Jewish leader named Arnold van den Bergh. 2002 The Associated Press. Per BBC, he wasn't deported and had lost his Jewish identity during the war. Anne Frank May Not Have Been Betrayed - Smithsonian Magazine Did Willem van Maaren betray Anne Frank? Anne, her sister and parents, were caught in the two-story annex with Hermann van Pels, who had worked in Frank's company, with van Pels' wife and teen-age son, and with Friedrich Pfeffer, a dentist. First published in English in 1952 as "The Diary of a Young Girl" and later as a stage play and film, her story made her a symbol both of the Holocaust and of Dutch bravery. Stockroom manager Willem van Maaren was another suspect, and since several possible culprits knew each other, there is also the possibility that more than one person betrayed the Frank family. At the time of Bep Voskuijls death in 1983, she was the least known of the four Dutch resisters who helped hide Anne Frank. Who betrayed the Franks and why? - Sage-Advices Still, Ronald Leopold, executive director of the museum, notesthat the new investigation did not refute the possibility that the people in hiding were betrayed, but instead illustrated that other scenarios should also be considered.. Who ratted on Anne Frank? - Profound-Information We have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario, filmmaker and team member Thijs Bayens tells Mike Corder of the Associated Press (AP). After Lee's book was published, Ahlers' son was quoted as saying he was convinced her theory is true. The men went down with whatever they could use as weapons and Hermann van Pels shouted Police. The team looked at dozens of potential suspects before arriving at the person they believe likely gave up the Franks' location: Arnold van den Bergh. ", By Arthur Max Who Betrayed Anne Frank? A New Study Suggests Nobody Did - Yahoo News In 2003, Carol Ann Lee came to a different conclusion in her biography of Otto Frank: the culprit was a man named Anton "Tonny" Ahlers, a member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands. That evening, Peter heard sounds from the warehouse. According to the researchers, the German Sicherheitsdienst police who discovered the family usually investigated cases involving cash and securities, not Jews in hiding. A New Study Suggests Nobody Did. For instance, the Anne Frank House in 2016 reinvestigated the raid, and in 2017 a former FBI officer announced that he would be looking for the possible traitor of the people in hiding with the help of an international cold case team and new technology. In both cases, the findings were inconclusive. Did willem van maaren betray the franks? - delasd.vhfdental.com It claims that Ahlers - then a 26-year- old petty thief - had fallen on hard times by 1944 and desperately needed the bounty paid to Dutch civilians who exposed Jews in their midst. Footsteps on the stairways, people shaking the bookcase. 2022 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. Argumentative Essay: Who Betrayed The Franks | ipl.org Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. He places books and bits of paper on the very edges of things in the warehouse so that if anyone walks by they fall off, Anne wrote in her diary in April of 1944. All Rights Reserved. Throughout the course of the hiding, Bep and Kugler had fallen in love, as Bep later confessed to her sister Diny with red cheeks, wrote Van Wijk. Although he published his mothers most intimate secrets, Van Wijk believes his book would eventually have gained her approval, because she greatly upheld the truth, he said. It's possible, Brock suggested, that there was no betrayal, and the SS raid was really part of ongoing attempts to track down purveyors of illegal goods. Investigators Are Turning to Big Data to Find Who Betrayed Anne Frank. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. On a warm August morning in 1944, SS officers stormed into an Amsterdam warehouse and arrested Anne Frank, her parents, her sister and four other Jews who had been hiding in a secret annex at the back of the building. Only when he began research for the book in 2010 was the long-time marketing professional able to locate documents that contradict the family backstory on Nelly. Bep Voskuijl was only 18 when she started working for the spice and jam company owned by Otto Frank. On a warm summer day in 1944, four German and Dutch security police pulled up to the warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht and asked the employee, Willem Van Maaren, where the Jews were hiding. Nevertheless, Lee's book "is interesting because it takes a more balanced view of Otto Frank," Barnouw said. More recent research by the Anne Frank House highlights and substantiates the possibility that the reasons for the raid may have been completely different. [T]he list of people who were accused of being involved in the case is too long to include in its entirety, notes the Anne Frank House on its website. Lena had already lost her son in the war, the theory goes, and her husband worked for Otto's food preservatives firm. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Digital Explanations for the discovery are mainly based on testimonies, because no documents about the raid on the Secret Annex have been preserved. "I looked at his files in The Hague because after the war he was convicted of betraying people and he was jailed," Lee said in an interview for a Dutch television documentary. There are no indications that Willem, or the other warehouse workers, knew that there were people in hiding in the building. Frank wist wie hem weghaalde, De Telegraaf, 22 November 1963. The key to the mystery proved to be a note sent to Otto Frank shortly after his return to Amsterdam in June 1945. On July 6, the Frank family began their lives in the Secret Annex attached to the office building at Prinsengracht263,where Otto Frank had worked. #inline-recirc-item--id-a4ef05fe-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d ~ .item:nth-child(5) { In other words: If a call was actually made that morning, and the response was immediate, then one may conclude that the informant was known and reliable, according to Lages. In 2022, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation which details the findings of Pankoke's investigationcited Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish businessman and member of the. . The sound might arouse suspicion. There were two separate official investigations into who may have betrayed the family: one in 1947-1948 and the second (conducted by the Dutch police) in 1963-1964. ), Anne Frank HouseWestermarkt 201016 DK Amsterdam. Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history. Who Betrayed Anne Frank? A New Study Suggests Nobody Did After the war, Frank removed content from Annes diary regarding Nellys collaboration. 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The Amsterdam home where she and her family hid is today a museum known as the Anne Frank House. Cookie Policy Vince Pankoke, who tracked Colombian drug traffickers in recentyears atthe FBI, will lead a multidisciplinary team of experts, among them historians, psychological profilers and police detectives. He and his team spent five years poring over every bit of pertinent material, setting up an extensive online database, and developing an AI program to help them sift through it all and find new connections. Ahlers had so much information on Otto Frank. The diary was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Your California Privacy Rights | Do Not Sell My Personal Information Historians made no further headway. Left unsigned, the message named van den Bergh as the person who'd reported the Franks' hiding place to the Nazis. There was one sister, however, who took a different path, Van Wijk was told growing up. Prior to that, Frank always said he did not want to know who betrayed his family. Out of all the warehouse staff, only Johan Voskuijl was aware of the presence of the people in hiding. Just three days later, German police led by SS officers stormed the Annex, arresting the Franks and the Van Pels family and transferring them to the Westerbork transit camp after interrogation. "And we went into the city archive and found proof that actually he was 'Aryanized,' so he lost his Jewish identity during the war. Still, experts remain focused on the fate of the teenage diarist whose life was cut tragically short. I take both of these theories seriously enough to put them on paper but that is different from actually saying what happened. Thats obvious, said Bertus Hulsman, who was the wartime boyfriend of Voskuijl and sometimes mentioned in the diary. Investigators began taking a fresh look at the case in 2016, hoping to provide new answers. Only the father, Otto Frank, survived. After all, one of her sisters and her father joined the high-risk effort of hiding, feeding, and sustaining eight Jewish fugitives. Anne, who is famous for documenting her time in the Secret Annex in her renowned diary, died of typhus in the spring of 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Were they betrayed? A petty thief and unsavory braggart, Van Maaren was investigated shortly after the war, but nothing was proved. Beginning in 2016, Pankoke led a team of expert investigators equipped with modern crime-solving techniques to try to crack the case. Her father, Otto Frank, survived, and spent the rest of his life trying to discover who had betrayed his family. Pankoke and his team are compiling a huge database of other documents that may contain information relevant to the Frank case: lists of Nazi informants, lists of Jews who were turned over to the authorities, names of Gestapo agents who lived in Amsterdam, police records and so on. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews - 70 percent of the community - were deported to concentration camps in Germany. And, during a 1994 lecture, Secret Annex helper Miep Gies let slip that the informant died prior to 1960. The house where she and her family hid in a sealed-off room at Prinsengracht 263 in central Amsterdam was turned into a museum in 1960 and receives almost a million visits a year, mainly from the US. The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and Will Croxton. Last year, the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam floated a new theory: Nazi officers who were investigating illegal work and ration fraud at the warehouse accidentally stumbled upon the Jews hiding in the annex. Wertheim spoke with Vince Pankoke, a retired FBI agent. The involvement of Van Dijk, who was executed in 1948 after admitting to collaborating in the capture of 145 people, had been previously claimed. Who betrayed the Frank family and why? / CBS News. Unlike other news outlets, we havent put up a paywall. According to Gerald Kremer's The Backyard of the Secret Annex, the Guardian reports, the Franks were betrayed by Anna "Ans" van Dijk, a Jewish woman executed in 1948 for her collaboration in. "The NIWD has never tried to find out who betrayed the Franks but they have contacts which I don't have and know how archives in the Netherlands work. It's been such a long time, and most of the people who knew are dead.". Was Anne Frank betrayed? | Anne Frank House Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World. He was not betraying Otto Frank., Ronald Leopold, director of the Anne Frank House, points out that many missing pieces of the puzzle remain, telling the AP, I dont think we can say that [the] mystery has been solved now.. Instead, he was drawn into solving a famous cold case: the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to the Franks' arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. One year before his death in 1980, Frank told an interviewer he believed a woman made the call to the Gestapo. Apparently, the burglars were still about. It probably never will be. In Joop van Wijks psychological diagnosis of his late mother Bep Voskuijl, she spent her post-war life being her own therapist in a kind of conversation with her alter ego. The case. It is my contribution to peace, understanding, respect, and above all loyalty to every human being.. Records discovered in the Dutch national archives by journalist Pieter van Twisk, co-founder of the research project, seemingly corroborated the claim, suggesting that a member of Amsterdams Jewish Council turned over lists of addresses where Jews were hiding. "He was a Dutch Nazi, a well-known traitor and an anti-semite and was very anti-Jewish. "Sometimes you can go through the same material with fresh eyes. The people in hiding did not sleep a wink for the rest of the night. The burglars managed to take two cash boxes containing forty guilders, blank giro and bank cheques, and coupons for 150 kilograms of sugar. At one point, Kugler was prepared to end his marriage in order to move to South America with Voskuijl, but she did not want to wreck their marriage. This is not the first time that hopes of unlocking the mystery have been raised. For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members. We are saved, go on saving us!That is all we can say. (Anne Frank, 11 April 1944. It is believed that an anonymous tip helped guide the Nazis to the secret annex, yet despite decades of investigations, the identity of the informant has never been proven. Her motive for betrayal, according to Mller, was that she did not want to lose her husband too and he would have been deported for aiding the Franks if they were discovered, which she believed was only a matter of time. The burglars had ripped a panel out of the warehouses street door in order to get in. But, the Anne Frank House museum and research center were unable to confirm Van Dijk's involvement after its own investigation. Around the time of Nellys return, her relations with the family strongly deteriorated, wrote Van Wijk, including Johan Voskuijl physically beating his daughter. Since then, several independent investigations have identified different possible suspects. #inline-recirc-item--id-a4ef05fe-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d, #right-rail-recirc-item--id-a4ef05fe-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d { The case against Ahlers fell apart, Pankoke told Wertheim, when it came to knowledge. The encounter ended with Nelly shouting, Just go to your Jews!. 'My aunt might have betrayed Anne Frank,' writes son of Secret Annex For decades suspicion centred on a man called Willem Van Maaren, who worked in the warehouse attached to the Franks' hiding place. First published on January 16, 2022 / 8:09 PM. Associate of Anne Frank's Father Suspected of Betrayal When they came to raid the building, they unexpectedly discovered Anne and the others. Sign in to stop seeing this, Netanyahu calls for national unity at Independence Day ceremony, Five wounded in terror car-ramming near busy Jerusalem market, Godfather meets Shtisel: New Netflix thriller delves into Haredi diamond dealers, 15,000 attend controversial joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day event. So the team has enlisted the Amsterdam-based data company Xomnia to develop algorithms that will analyze the documents, andperhapsreveal connections that have never been noticed before. | READ MORE. On August 4, 1944, police in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam raided a warehouse and arrested eight Jews who were hiding in an annex disguised behind a bookcase. His name was Anton Ahlers. Anne wrote about it in her diary and attributed negative qualifications to him. The warehouse workers were not to know that there were people hiding in the Secret Annex. Thats why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world. See an Original 1941 Transcript of FDR's Pearl Harbor Speech, What America's Richest Ski Town's Handling of COVID-19 Shows. Warehouse worker Lammert Hartog did undeclared work, and director Victor Kugler kept part of the company income out of the books. "He may have got money for it. For example, it is certain that two representatives from whom the helpers bought illegal coupons were arrested for black marketeering. And it really matters to me, and I think it mattered to the group, that that was an anonymous list of addressesthere were no names. Two other plausible suspects emerged over the years: Lena van Bladeren-Hartog (died 1963) and Tonny Ahlers (1917 - 2000). But isn't it even riskier to leave things as they are?. In the immediate aftermath of the war Otto, Anne's father, had trouble finding a publisher for the diary and was told that nobody wanted to read about the Holocaust. 2023 TIME USA, LLC. }. It made sense that two people who were constantly in each others vicinity and shared the role of helper of Jews, grew closer, he wrote. Ad Choices, Katie Falkenberg/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images. He strongly suspected a warehouse employee named Willem van Maaren, who had sparked concerns among the Franks and the people who helped them hide. Not only was she carousing with German soldiers, but Nellys rowdy behavior earned her a stint in police custody. Meilan Solly As fast as they could, they all fled back to the hiding place. Jewish Councils were set up in Nazi-controlled cities and pitted members of the Jewish community against one another. Nevertheless, researchers do not rule out the potential that Frank and the others were the victims of a betrayal. As Pankoke tells 60 Minutes, the team managed to track down a copy of the note after reaching out to the son of one of the 1963 investigators. The Subdistrict Court dismissed the . Kremer's father was an acquaintance ofVan Dijk in Amsterdam and Kremer writes that in early August 1944, his father overheardVan Dijkspeaking about Prinsengracht, where the Franks were hiding, in Nazi offices. "I think he actually made the call. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but she and her family fled the country and settled in Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler came to power. If Frank had known that Van Dijk had also betrayed his family, Pankoke reasoned, he would have had no incentive to keep the information quiet. And probably wasn't capable of betrayal, because had he betrayed the annex, he knew that he would end up losing his job.". On 17 January 2022 the cold case teampresentedtheir findings. Wilhelm van Maaren Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2 Jennifer Ouellette So now we have a request. Born in 1949, Van Wijk remembers a childhood shrouded in mystery about what Nelly did during the war. display: block; Frank and her older sister, Margot, died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp less than a year later, in February 1945. (public domain), Author Joop van Wijk with the biography of his mother, Bep Voskuijl (courtesy), Bep Voskuijl, lower right, with Otto Frank (middle) and the other Dutch helpers in October, 1945 (public domain), Nelly Voskuijl during World War II (courtesy: Joop van Wijk), View of the secret annex with its blacked out windows at the renovated Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nov. 21, 2018 (AP Photo/Peter Dejong), The Secret Annex in which Anne Frank wrote her diary, Amsterdam, January 2017 (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel), Otto Frank and Bep Voskuijl in 1978 (courtesy: Joop van Wijk), Anne Franks hiding place bedroom during the 1950s (left) and her restored bedroom at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam today (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel), Exterior of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, November 2014 (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel). Anne Frank Study Guide: Deaths, Dates, Betrayal, and History - Quizlet When they returned to the Annex, they found the pages of Anne's diary strewn across the floor, and the duo decided to preserve it for posterity. A new book suggests the informant may have been a business associate of Anne's father, the only family member to survive World War II.