A former FBI agent and his team believe they have revealed the identity of the person that betrayed Anne Frank by giving her location to the Nazis.
Former FBI investigator Vincent Pankoke and his team said in a new 60 Minutes documentary that they believe the person who betrayed her was Jewish man named Arnold van den Bergh.
Van den Bergh, who died in 1950, worked as a notary and was part of a Jewish council – a monitoring body set up by the Nazis to watch local Jewish communities.
After six years of investigation, Pankoke and his team believe he gave up the family’s hiding place in Amsterdam and believe he betrayed a number of other Jewish families.
They believe he did it in order to protect his own family from persecution and was understood not to have known the identity of the families hiding at the addresses he gave to the Nazi police, or whether they were still there.
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As investigators dug into the question of who may have betrayed Anne Frank’s family to the Nazis, they began to focus on a suspect who was Jewish and, they say, likely used the information to save himself, his wife, and children from the genocide. https://t.co/Okgmh9LOOK pic.twitter.com/OiXCoOWsin
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 17, 2022
In the documentary, Pankoke told CBS 60 Minutes: “When van den Bergh lost all his series of protections, exempting him from having to go to the camps, he had to provide something valuable to the Nazis that he’s had contact with to let him, and his wife at that time, stay safe.”
A key piece of evidence in identifying him was an anonymous note given to Frank’s father, Otto, that informed him of the betrayal.
From 1942 until August 1944, child diarist Frank and her family hid from the Nazis in a building next to the canal in Amsterdam. When they were discovered, they were taken to Auschwitz.
Frank was killed at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, aged 15 years old.
