Who Shared the Annex With Anne and the Frank Family?
Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world. Blinkering between promise and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager's life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave vocalism and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, however one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search squad, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family unit'southward hiding identify? Two Dutch police force inquiries and countless historians have come upwards with theories, only no house conclusion.
Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and applied science to this cold case. And now, they believe they take an answer—one we'll share with you this evening—to a question that'south bedeviled historians, and haunted Holland: who was responsible for the expose?
Vince Pankoke had turned in his badge and gun. He was two years into a comfy Florida retirement, when his phone rang in the spring of 2016.
Vince Pankoke: I received a telephone call from a colleague from kingdom of the netherlands who said, "If you—if you lot're done laying on the beach, nosotros have a example for you."
Jon Wertheim: Were you laying on the embankment?
Vince Pankoke: I was actually driving to the embankment. I w— (LAUGH) I wasn't quite at that place yet.
Pankoke spent three decades every bit an FBI special agent, targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work had likewise taken him to the Netherlands, where his investigative chops left an impression.
Jon Wertheim: Were you looking to get back when he told you what information technology was about?
Vince Pankoke: After he told me information technology was to, you know, endeavor to solve the mystery of what caused the raid—for Anne Frank and the others in the annex. I needed to hear more.
Iv-thousand miles abroad, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been asking effectually for a credentialed investigator to dig into a question that he feels Holland has never quite reckoned with, one that gets to the essence of human being nature.
Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really of import to investigate what makes us-- requite up on each other. The expanse where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And it'southward a very warm area with the butcher and the doc and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And all of a sudden people start to betray on each other. How could that happen?
Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why practice y'all call up this one resonates the way it does?
Thijs Bayens: I think right afterwards the war people were shown the concentration camps, the atrocities that took place, the horror. And, suddenly you find this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented daughter. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And and so I think humanity said, "This is who nosotros are.
Betraying boyfriend Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in kingdom of the netherlands, simply two police probes and a whole library of books dedicated to the Anne Frank case, yielded neither convictions nor definitive conclusions.
Jon Wertheim: This question of who betrayed Anne Frank, that had been investigated for years. What was gonna make your investigation different than the ones before it?
Thijs Bayens: If it's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the constabulary. And so nosotros set information technology upwardly every bit a cold instance.
Like so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle school in Western Pennsylvania and it left a mark. There would be no perp walks or disrepair crime syndicates here, but he was intrigued… cautiously.
Jon Wertheim: You hear, "We're gonna get back and expect at Anne Frank." And that might accept the ring of some schlocky media creation. Did that worry you?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, it did. It did. Because equally a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with any type of a tabloid type investigation.
Jon Wertheim: You had to brand sure this was serious.
Vince Pankoke: Let'south face up it. I mean, the accolade of the diary, the award of Anne Frank, we had to treat this with utmost respect.
What ultimately sealed it for Vince Pankoke, the guarantee of absolute autonomy. The ground rules: Thijs Bayens would oversee the operation and could pic the process for a documentary he's been making. There would exist a volume about information technology, which helped finance the project along with funding from the urban center of Amsterdam, only this was going to be an independent undertaking with serious investigators. And Vince Pankoke was going to accept the atomic number 82 digging in.
Jon Wertheim: Yous'd washed cold cases earlier. Earlier this, what was the biggest gap in time between when you lot were approached and when the— the crime occurred?
Vince Pankoke: Information technology was well-nigh a five-year crime at that point.
Jon Wertheim: Information technology's 75 years. So a fiddling different.
Vince Pankoke: It's a lot different.
Jon Wertheim: This is more than common cold.
Vince Pankoke: This— yeah. This was frozen.
To chip away, Pankoke had to describe up his own blueprint. He knew that there was going to exist more information to turn through than any human could handle and that artificial intelligence could exist a secret weapon.
An FBI human being'southward dream team was assembled… an investigative psychologist, a war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists plus an army of archival researchers.
Jon Wertheim: What did all these people with disparate skills bring to this?
Vince Pankoke: They brought a different view. It was all of these skills that help u.s. empathise and put into context, a crime that happened, you know, in 1944. We take to look at things differently.
Together, they pigeon into a familiar story: the Frank family unit had moved to Amsterdam from Deutschland to escape the ascent of Hitler. They found safety in Holland, where Otto Frank ran a manufacturing business. But so the Nazis invaded in 1940, two years later, the Franks—Otto, wife Edith, Anne and her sis Margot—along with four other Jewish friends of the family went into hiding in an annex behind Otto'southward warehouse. Today, it's preserved equally a museum. Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian at the Anne Frank Firm, showed us in.
Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow. This— this is the famous—
Dr. Gertjan Broek: This is the bookcase.
Jon Wertheim: —bookcase.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: This is the bookcase. It was used to camouflage the entrance to the hiding place.
The bookcase helped protect the Franks, as did a handful of Otto's close colleagues at the warehouse who were in on the hush-hush.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Nosotros become inside, mind your head.
Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow.
After the raid, the Nazis took anything that wasn't nailed downwardly. Recreations prove what it looked like. Two crammed floors, 761 days, more than two excruciating years indoors. The office workers brought food and supplies, simply the eight in hiding couldn't make a sound during the day. By night they could heed to the radio, badly plotting updates from the front on this map.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Hither's a newspaper clipping from shortly after D-Day, and then June, 1944. With the pins that tried to follow the advances of the allied troops in the days and weeks probably after.
Jon Wertheim: This is June, 1944—
Dr. Gertjan Broek: four June—
Jon Wertheim: —so...
Dr. Gertjan Broek: So there'due south hope because Centrolineal forces are on the way. Their life depended on what would happen.
Anne's bedroom walls, familiar to whatever teenager, preserved from the day she was taken away. Hither, she chronicled the monotony and the horror of life in hiding. "Exterior things are terrible, day and night," she wrote in Jan 1943. "These poor people are being dragged away, with nothing simply a backpack and a little bit of money."
Her last entry was dated August 1st, 1944. She was xv.
Jon Wertheim: Have me to the day of the raid. Information technology's the summer of 1944 and what happens that day?
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Information technology's a warm twenty-four hours, sunny. And around x:30, betwixt ten:30 and 11:00, a couple of men walk in.
They were detectives with a Dutch police unit of measurement working with the Nazis. An SS officer named Silberbauer led the team. They demanded to exist shown effectually the warehouse.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: They end up in front of the bookcase, which is hiding the archway to the annex. And it'south important I recollect to realize that 2 of the policemen present had been seasoned detectives, well experienced. They had been searching this type of building in the inner urban center of Amsterdam before.
They knew in that location was probable something behind that bookcase. The stunned inhabitants they plant were marched out. On the flooring backside them, Anne'due south diary—which a quick-thinking part worker, loyal to the Franks, preserved. Of the eight taken away, Otto Frank was the only survivor. The others were amongst the 100,000 Dutch Jews—iii-quarters of the state'southward Jewish population—to die at the hands of the Nazis.
In an interview with CBS in 1964, Otto recounted what happened when his family was put on the cattle cars to Auschwitz a month subsequently their capture.
Otto Frank: On September quaternary, 1944, the terminal transport went to Auschwitz. Well, when we arrived at Auschwitz at that place were men standing there with clubs—women hither, men there. We were separated right on the station, then women went to Birkenau Military camp and we went to Auschwitz Camp from the station and I never saw my family unit again.
Subsequently the state of war, Otto Frank was adamant to detect out who betrayed the hiding place to the Nazis. It was the question many readers asked after he published his daughter'southward diary in 1947. But after a couple of years, Otto abruptly stopped looking—more than on that curious decision, later. When Vince Pankoke went to Amsterdam to begin his search, his first finish, naturally, was the scene of the crime.
Vince Pankoke: I called this the most visited law-breaking scene in the world because then many people from all over the world, you know, millions of people come here.
Jon Wertheim: And so when you lot come here for the first fourth dimension, what are you looking for?
Vince Pankoke: Well, as an investigator I wanna run into what's in the area. Of course I wanna see within the building. I wanna reconstruct how the actual arrest took place, and who participated in it.
Pankoke and his team spent hours in the addendum looking for whatever clue, however remote.
He as well cased the outside—today almost exactly equally it was then.
Vince Pankoke: This is the courtyard that is behind the annex. And information technology'due south—as you can see, it's totally enclosed. This courtyard area is surrounded past the buildings of the neighborhood.
Jon Wertheim: I'chiliad thinking one cough that gets overheard, ane window that happens to be open at the wrong time, the sheer risk cistron hither is extraordinary.
Vince Pankoke: It is boggling. When we first started the case, one of the theories that was out at that place is that the raid may have been caused by somebody in the firsthand surface area seeing something, hearing something, and reporting it. So, therefore, we tracked and identified every resident that lived in this block and next streets.
Using the artificial intelligence plan, Pankoke and his squad mapped potential threats. In the courtyard surrounding the addendum, they found Nazi party members and fifty-fifty known informants.
Vince Pankoke: All living simply a wall or 2 away from i another. When you take a expect at the threats the question isn't, yous know, what caused the raid. The question might be: how did they last more than 2 years without existence discovered?
Jon Wertheim: It strikes me in a case like this, anyone could exist a suspect. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk past and hear a cough. How did you navigate that?
Vince Pankoke: We had to consider all those options. The team and I sat down and we compiled a list of ways in which the addendum coulda been compromised. You know, was it carelessness of the people occupying the annex maybe making too much dissonance or being seen in the windows? You know, was information technology betrayal?
Jon Wertheim: There is a theory out there that no 1 betrayed the Frank family. This was coincidence, or this was skillful detective piece of work. You buy that at all?
Vince Pankoke: No. No. I mean, we took that theory apart, yous know, flake by bit.
Jon Wertheim: This doesn't play out the mode it does, but for a specific tip.
Vince Pankoke: Exactly.
Vince Pankoke, the thirty-year FBI veteran, had worked enough of cold cases, just none this cold. Information technology had been more than vii decades since Anne Frank and her family had been discovered in their hiding place in central Amsterdam and ultimately put on cattle cars to Auschwitz. As to the question of who betrayed the family to the Nazis, all the witnesses were long expressionless, their testify thinned by fourth dimension, simply Pankoke leaned on decades of experience and intuition, starting with the one-time case files.
Vince Pankoke: In a normal cold instance, you get to a file. You lot pull it out. Yous read through everything that the previous investigation did. Interviews, leads that were followed up on.
Two previous Dutch law investigations into the raid on Anne Frank'due south hiding place - i in 1948 and another in 1963 - were not exactly masterclasses in detective work. And a lot of time had passed.
Vince Pankoke: The files were incomplete. And they were scattered nigh in probably a dozen different athenaeum. Reports were missing. Witnesses had passed on. Memories had failed.
Pulling from the standard cold case playbook, Vince Pankoke followed up on what leads he could. Otherwise he and his team had to have a fresh approach. They spent years in places similar the Amsterdam city archives, where the meticulous Dutch tape-keeping used then brutally by the Nazis proved a major nugget to the investigation.
Forth with Pieter van Twisk—a veteran Dutch journalist who co-founded this projection and led the research team—they showed usa a trove of items they dug up. Including a residence carte du jour belonging to Anne frank.
Pieter van Twisk: You can see here her name: her first proper noun, 2nd proper noun, and her surname; and the engagement of birth. Here yous see "North.I.", which stands for Nederlands. Israelis, which is her faith.
Jon Wertheim: "Netherland Israeli." Then this—
Pieter van Twisk: Yeah, I don't—
Jon Wertheim: —she's Jewish.
Pieter van Twisk: —know why. That's Jewish, she was Jewish, yes,
Jon Wertheim: Every Dutch resident had to have one of these?
Pieter van Twisk: Yah. Yah.
Jon Wertheim: This is— This is very detailed, and this has her— her parents' birthdates on it.
Pieter van Twisk: Yah. That's, of grade, likewise why it was quite easy for the Nazis to find people in the Netherlands, and to know if who was Jewish, or who was not Jewish.
Jon Wertheim: One piece of paper in the '40s, and y'all've got everything you could want to know about someone.
Pieter van Twisk: Yah.
The team fed every morsel they could—letters, maps, photos, fifty-fifty whole books—into the artificial intelligence database, developed specifically for the projection. And so they let machine learning practice its affair.
Vince Pankoke: Information technology would identify relationships between people, addresses that were alike. And we were looking for those connections. Clues to solving this.
Jon Wertheim: Quantify how much time that saved you.
Vince Pankoke: Oh—thousands and thousands of homo-hours.
Jon Wertheim: This likewise tells you what'southward garbage, what'due south excluded, what isn't gonna help your case.
Vince Pankoke: Oh, yes, considering much of what nosotros practise is eliminating the unnecessary.
The team paid item attending to abort records from the fourth dimension. The Nazis were hellbent on ridding the Netherlands of all Jews, part of the Final Solution. By 1942, the Franks were among some 25,000 Jews in hiding across the country. The Nazis were coldly skilled at getting people to talk.
Vince Pankoke: Their typical MO was once they arrested somebody, the get-go question that was posed to them, "Do y'all know where any other Jews are in hiding?" Then what we did is nosotros chronicled all the arrests prior to and merely later the annex raid to attempt to find any connectedness, any loose thread that would bear witness us that they went from one arrest to another and and then ultimately to the annex.
Jon Wertheim: And the implication is, "I'll make your sentence more than lenient if yous surrender some names."
Vince Pankoke: Yep.
Jon Wertheim: Effective?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, information technology was very effective.
Before long, suspects emerged. Dozens of them, like Willem van Maaren, an employee in the warehouse where the Franks were hiding, whom the Dutch constabulary had interviewed in their investigations.
Vince Pankoke: He was prime suspect number one later the war. He'southward working downstairs in the warehouse. He was very shifty, suspicious. Really a thief.
Jon Wertheim: So you say shifty, suspicious, thief. And withal, you lot eliminated him every bit a suspect.
Vince Pankoke: Not a betrayer, though. He was not antisemitic. He had incentive not to betray them because if he did, he would take lost his chore, the concern would have been closed.
Jon Wertheim: What specifically are you looking for when y'all're because suspects?
Vince Pankoke: We're looking at, did they have the knowledge? Nosotros look at their motive. You know, what would the motive be? Were they antisemitic? Were they trying to practise this for money? And then opportunity. Were they even in town?
Jon Wertheim: So this—knowledge, motive, opportunity, that's I'one thousand guessing what yous were using when you lot're infiltrating drug cartels. I mean, this is standard FBI technique—
Vince Pankoke: It'due south standard police enforcement technique.
Jon Wertheim: What kind of a person would betray the Frank family?
Bram van der Meer: You would expect perhaps that a very bad person did this, a person with—I would say a psychopathic mind would, would do this.
Bram van de Meer knows psychopathic minds. He had been an investigative psychologist with the national police force force in the netherlands. On Vince Pankoke'south team, he analyzed the behavior and mindsets of suspects they were considering.
Jon Wertheim: That's your kickoff instinct? Then it had to exist a psychopath to practice this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah. But you have to be so very careful. Information technology'south war. You're surviving. Your day-to-mean solar day life is filled with fear. Your family might exist arrested the next mean solar day. You're thinking everyday virtually your own survival. And then that'southward the context.
Jon Wertheim: In a vacuum it had to exist a psychopath to do this. Just given the context--
Bram van der Meer: That'southward right.
Jon Wertheim: Then what kinda person might do this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah, and then—and then you end up in, in a situation where it could exist anybody.
Over fourth dimension, their focus shifted to someone who, on the surface, might non have raised suspicions. This suspect wasn't a neighbor of the Franks and didn't piece of work for them. But the FBI human being's sixth sense kicked in. Arnold van den Bergh was a prominent Jewish man of affairs with a wife and kids in Amsterdam. Later on the invasion, he served on the Jewish council, a body the Nazis ready upward, nefariously, to comport out their policies inside the Jewish community. In exchange for doing the Nazis' behest, members might be spared the gas chambers.
Vince Pankoke: We know from history that the Jewish Council was dissolved in tardily September of 1943 and they were sent to the camps. We figured, well, if Arnold van den Bergh is in a camp somewhere, he certainly can't be privy to data that would lead to the compromise of the annex.
Jon Wertheim: Was he in a campsite somewhere?
Vince Pankoke: Well, we thought he was. And then due diligence, nosotros started a search. And we couldn't find Arnold van den Bergh or whatsoever of his immediate family members in those camps.
Jon Wertheim: Why not?
Vince Pankoke: Well, that was the question. If he wasn't in the camps, where was he?
Turned out, he was living an open life in the eye of Amsterdam, Vince Pankoke says, just possible, if Van den Bergh had some kind of leverage.
Jon Wertheim: To my ears, you're describing an operator. Is that off-white?
Vince Pankoke: I'd call him a chess player. He idea in terms of layers of protection, by obtaining different exemptions from beingness placed into the camps.
Every bit it happened, Van den Bergh—who died in 1950—had come up upwardly before, in a report from the 1963 investigation. Though astonishingly, in that location was little apparent follow up by police.
Vince Pankoke: We read just one small paragraph that mentioned that during the interview of Otto Frank, he told them that shortly after liberation, he received an bearding note identifying his betrayer of the address where they were staying, the annex, as Arnold van den Bergh.
Jon Wertheim: Wait, wait. So, in the files, there'southward reference to a annotation that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific proper name?
Vince Pankoke: Remarkably so. Yes. It'due south listed right there.
The annotation was so striking to Otto Frank that he typed up a copy for his records. Naturally, the veteran FBI man wanted to know: where was that annotation? Whatsoever seasoned investigator will tell y'all that, ideally, skillful shoe leather comes garnished with expert luck. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and team located the son of ane of the former investigators. There in the son's home, cached in some one-time files: Otto's copy of the note.
Jon Wertheim: I just wanna become this straight. You're talking to the son of an investigator. He says, "Yeah, fifty years agone my dad looked into this and I might have some textile."
Vince Pankoke: Yes. We were lucky.
Jon Wertheim: You've held the metaphorical smoking gun in your hand before in the FBI. This bearding annotation. Does information technology feel like a smoking gun?
Vince Pankoke: Non a smoking gun, but it feels similar a warm gun with the evidence of the bullet sitting nearby.
Back at the athenaeum, they showed it to usa, Otto's copy. The team used forensic techniques which they say authenticates information technology. That handwriting you lot see: the scribblings of the 1963 detective. The anonymous note informed Otto that he'd been betrayed by Arnold van den Bergh who'd handed the Nazis an entire listing of addresses where Jews were hiding.
Vince Pankoke: Whoever it was that authored this anonymous note knew then much, that knew that lists were turned in.
Jon Wertheim: And this is information you lot were able to corroborate.
Vince Pankoke: Pieter was able to locate, in the national archive, records that indicated that in fact somebody from the Jewish Council, of which Arnold Van Den Bergh was a member, was turning over lists of addresses where Jews were in hiding.
Jon Wertheim: So what's your theory of the case here? How and why would Arnold van den Bergh have betrayed the Frank family unit?
Vince Pankoke: Well, in his role as being a founding member of the Jewish Council, he would accept had privy to addresses where Jews were hiding. 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 permit him and his wife at that time stay safe.
Jon Wertheim: Is at that place any evidence he knew who he was giving up?
Vince Pankoke: There's no evidence to indicate that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses. They were but addresses that were provided that where Jews were known to accept been in hiding.
Nosotros contacted the foundation Otto Frank started in Switzerland and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam—neither of which formally participated in the investigation—to try to find out whether they could provide any other evidence that might implicate or clear Arnold van den Bergh. The Anne Frank business firm said they could not. The foundation is reserving annotate until they've seen the entire results of the investigation.
The cold example team began to confront the real possibility that Otto Frank might have known the identity of the betrayer. What reason, they wondered, would Otto take had to keep this to himself?
Vince Pankoke: He knew that Arnold van den Bergh was Jewish, and in this flow afterwards the war, antisemitism was yet around. So peradventure he just felt that if I bring this upwards once more, with Arnold van den Bergh existence Jewish, it'll simply stoke the fires further. But we accept to keep in heed that the fact that he was Jewish simply meant the he was placed into a untenable position past the Nazis to do something to save his life.
The team wrestled with these ethical questions. Thijs Buyens, the filmmaker and documentarian who conceived of the projection, wondered whether the revelation would be fodder for bigots and antisemites.
Jon Wertheim: The conclusion was that this culprit was a Jewish man who past all accounts was doing what he did to protect his own family unit.
Thijs Bayens: Yeah.
Jon Wertheim: What was your emotion when you lot heard this?
Thijs Bayens: I found it very painful. Perhaps yous could say I even hoped it wouldn't exist something similar this.
Jon Wertheim: Why?
Thijs Bayens: Considering I feel the pain of all these people existence put in— in— in a state of affairs which is very hard for us to understand.
Jon Wertheim: I doubtable when this is revealed people around the earth are gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that a Jew betrayed another Jew.
Thijs Bayens: I hope and then.
Jon Wertheim: Yous hope they will be?
Thijs Bayens: Yeah. Because information technology shows you how bizarre the Nazi government actually operated, and how they brought people to do these terrible things. The— the real question is, what would I have done? That's the real question.
Throughout the project, Bayens sought counsel from Menachem Sebbag, an Orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam who likewise serves as primary Jewish chaplain in the Dutch Regular army.
Jon Wertheim: Is a greater good being served hither?
Menachem Sebbag: I promise so. I truly hope then. I hope that people will understand that one of the things that the Nazi credo did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize Jewish people. And going dorsum into history and looking for the truth and attaining truth is really giving the Jewish people back their own humanity. Even if that means that sometimes Jewish people are seen as not interim morally correct. That gives them back their own humanity, because that's the fashion man beings are when they're faced with existential threats.
Later on years of investigating this seven-decade-one-time cold instance, we had a hypothetical for Vince Pankoke.
Jon Wertheim: Yous're back to existence an FBI amanuensis. You've got this instance you lot've built. You've got your testify and you paw it over to the prosecutor, the U.S. attorney. Y'all call back you're getting a conviction?
Vince Pankoke: No. There could exist some reasonable dubiousness.
Jon Wertheim: To be clear, it's a circumstantial case.
Vince Pankoke: It is a circumstantial case, every bit many cases are. In today's criminal offense solving, they want positive Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence or video surveillance record. We can't give yous any of that. Merely in a historical example this quondam, with all the evidence that we obtained, I recollect information technology'due south pretty convincing.
At present back in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's glimpsed a new fashion to thaw cold cases. He marvels that an investigation that put no 1 behind bars, turned out to be the most significant example of his career and one, he believes, brought an answer to a painful historical question.
Produced past David M. Levine. Associate producers, Jacqueline Kalil and Elizabeth Germino. Broadcast associates, Annabelle Hanflig and Eliza Costas. Edited past Michael Mongulla.
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anne-frank-betrayal-investigation-60-minutes-2022-01-16/
Post a Comment for "Who Shared the Annex With Anne and the Frank Family?"