Hermann van Pels hit the ground with an axe, which finally drove them away. The people in hiding slept through the first one, in July 1943. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Ars Technica Addendum (effective 8/21/2018). All Rights Reserved. The case was reopened in 1963 after Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal located Silberbauer in the Vienna police force. Two other plausible suspects emerged over the years: Lena van Bladeren-Hartog (died 1963) and Tonny Ahlers (1917 - 2000). On this page we distinguish the facts from the unproven theories and the absolute falsehoods. Specifically, the author believes Nelly was involved in the betrayal of the so-called Secret Annex Jews, including the iconic teenage diarist. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Out of the seven others who hid with her, her father, Otto Frank, was the only one who survived the Holocaust. Were they betrayed? Ahlers himself was jailed for collaboration after the war and bizarrely Otto wrote letters to the authorities pleading for his release. Two other plausible suspects emerged over the years: Lena van Bladeren-Hartog (died 1963) and Tonny Ahlers (1917 - 2000). Beginning in 2016, Pankoke led a team of expert investigators equipped with modern crime-solving techniques to try to crack the case. Kugler was a married man, and he never shared the secret of the hidden Jews with his wife, wrote Van Wijk. Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history. In his 2018 book The Backyard of the Secret Annex author Gerard Kremer claimed that Ans van Dijk betrayed those hiding in the annex. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. 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. 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. 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. 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. He worked in the same building where the Franks were hiding.. Apparently, the police were called next, because a little while later, they came inside to take a look around. One of the people who has been most often scrutinized as the potential betrayer is Wilhelm van Maaren, a worker in the warehouse building where the Franks hid. Willem van Maaren was the traitor. Nelly knew that Bep and her father were helping Jews. The groups hideout was located inside a warehouse he had once owned, and they were aided by several of his employees as well as other Dutch sympathizers. For example, it is certain that two representatives from whom the helpers bought illegal coupons were arrested for black marketeering. The note came to authorities attention during a 1963 investigation into the betrayal but received little notice, with police instead focusing their efforts on suspects such as van Maaren. The sound might arouse suspicion. 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. After discovering some of the family's long-held secrets, Van Wijk now believes there is an unsettling reason behind his mother's relative "anonymity" among the helpers. 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. display: none; Willem Gerardus van Maaren (August 10, 1895- November 28, 1971) was the person most often suggested as the betrayer of Anne Frank. They could, for example, not flush the toilet too often, because the water discharge from the Secret Annex ran along the storeroom. The people in hiding in the Secret Annex were terrified when someone broke into the business premises. The second thing was there was nothing that actually tied her to information that would have led her to know that people were in the annex.". There's no evidence to indicate that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses, Pankoke tells 60 Minutes. [But] 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.. Barnouw, the historian, said the blackmail supposition is thin. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Nelly didnt just engage in an adolescent relationship with a soldier it went far beyond that, wrote Van Wijk. For almost 60 years, the identity of that informant, whose call had such tragic consequences, has remained a mystery to historians and the most dogged Nazi hunters. Read our affiliate link policy. "His own mother said he had a bad character from birth and that he was always parading his Nazi connections," the author told the Guardian yesterday. 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. But Barnouw said Lee's case sounded credible enough for the institute to reopen its investigation into the betrayal. We are saved, go on saving us!That is all we can say. (Anne Frank, 11 April 1944. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter, Despite decades of research, betrayal as a point of departure has delivered nothing conclusive, Ronald Leopold, Executive Director of the Anne Frank House museum, said in statement. The book, released in English yesterday, points the finger of blame at a man called Anton Ahlers, a business associate of Otto's and a committed Nazi. She was 15 at the time of her death. Left unsigned, the message named van den Bergh as the person whod reported the Franks hiding place to the Nazis. Fox on Parkinson's, and maintaining optimism Did Willem van Maaren betray the Franks? Incorrect password. January 16, 2022 / 8:09 PM Click the link in that email to complete registration so you can comment. A family's darkest secret sheds light on an enduring mystery, Were really pleased that youve read, Please use the following structure: [email protected], Send me The Times of Israel Daily Edition. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. This is highly significant and even if they don't find who the traitor was, the scope to find out exactly what did happen is enormous.". The people in hiding decided not to wait but to take action. A Dutch newspaper, Het Parool, printed a story about Anne's diary which aroused the interest of a publishing house. Although Miep Gies is the best-remembered of the Dutch helpers, Voskuijl was the closest to Anne in age and temperament. However, because Anne wrote about Nellys collaboration with the Nazis in the original version of her her diary, the authors proved that Nelly returned to Amsterdam in 1943. 2023 TIME USA, LLC. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Erik Somers, a historian at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, praised the depth of the investigation but criticized its conclusion. Footsteps on the stairways, people shaking the bookcase. Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. } The case. There was another important reason Pankoke crossed Van Dijk off the list of suspects. Advertising Notice All rights reserved. While his mother referred to as Elli Vossen in The Diary of Anne Frank risked her life to hide eight Jews, his aunt had behaved shamefully during the occupation of the Netherlands, it was whispered. Now, a biographer of Anne Frank has published a new theory which has intrigued the nation and revived a dark chapter in Dutch history - the failure to protect Jewish citizens from the genocidal Nazis. They will also scrutinise the letters of Anne's father, Otto, for clues and examine police transcripts of interviews dating back to the 1940s. Ahlers was among the suspects Pankoke and his team investigated and ultimately ruled out. 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. They had to act as if everything was normal. "However, after Otto Frank went into hiding, Tonny Ahlers was out doing other things in different parts of the city. Instead, the groups arrest could have been a tragic accident. I think he got the information from Ahlers," Lee said. If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. Cookie Settings, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Five Places Where You Can Still Find Gold in the United States, Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Otherand the Birds Loved It, Balto's DNA Provides a New Look at the Intrepid Sled Dog, The Science of California's 'Super Bloom,' Visible From Space, What We're Still Learning About Rosalind Franklins Unheralded Brilliance. Nobody knows for sure who betrayed the Franks, but after doing research, I believe that Tony Ahlers is guilty. Meanwhile, in 2018, a book claimed to offer evidence that Anne Frankand her family were betrayed by a Jewish woman who was executed after World War II for collaborating with the Nazis. Recently translated into English, Van Wijks family account adds what he calls a remarkable name to the list of people suspected of betraying the Secret Annex nearly 75 years ago: his mothers sister. Her writing created a trail to judicial documents from other parts of the Netherlands, resulting in the latest theory. Around the time of the investigation into the SS officer, Voskuijl ceased granting interviews, wrote Van Wijk. However, the two new theories, painstakingly researched by a British and an Austrian author, and presented in separate books, have raised hopes once again and the NIWD is about to discover whether either of the scenarios stands up to close scrutiny. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World. Kugler and Kleiman were also arrested and held at a penal camp for "enemies of the regime.". This theory holds that Nellywho returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when her romance souredmay have been the anonymous female caller who (allegedly) tipped off the SS about the Secret Annex, per the testimony of SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, who made the arrests. First, fingers were pointed at Willem van Maaren, who worked in a warehouse below where the Jews were hidden by coworkers of Otto Frank, Anne's father. Ahlers was a member of the Dutch Nazi NSB movement, appeared in Nazi propaganda films and was thrown out of his lodgings after his landlady discovered a swastika flag on the wall and a uniform bearing SS insignia hanging in his wardrobe. The time will come when we will be people again and not just Jews! Only the father, Otto Frank, survived. 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. When Frank returned from Auschwitz in 1945, having lost his wife and two daughters, he may have feared his company would be confiscated if his prewar business with Germany became known. It has been widely believed that Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee who worked for Otto Frank, outed the Frank family. The proof is not final. The first police investigation: Was WILLEM VAN MAAREN the betrayer? I think he is the one who gave away the Franks' whereabouts to the caller although I don't think he physically made the call himself.". The helpers did not trust warehouse worker Willem van Maaren. Fifteen-year-old Anne, her sister Margot and her mother Edith died in Nazi concentration camps. But a few years after the war, reports Hanneloes Pen for Dutch newspaper Het Parool, he told a journalist that his family had been betrayed by a member of the Jewish community. In that statement we indicated the need for further research. The note came to authorities' attention during a 1963 investigation into the. ", Photo of Ans van Dijk courtesy of Ben van Meerendonk/IISH. He vehemently denied any involvement and said that Victor Kugler had known about the pieces of wood and other things. "We can never be just Dutch, or just English, or whatever, we will always be Jews as well. But Pankoke said Van Maaren did not hold up as a suspect once investigators examined all the information they found. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Digital ", Ms Lee is also cautious but believes the secret of who shopped Anne Frank is there to be unearthed. As a member of the local Jewish Counciladministrative bodies established by the Nazis to govern Jewish communities in German-occupied Europevan den Bergh had access to lists of addresses where Jews were known to be in hiding. Among other investigative strategies, they used artificial intelligence to sift through reams of data and original documents. It was edited by Will Croxton. Anne often wrote about good-natured Bep in her diary, including happenings in the large Voskuijl family of eight siblings. Wilhelm van Maaren One of the people who has. Fox on Parkinson's and how he finds "optimism is sustainable" These are two of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to Anne Frank. That was quite a feat. "There's no doubt he did it," Anton Ahlers Jr. told the Volkskrant newspaper. My sister and my oldest brother are still angry with me about the content of the book, Van Wijk told The Times of Israel. The Anne Frank House undertook its own investigation and arrived at a surprising new theory in 2017, thanks to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. 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. While admitting that the case is circumstantial and some reasonable doubt remains, Pankoke et al. Frank wist wie hem weghaalde, De Telegraaf, 22 November 1963. First Republic Bank seized by regulators, then sold to JPMorgan Chase, Reward offered as manhunt for Texas shooting suspect reaches "dead end", Louisiana's health care deserts put women, babies at risk, doctors say, Second convoy of U.S. citizens fleeing Khartoum arrives at Port Sudan, ISIS chief killed by Turkey's intelligence agency, Erdogan says, How a tall Texan became an unlikely Australian rules football star, General Mills issues Gold Medal flour recall over salmonella concerns, Investors sue Adidas over Kanye West Yeezy deal, Shaquil Barrett's 2-year-old daughter dies in drowning accident, Anne Franks betrayal: Investigating other suspects, Louisiana doctors detail unintended consequences of state's abortion ban, Scaling up carbon capture to make an impact. 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. Johan was important to them because he could keep an eye on the other warehouse workers to see if they noticed anything. Around the time of Nellys return, her relations with the family strongly deteriorated, wrote Van Wijk, including Johan Voskuijl physically beating his daughter. When did the Franks decided to move to the Netherlands due to increasing tensions in Germany? Writer Rosemary Sullivan chronicled the painstaking process in a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. 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). 2002 The Associated Press. 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. We strive for accuracy and fairness. For a long time, betrayal was considered to be the reason for the arrest of the people in hiding, but the focus is shifting, as there are several other options. Hermann van Pels hit the ground with an axe, which finally drove them away. 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. Those hiding in the annex were wary of Van Maaren, and Anne Frank documented their suspicion in her diary. One of the reasons his aunt has been overlooked by past investigators, believes Van Wijk, involves his familys darkest secret. Hours earlier, Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Austrian commander of the squad, received a phone call from the head of the Amsterdam security police who said eight Jews were hiding in the warehouse. But two police investigations - one immediately after the. This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Jon Wertheim reported on a new look into the decades-old question that has dogged many readers of Anne Frank's diary: Who betrayed the Frank family and led a search team to their secret annex hidden behind a bookcase? Then, the team considered the motive. It takes just a few seconds. A detailed picture of the interior of the warehouse, reconstruction (1999). Only one of the people in hiding, Franks father, Otto, survived World War II. Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in the spring of 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated. Anne and her family hid for 25 months in a canal-side warehouse in central Amsterdam, where the teen-ager wrote her thoughts, yearnings and descriptions of life in the cramped annex into notebooks. . Fox on Parkinson's, and maintaining optimism, Bruce Springsteen on "Nebraska," and the emergence of Springsteen the poet, Michael J. After Lee's book was published, Ahlers' son was quoted as saying he was convinced her theory is true. See an Original 1941 Transcript of FDR's Pearl Harbor Speech, What America's Richest Ski Town's Handling of COVID-19 Shows. In her diary, Anne Frank wrote about Nelly on several occasions. Cookie Policy For two years, Anne Frank's family hid in secret rooms in Amsterdam, knowing that a curtain left open by mistake, a wayward noise or a nervous conspirator's phone call to the Nazis could land. Her father, Otto Frank, survived, and spent the rest of his life trying to discover who had betrayed his family. Jewish Councils were set up in Nazi-controlled cities and pitted members of the Jewish community against one another. Investigators began taking a fresh look at the case in 2016, hoping to provide new answers. 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. In her diary, Anne reported various attempted burglaries and actual burglaries. Van Maaren was later the subject of multiple investigations related to the betrayalincluding one by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthalbut he always maintained his innocence, and none of the cases ever produced any evidence against him. In the end, the list of people who were accused of being involved in the case is too long to include in its entirety. Anne Franks father Ottothe only member of the family to survive their subsequent deportation to the concentration campswas among the first to assert that a betrayal had led to their capture. Although he heard about Nellys romantic liaisons with Germans while growing up, Van Wijk was never told about his aunts role as a Nazi collaborator. Their mother, Edith, had died of starvation the year before. And who among us, if our families were on the line and heading to extermination camps, wouldnt do what we could? But despite suspicions, there was no conclusive evidence van Maaren betrayed the family. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. 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. Warehouse worker Lammert Hartog did undeclared work, and director Victor Kugler kept part of the company income out of the books. 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. believe the most likely culprit is a local Jewish leader named Arnold van den Bergh. ", Barnouw told The Associated Press he and another colleague will review old files and testimony for new revelations. See: Barnouw, David & Stroom, Gerrold van der, Who betrayed Anne Frank? Apparently, the burglars were still about. And probably wasn't capable of betrayal, because had he betrayed the annex, he knew that he would end up losing his job." The most believable suspect was Arnold van den Bergh, a prominent Jewish businessman in the city who lived a lavish life during the holocaust. Lee says Ahlers not only turned in the Frank family, but may have blackmailed Otto Frank for years after the war, receiving payment for his silence about Frank's business with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. He was the warehouse manager as well as the father of Bep, who worked in the office and was one of the helpers. They had come very close to being discovered! He referred them to the first floor, where the office staff was. ", By Arthur Max It was an anonymous phone call in the hot summer of 1944 which led the Gestapo and Dutch security police to the concealed annexe in a canalside house where Anne Frank and her family had hidden for almost two years. Scholars and the public alike have long debated the identity of the individual (or individuals) who betrayed Frank, her family and the other residents of the so-called Secret Annex. After the war, Frank removed content from Annes diary regarding Nellys collaboration. "Everyone, including his own family, condemned him as distinctly anti-Jewish and a thoroughly unpleasant character.". That, Ms Lee suggests, is more likely to have been a man called Maarten Kuiper, who made a living from the betrayal of Jews and who moved into Ahlers' flat with him the day before the raid. 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. This theory continues on an assumption that in itself is insufficiently proven, that is that betrayal by telephone led to the raid. War diary of life in hiding became world bestseller The Diary of Anne Frank, first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, is one of the most widely read books in the world. It probably never will be. 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.. As he tells Anthony Deutsch and Stephanie van den Berg of Reuters, van den Bergh was a very influential man who couldve avoided deportation for any number of reasons. Anne Frank is a symbol of the youth and what the people who were in hiding went through, Pankoke said.
