Anne Frank betrayal book pulled as historians discredit cold case findings

A cold case investigation book that claimed to have solved the question of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank has been pulled by its Dutch publisher after being discredited by a group of historians.

Findings in The Betrayal Of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation have been described as “a shaky house of cards” by six Dutch historians and academics in a 69-page written “refutation”.

The book claims that the person who revealed the location of the Frank family’s annex hiding place in Amsterdam was “most likely” a prominent Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, who told German occupiers to save his own family from deportation to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.

It immediately drew criticism in the Netherlands following its publication earlier this year.

Following the new discreditation by Second World War experts, which says the Van den Bergh accusation “does not hold water”, the book has been pulled and its Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos has apologised.

“Based on the conclusions of this report, we have decided that effective immediately, the book will no longer be available,” it said.

In February, the main umbrella group for Europe’s national Jewish communities urged HarperCollins to pull the English edition, saying it had tarnished Anne Frank’s memory and the dignity of Holocaust survivors.

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Anne Frank was discovered in a raid at a canal-side house in Amsterdam on 4 August 1944 after two years of hiding in concealed rooms. Previous studies have claimed there was no conclusive evidence the young Jewish diarist and her family were betrayed.

In their criticism of the Betrayal Of Anne Frank book, the historians said it “displays a distinct pattern in which assumptions are made by the CCT (Cold Case Team), held to be true a moment later, and then used as a building block for the next step in the train of logic. This makes the entire book a shaky house of cards, because if any single step turns out to be wrong, the cards above also collapse”.

The cold case team, which included retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke, had spent six years looking into the case.

Team leader Pieter van Twisk gave a response to Dutch broadcaster NOS, saying the historians’ work was “very detailed and extremely solid” and “gives us a number of things to think about, but for the time being I do not see that Van den Bergh can be definitively removed as the main suspect”.

Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens, who put the team together, conceded in January that they did not have 100% certainty of their theory.

Anne Frank and her sister Margot died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, when Anne was just 15.

The diary documenting her time in hiding was kept safe until it was published by her father, Otto – the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust – in 1947. It has been translated into 60 languages and read by millions around the world.

In January, Ronald Leopold, director of The Anne Frank House museum, called the cold case team’s conclusion “an interesting theory” but said he believed that “there are still many missing pieces of the puzzle” that needed to be investigated.

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