Anne Frank and Her Family in Hiding Spot
Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains amid the most widely-read books in the world. Blinkering between promise and despair, the business relationship of a Jewish teenager'southward life in hiding in an addendum behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave voice and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet i question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family unit's hiding place? Two Dutch constabulary inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, only no house decision.
Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI amanuensis, decided to bring modern criminal offense-solving techniques and technology to this common cold instance. And now, they believe they have an reply—one we'll share with you tonight—to a question that's bedeviled historians, and haunted Holland: who was responsible for the betrayal?
Vince Pankoke had turned in his bluecoat and gun. He was two years into a comfortable Florida retirement, when his phone rang in the spring of 2016.
Vince Pankoke: I received a phone call from a colleague from the netherlands who said, "If you lot—if y'all're done laying on the beach, we have a case for yous."
Jon Wertheim: Were you laying on the beach?
Vince Pankoke: I was actually driving to the beach. I west— (LAUGH) I wasn't quite there yet.
Pankoke spent three decades as an FBI special amanuensis, targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work had too taken him to kingdom of the netherlands, where his investigative chops left an impression.
Jon Wertheim: Were you lot looking to get dorsum when he told you what it was nigh?
Vince Pankoke: Afterward he told me it was to, you know, endeavour 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 away, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been request around 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 nature.
Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really of import to investigate what makes us-- give up on each other. The area where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And it'southward a very warm area with the butcher and the doctor and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people beginning to betray on each other. How could that happen?
Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come up out of the Holocaust, why do you retrieve this one resonates the way it does?
Thijs Bayens: I retrieve right after the war people were shown the concentration camps, the atrocities that took place, the horror. And, of a sudden y'all notice this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented daughter. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And then I recollect humanity said, "This is who we are.
Betraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but two constabulary 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 brand your investigation dissimilar than the ones earlier information technology?
Thijs Bayens: If information technology's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police. So we set information technology up as a cold example.
Similar so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle school in Western Pennsylvania and information technology left a mark. In that location would be no perp walks or busted crime syndicates hither, but he was intrigued… charily.
Jon Wertheim: You lot hear, "We're gonna become back and await at Anne Frank." And that might have the ring of some schlocky media creation. Did that worry you?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, it did. It did. Because every bit a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with any blazon of a tabloid blazon investigation.
Jon Wertheim: You had to make certain this was serious.
Vince Pankoke: Permit's face it. I mean, the laurels of the diary, the accolade of Anne Frank, we had to treat this with utmost respect.
What ultimately sealed information technology for Vince Pankoke, the guarantee of absolute autonomy. The ground rules: Thijs Bayens would oversee the functioning and could flick the process for a documentary he's been making. There would be a book about it, which helped finance the project along with funding from the metropolis of Amsterdam, but this was going to be an independent undertaking with serious investigators. And Vince Pankoke was going to take the lead digging in.
Jon Wertheim: You'd done cold cases earlier. Before this, what was the biggest gap in fourth dimension betwixt when you were approached and when the— the crime occurred?
Vince Pankoke: It was about a five-year crime at that bespeak.
Jon Wertheim: It's 75 years. And then a little different.
Vince Pankoke: Information technology'south a lot unlike.
Jon Wertheim: This is more than cold.
Vince Pankoke: This— yeah. This was frozen.
To fleck away, Pankoke had to describe up his own blueprint. He knew that at that place was going to be more information to turn through than any human could handle and that bogus intelligence could exist a surreptitious weapon.
An FBI man'due south dream team was assembled… an investigative psychologist, a state of war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists plus an ground forces of archival researchers.
Jon Wertheim: What did all these people with disparate skills bring to this?
Vince Pankoke: They brought a dissimilar view. It was all of these skills that assistance us understand and put into context, a offense that happened, yous know, in 1944. We have to look at things differently.
Together, they dove into a familiar story: the Frank family unit had moved to Amsterdam from Federal republic of germany to escape the rise of Hitler. They found condom in Holland, where Otto Frank ran a manufacturing business. But then the Nazis invaded in 1940, two years later, the Franks—Otto, married woman Edith, Anne and her sister Margot—forth with four other Jewish friends of the family went into hiding in an addendum behind Otto's warehouse. Today, information technology'southward preserved equally a museum. Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian at the Anne Frank House, showed the states 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 identify.
The bookcase helped protect the Franks, as did a handful of Otto'south shut colleagues at the warehouse who were in on the secret.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: We go inside, heed your head.
Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow.
Later on the raid, the Nazis took anything that wasn't nailed down. Recreations bear witness what it looked like. Ii crammed floors, 761 days, more than two excruciating years indoors. The function workers brought food and supplies, but the eight in hiding couldn't make a sound during the twenty-four hours. Past night they could listen to the radio, desperately plotting updates from the forepart on this map.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Hither'due south 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: 4 June—
Jon Wertheim: —so...
Dr. Gertjan Broek: And then there'southward hope because Allied forces are on the manner. Their life depended on what would happen.
Anne's sleeping room walls, familiar to whatsoever teenager, preserved from the day she was taken away. Here, she chronicled the monotony and the horror of life in hiding. "Outside things are terrible, mean solar day and dark," she wrote in Jan 1943. "These poor people are being dragged away, with nothing but a backpack and a trivial bit of money."
Her last entry was dated August 1st, 1944. She was 15.
Jon Wertheim: Accept me to the mean solar day of the raid. Information technology's the summer of 1944 and what happens that day?
Dr. Gertjan Broek: It's a warm day, sunny. And around 10:xxx, between 10:30 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 around the warehouse.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: They terminate upward in front of the bookcase, which is hiding the entrance to the addendum. And it'due south important I call back to realize that two of the policemen present had been seasoned detectives, well experienced. They had been searching this blazon of building in the inner city of Amsterdam before.
They knew there was probable something behind that bookcase. The stunned inhabitants they found were marched out. On the floor behind them, Anne'southward diary—which a quick-thinking office worker, loyal to the Franks, preserved. Of the viii taken away, Otto Frank was the but survivor. The others were among the 100,000 Dutch Jews—three-quarters of the state's 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 calendar month after their capture.
Otto Frank: On September fourth, 1944, the concluding ship 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, and so women went to Birkenau Camp and we went to Auschwitz Campsite from the station and I never saw my family unit again.
Afterwards the war, Otto Frank was adamant to find out who betrayed the hiding place to the Nazis. Information technology was the question many readers asked after he published his daughter'south diary in 1947. Only after a couple of years, Otto abruptly stopped looking—more on that curious determination, later. When Vince Pankoke went to Amsterdam to begin his search, his start stop, naturally, was the scene of the crime.
Vince Pankoke: I chosen this the virtually visited crime scene in the world because so many people from all over the world, you know, millions of people come here.
Jon Wertheim: So when you come here for the first fourth dimension, what are you looking for?
Vince Pankoke: Well, as an investigator I wanna see what'southward in the area. Of course I wanna run into inside the building. I wanna reconstruct how the actual abort took place, and who participated in it.
Pankoke and his team spent hours in the annex looking for any clue, however remote.
He also cased the exterior—today almost exactly equally information technology was then.
Vince Pankoke: This is the courtyard that is backside the annex. And it'southward—as you can come across, it's totally enclosed. This courtyard surface area is surrounded by the buildings of the neighborhood.
Jon Wertheim: I'thou thinking ane coughing that gets overheard, one window that happens to be open at the incorrect time, the sheer risk cistron here is extraordinary.
Vince Pankoke: It is extraordinary. When we first started the instance, one of the theories that was out there is that the raid may have been caused by somebody in the immediate expanse seeing something, hearing something, and reporting it. So, therefore, we tracked and identified every resident that lived in this block and adjacent streets.
Using the artificial intelligence program, Pankoke and his team mapped potential threats. In the courtyard surrounding the annex, they institute Nazi political party members and even known informants.
Vince Pankoke: All living simply a wall or two away from one some other. When you take a look at the threats the question isn't, y'all know, what caused the raid. The question might be: how did they terminal more than than two years without beingness discovered?
Jon Wertheim: It strikes me in a case similar this, anyone could be a suspect. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk by and hear a cough. How did you lot navigate that?
Vince Pankoke: We had to consider all those options. The team and I sabbatum down and we compiled a list of ways in which the annex coulda been compromised. Yous know, was it carelessness of the people occupying the annex possibly making as well much noise or being seen in the windows? You know, was it betrayal?
Jon Wertheim: There is a theory out in that location that no one betrayed the Frank family. This was coincidence, or this was skilful detective work. Y'all buy that at all?
Vince Pankoke: No. No. I mean, we took that theory apart, you know, fleck by bit.
Jon Wertheim: This doesn't play out the way it does, but for a specific tip.
Vince Pankoke: Exactly.
Vince Pankoke, the thirty-year FBI veteran, had worked enough of cold cases, merely none this cold. It 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 dead, their testify thinned by time, simply Pankoke leaned on decades of experience and intuition, starting with the one-time case files.
Vince Pankoke: In a normal common cold example, you become to a file. You pull it out. You read through everything that the previous investigation did. Interviews, leads that were followed up on.
Ii previous Dutch police investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding place - one in 1948 and another in 1963 - were non exactly masterclasses in detective piece of work. And a lot of time had passed.
Vince Pankoke: The files were incomplete. And they were scattered about in probably a dozen dissimilar archives. Reports were missing. Witnesses had passed on. Memories had failed.
Pulling from the standard cold instance playbook, Vince Pankoke followed up on what leads he could. Otherwise he and his team had to take a fresh approach. They spent years in places like the Amsterdam city athenaeum, where the meticulous Dutch record-keeping used then brutally by the Nazis proved a major asset to the investigation.
Along with Pieter van Twisk—a veteran Dutch journalist who co-founded this project and led the research team—they showed us a trove of items they dug upwards. Including a residence card belonging to Anne frank.
Pieter van Twisk: Y'all tin can see here her proper name: her outset name, second name, and her surname; and the engagement of birth. Here y'all encounter "North.I.", which stands for Nederlands. Israelis, which is her faith.
Jon Wertheim: "Netherland Israeli." Then this—
Pieter van Twisk: Yes, I don't—
Jon Wertheim: —she's Jewish.
Pieter van Twisk: —know why. That'south Jewish, she was Jewish, yeah,
Jon Wertheim: Every Dutch resident had to accept 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'south, of course, also why it was quite easy for the Nazis to find people in kingdom of the netherlands, and to know if who was Jewish, or who was not Jewish.
Jon Wertheim: One piece of paper in the '40s, and you've got everything you could want to know most someone.
Pieter van Twisk: Yah.
The team fed every morsel they could—messages, maps, photos, even whole books—into the bogus intelligence database, developed specifically for the project. Then they let automobile learning exercise its thing.
Vince Pankoke: It would identify relationships between people, addresses that were alike. And nosotros were looking for those connections. Clues to solving this.
Jon Wertheim: Quantify how much time that saved yous.
Vince Pankoke: Oh—thousands and thousands of human-hours.
Jon Wertheim: This also tells you lot what's garbage, what's excluded, what isn't gonna aid your instance.
Vince Pankoke: Oh, yeah, because much of what we exercise is eliminating the unnecessary.
The team paid particular attending to arrest records from the time. The Nazis were hellbent on ridding the Netherlands of all Jews, role of the Concluding Solution. By 1942, the Franks were amongst 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 first question that was posed to them, "Exercise you know where any other Jews are in hiding?" So what nosotros did is nosotros chronicled all the arrests prior to and just afterward the addendum raid to try to find any connection, any loose thread that would bear witness us that they went from one abort to another and and then ultimately to the annex.
Jon Wertheim: And the implication is, "I'll brand your judgement more lenient if you requite upwardly some names."
Vince Pankoke: Yep.
Jon Wertheim: Effective?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, it was very effective.
Earlier long, suspects emerged. Dozens of them, like Willem van Maaren, an employee in the warehouse where the Franks were hiding, whom the Dutch police had interviewed in their investigations.
Vince Pankoke: He was prime suspect number one later the war. He'south working downstairs in the warehouse. He was very shifty, suspicious. Actually a thief.
Jon Wertheim: Then yous say shifty, suspicious, thief. And yet, you eliminated him as 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 have lost his chore, the business would have been closed.
Jon Wertheim: What specifically are you looking for when you're considering suspects?
Vince Pankoke: We're looking at, did they have the noesis? We wait at their motive. Yous know, what would the motive be? Were they antisemitic? Were they trying to do this for money? Then opportunity. Were they even in town?
Jon Wertheim: So this—knowledge, motive, opportunity, that'south I'm guessing what you lot were using when you're infiltrating drug cartels. I hateful, this is standard FBI technique—
Vince Pankoke: Information technology'southward standard law enforcement technique.
Jon Wertheim: What kind of a person would betray the Frank family?
Bram van der Meer: Y'all would wait maybe that a very bad person did this, a person with—I would say a psychopathic heed would, would practice this.
Bram van de Meer knows psychopathic minds. He had been an investigative psychologist with the national police force force in kingdom of the netherlands. On Vince Pankoke's squad, he analyzed the behavior and mindsets of suspects they were considering.
Jon Wertheim: That'southward your first instinct? And then it had to be a psychopath to practice this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah. But you have to be so very conscientious. It's state of war. Y'all're surviving. Your twenty-four hour period-to-day life is filled with fright. Your family unit might be arrested the next solar day. You're thinking everyday about your own survival. And then that'south the context.
Jon Wertheim: In a vacuum it had to exist a psychopath to do this. But given the context--
Bram van der Meer: That's right.
Jon Wertheim: And so what kinda person might do this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah, and then—and then you lot end up in, in a situation where it could be everyone.
Over time, their focus shifted to someone who, on the surface, might not have raised suspicions. This doubtable wasn't a neighbor of the Franks and didn't work for them. Only the FBI man's sixth sense kicked in. Arnold van den Bergh was a prominent Jewish man of affairs with a wife and kids in Amsterdam. After the invasion, he served on the Jewish council, a body the Nazis fix up, nefariously, to bear out their policies within the Jewish community. In exchange for doing the Nazis' bidding, 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 pb to the compromise of the annex.
Jon Wertheim: Was he in a campsite somewhere?
Vince Pankoke: Well, nosotros idea he was. And so due diligence, nosotros started a search. And we couldn't discover Arnold van den Bergh or any of his firsthand 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 up life in the eye of Amsterdam, Vince Pankoke says, but possible, if Van den Bergh had some kind of leverage.
Jon Wertheim: To my ears, you're describing an operator. Is that fair?
Vince Pankoke: I'd phone call him a chess actor. He idea in terms of layers of protection, past obtaining different exemptions from being placed into the camps.
Equally information technology happened, Van den Bergh—who died in 1950—had come up upwards earlier, in a study from the 1963 investigation. Though astonishingly, at that place was little apparent follow up by police.
Vince Pankoke: We read simply one pocket-size paragraph that mentioned that during the interview of Otto Frank, he told them that shortly after liberation, he received an anonymous notation identifying his betrayer of the address where they were staying, the addendum, as Arnold van den Bergh.
Jon Wertheim: Look, wait. And then, in the files, there's reference to a note that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific name?
Vince Pankoke: Remarkably so. Yeah. Information technology'south listed right there.
The note was so hit to Otto Frank that he typed up a copy for his records. Naturally, the veteran FBI man wanted to know: where was that note? Any seasoned investigator will tell you that, ideally, good shoe leather comes garnished with good luck. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and team located the son of ane of the quondam investigators. There in the son's habitation, buried in some sometime files: Otto'south copy of the note.
Jon Wertheim: I just wanna become this straight. Y'all're talking to the son of an investigator. He says, "Yeah, fifty years ago my dad looked into this and I might take some material."
Vince Pankoke: Yeah. We were lucky.
Jon Wertheim: You've held the metaphorical smoking gun in your hand earlier in the FBI. This anonymous notation. Does information technology feel similar a smoking gun?
Vince Pankoke: Not a smoking gun, but it feels like a warm gun with the prove of the bullet sitting nearby.
Dorsum at the archives, they showed it to us, Otto'southward copy. The team used forensic techniques which they say authenticates it. That handwriting you see: the scribblings of the 1963 detective. The bearding note informed Otto that he'd been betrayed by Arnold van den Bergh who'd handed the Nazis an entire list of addresses where Jews were hiding.
Vince Pankoke: Whoever it was that authored this bearding note knew and then much, that knew that lists were turned in.
Jon Wertheim: And this is data y'all 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: Then what's your theory of the case here? How and why would Arnold van den Bergh have betrayed the Frank family?
Vince Pankoke: Well, in his role as existence a founding member of the Jewish Quango, he would have 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'south had contact with to permit him and his wife at that time stay condom.
Jon Wertheim: Is at that place whatever show he knew who he was giving upwardly?
Vince Pankoke: There's no bear witness to indicate that he knew who was hiding at whatever of these addresses. They were just addresses that were provided that where Jews were known to take been in hiding.
We contacted the foundation Otto Frank started in Switzerland and the Anne Frank Firm in Amsterdam—neither of which formally participated in the investigation—to attempt to find out whether they could provide whatsoever other evidence that might implicate or articulate Arnold van den Bergh. The Anne Frank house said they could not. The foundation is reserving comment until they've seen the entire results of the investigation.
The common cold case squad began to face up the real possibility that Otto Frank might take 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 period later on the war, antisemitism was still around. So perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up once more, with Arnold van den Bergh beingness Jewish, information technology'll only stoke the fires farther. Only nosotros have to keep in listen that the fact that he was Jewish simply meant the he was placed into a untenable position past the Nazis to exercise something to save his life.
The team wrestled with these ethical questions. Thijs Buyens, the filmmaker and documentarian who conceived of the project, wondered whether the revelation would be forage for bigots and antisemites.
Jon Wertheim: The conclusion was that this culprit was a Jewish human who by all accounts was doing what he did to protect his own family.
Thijs Bayens: Yep.
Jon Wertheim: What was your emotion when you heard this?
Thijs Bayens: I found it very painful. Maybe you could say I fifty-fifty hoped it wouldn't be something like this.
Jon Wertheim: Why?
Thijs Bayens: Because I feel the hurting of all these people existence put in— in— in a situation which is very difficult for the states to understand.
Jon Wertheim: I doubtable when this is revealed people effectually the world are gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that a Jew betrayed some other Jew.
Thijs Bayens: I hope so.
Jon Wertheim: Yous hope they volition be?
Thijs Bayens: Yes. Considering it shows you how bizarre the Nazi regime really operated, and how they brought people to do these terrible things. The— the real question is, what would I take washed? That's the real question.
Throughout the projection, Bayens sought counsel from Menachem Sebbag, an Orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam who also serves as chief Jewish chaplain in the Dutch Army.
Jon Wertheim: Is a greater good being served here?
Menachem Sebbag: I hope so. I truly hope and then. I hope that people will understand that one of the things that the Nazi ideology did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize Jewish people. And going back into history and looking for the truth and attaining truth is actually giving the Jewish people back their own humanity. Even if that means that sometimes Jewish people are seen every bit not acting morally correct. That gives them back their ain humanity, because that's the mode human beings are when they're faced with existential threats.
Later on years of investigating this seven-decade-old cold case, we had a hypothetical for Vince Pankoke.
Jon Wertheim: Yous're back to being an FBI agent. You lot've got this case you've built. You lot've got your evidence and you hand it over to the prosecutor, the U.S. attorney. You think y'all're getting a conviction?
Vince Pankoke: No. There could be some reasonable doubt.
Jon Wertheim: To be clear, it's a circumstantial case.
Vince Pankoke: It is a coexisting case, as many cases are. In today's offense solving, they desire positive DNA bear witness or video surveillance record. Nosotros can't give y'all any of that. But in a historical instance this old, with all the evidence that we obtained, I call back it's pretty convincing.
At present back in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's glimpsed a new way to thaw cold cases. He marvels that an investigation that put no one behind bars, turned out to be the near meaning case of his career and one, he believes, brought an reply to a painful historical question.
Produced by David Grand. 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/
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