After Anne and Her Family Are Captured, Who Finds and Keeps Anne's Diary
Seventy-v years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the nearly widely-read books in the world. Blinkering between hope and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager'southward life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave phonation and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family unit'due south hiding place? 2 Dutch police inquiries and countless historians take come up up with theories, simply no house conclusion.
Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and engineering science to this cold case. And now, they believe they have an answer—one nosotros'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 badge and gun. He was 2 years into a comfortable Florida retirement, when his telephone 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 beach?
Vince Pankoke: I was actually driving to the beach. I w— (LAUGH) I wasn't quite there yet.
Pankoke spent three decades equally an FBI special agent, targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work had too taken him to the Netherlands, where his investigative chops left an impression.
Jon Wertheim: Were you looking to get back when he told yous what it was well-nigh?
Vince Pankoke: After he told me information technology was to, you know, try to solve the mystery of what caused the raid—for Anne Frank and the others in the addendum. I needed to hear more.
Four-yard miles abroad, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been asking around for a credentialed investigator to dig into a question that he feels Holland has never quite reckoned with, ane that gets to the essence of human nature.
Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really of import to investigate what makes us-- surrender on each other. The expanse where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And it'south a very warm area with the butcher and the md and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people showtime 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 think this 1 resonates the way it does?
Thijs Bayens: I think right after the state of war people were shown the concentration camps, the atrocities that took identify, the horror. And, suddenly you observe this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And so I remember humanity said, "This is who we are.
Betraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but ii police probes and a whole library of books dedicated to the Anne Frank instance, 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 it's a criminal act, it should exist investigated by the police. So nosotros set it upwards as a cold case.
Like and so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle schoolhouse in Western Pennsylvania and information technology left a mark. In that location would be no perp walks or disrepair crime syndicates hither, but he was intrigued… cautiously.
Jon Wertheim: You hear, "We're gonna get dorsum and wait 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 equally a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with whatsoever type of a tabloid type investigation.
Jon Wertheim: You had to make sure this was serious.
Vince Pankoke: Let's face up it. I mean, the accolade of the diary, the honor of Anne Frank, we had to care for this with utmost respect.
What ultimately sealed information technology for Vince Pankoke, the guarantee of absolute autonomy. The basis rules: Thijs Bayens would oversee the operation and could film the process for a documentary he'due south been making. There would exist a book about it, which helped finance the projection forth with funding from the city 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 washed cold cases before. Before this, what was the biggest gap in time between when you were approached and when the— the crime occurred?
Vince Pankoke: It was well-nigh a five-year crime at that bespeak.
Jon Wertheim: It's 75 years. Then a little different.
Vince Pankoke: It's a lot unlike.
Jon Wertheim: This is more than cold.
Vince Pankoke: This— yeah. This was frozen.
To scrap away, Pankoke had to depict up his own blueprint. He knew that there was going to be more information to plough through than whatever human could handle and that artificial intelligence could exist a hush-hush weapon.
An FBI man'southward dream team was assembled… an investigative psychologist, a state of 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 dissimilar view. Information technology was all of these skills that help united states of america understand and put into context, a crime that happened, y'all know, in 1944. We have to await at things differently.
Together, they pigeon into a familiar story: the Frank family had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the rise of Hitler. They constitute safety in Holland, where Otto Frank ran a manufacturing business. But then the Nazis invaded in 1940, two years later, the Franks—Otto, wife Edith, Anne and her sister Margot—along with four other Jewish friends of the family unit went into hiding in an addendum backside Otto's warehouse. Today, it's preserved as 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 archway to the hiding place.
The bookcase helped protect the Franks, as did a handful of Otto'south close colleagues at the warehouse who were in on the hush-hush.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: We go inside, heed your caput.
Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow.
After the raid, the Nazis took anything that wasn't nailed down. Recreations show what it looked like. Ii crammed floors, 761 days, more than 2 excruciating years indoors. The function workers brought nutrient and supplies, but the eight in hiding couldn't make a sound during the day. By night they could listen to the radio, badly plotting updates from the front on this map.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Here'due south a newspaper clipping from shortly after D-24-hour interval, so June, 1944. With the pins that tried to follow the advances of the allied troops in the days and weeks probably later.
Jon Wertheim: This is June, 1944—
Dr. Gertjan Broek: 4 June—
Jon Wertheim: —so...
Dr. Gertjan Broek: So at that place's promise because Centrolineal forces are on the way. Their life depended on what would happen.
Anne'south bedroom walls, familiar to whatsoever teenager, preserved from the day she was taken abroad. Here, she chronicled the monotony and the horror of life in hiding. "Outside things are terrible, day and night," she wrote in January 1943. "These poor people are being dragged abroad, with nothing but a backpack and a footling bit of money."
Her last entry was dated August 1st, 1944. She was 15.
Jon Wertheim: Take me to the day of the raid. It'due south 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 xi:00, a couple of men walk in.
They were detectives with a Dutch constabulary unit working with the Nazis. An SS officer named Silberbauer led the team. They demanded to be shown effectually the warehouse.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: They terminate up in front of the bookcase, which is hiding the entrance to the annex. And information technology's important I think to realize that two of the policemen present had been seasoned detectives, well experienced. They had been searching this type of building in the inner city of Amsterdam before.
They knew there was likely something behind that bookcase. The stunned inhabitants they plant were marched out. On the floor backside them, Anne's diary—which a quick-thinking office worker, loyal to the Franks, preserved. Of the eight taken abroad, Otto Frank was the just survivor. The others were amongst the 100,000 Dutch Jews—3-quarters of the country's Jewish population—to dice 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 after their capture.
Otto Frank: On September fourth, 1944, the last send went to Auschwitz. Well, when nosotros arrived at Auschwitz there were men standing there with clubs—women here, men there. We were separated correct on the station, and then women went to Birkenau Camp and we went to Auschwitz Campsite from the station and I never saw my family again.
After the state of war, Otto Frank was determined to find out who betrayed the hiding place to the Nazis. Information technology was the question many readers asked afterward he published his daughter'southward diary in 1947. Merely afterwards a couple of years, Otto abruptly stopped looking—more on that curious decision, later. When Vince Pankoke went to Amsterdam to begin his search, his starting time end, naturally, was the scene of the law-breaking.
Vince Pankoke: I called this the most visited law-breaking scene in the earth because so many people from all over the world, you know, millions of people come here.
Jon Wertheim: And then when you come up here for the offset fourth dimension, what are y'all looking for?
Vince Pankoke: Well, as an investigator I wanna see what'southward in the area. Of course I wanna see within 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, all the same remote.
He also cased the exterior—today almost exactly as information technology was then.
Vince Pankoke: This is the courtyard that is backside the annex. And it'due south—equally you can see, it's totally enclosed. This courtyard area is surrounded by the buildings of the neighborhood.
Jon Wertheim: I'grand thinking one cough that gets overheard, ane window that happens to be open at the wrong time, the sheer risk factor here is boggling.
Vince Pankoke: It is extraordinary. When we starting time started the case, one of the theories that was out there is that the raid may have been acquired past somebody in the immediate expanse seeing something, hearing something, and reporting it. So, therefore, nosotros tracked and identified every resident that lived in this cake and side by side streets.
Using the artificial intelligence program, Pankoke and his team mapped potential threats. In the courtyard surrounding the annex, they found Nazi political party members and even known informants.
Vince Pankoke: All living only a wall or two away from i some other. When you accept a look at the threats the question isn't, you know, what caused the raid. The question might be: how did they final more than than two years without existence discovered?
Jon Wertheim: Information technology strikes me in a case like this, anyone could be a suspect. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk by and hear a cough. How did y'all navigate that?
Vince Pankoke: We had to consider all those options. The squad and I sat down and we compiled a list of ways in which the annex coulda been compromised. Y'all know, was information technology carelessness of the people occupying the annex possibly making also much noise or existence seen in the windows? Y'all know, was it betrayal?
Jon Wertheim: At that place is a theory out there that no one betrayed the Frank family. This was coincidence, or this was good detective work. You lot purchase that at all?
Vince Pankoke: No. No. I hateful, we took that theory apart, you know, chip past bit.
Jon Wertheim: This doesn't play out the way it does, but for a specific tip.
Vince Pankoke: Exactly.
Vince Pankoke, the xxx-year FBI veteran, had worked plenty of cold cases, but none this common cold. It had been more vii decades since Anne Frank and her family unit had been discovered in their hiding place in cardinal 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, but Pankoke leaned on decades of experience and intuition, starting with the old example files.
Vince Pankoke: In a normal common cold case, you go to a file. You pull it out. You read through everything that the previous investigation did. Interviews, leads that were followed upwards on.
2 previous Dutch police investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding identify - one in 1948 and another in 1963 - were not exactly masterclasses in detective piece of work. And a lot of fourth dimension had passed.
Vince Pankoke: The files were incomplete. And they were scattered well-nigh in probably a dozen dissimilar 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 squad had to take a fresh approach. They spent years in places like the Amsterdam city athenaeum, where the meticulous Dutch tape-keeping used and then brutally past 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 squad—they showed us a trove of items they dug upwardly. Including a residence card belonging to Anne frank.
Pieter van Twisk: You can see hither her name: her kickoff name, 2d proper noun, and her surname; and the date of birth. Here y'all encounter "N.I.", which stands for Nederlands. Israelis, which is her religion.
Jon Wertheim: "Netherland Israeli." So 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 course, also 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 newspaper in the '40s, and you've got everything you could desire to know near someone.
Pieter van Twisk: Yah.
The team fed every morsel they could—messages, maps, photos, fifty-fifty whole books—into the artificial intelligence database, developed specifically for the projection. Then they let machine learning do 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 man-hours.
Jon Wertheim: This likewise tells you what'south garbage, what's excluded, what isn't gonna aid your case.
Vince Pankoke: Oh, yep, because much of what we do is eliminating the unnecessary.
The team paid detail 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 first question that was posed to them, "Do you know where any other Jews are in hiding?" So what we did is we chronicled all the arrests prior to and just afterward the annex raid to try to find whatsoever connection, any loose thread that would show the states that they went from one abort to another and and then ultimately to the annex.
Jon Wertheim: And the implication is, "I'll make your sentence more than lenient if you give up some names."
Vince Pankoke: Yeah.
Jon Wertheim: Effective?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, it was very constructive.
Earlier long, suspects emerged. Dozens of them, similar 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 i afterwards the war. He'due south working downstairs in the warehouse. He was very shifty, suspicious. Actually a thief.
Jon Wertheim: So you lot 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 non to betray them because if he did, he would accept lost his job, the business would have been closed.
Jon Wertheim: What specifically are yous looking for when you're considering suspects?
Vince Pankoke: We're looking at, did they take the noesis? We expect at their motive. Yous know, what would the motive exist? Were they antisemitic? Were they trying to practise this for money? And so opportunity. Were they even in town?
Jon Wertheim: So this—knowledge, motive, opportunity, that's I'g guessing what you lot were using when yous're infiltrating drug cartels. I mean, this is standard FBI technique—
Vince Pankoke: It'due south standard law enforcement technique.
Jon Wertheim: What kind of a person would beguile the Frank family?
Bram van der Meer: You would wait maybe 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 in the Netherlands. On Vince Pankoke's squad, he analyzed the behavior and mindsets of suspects they were considering.
Jon Wertheim: That's your first instinct? Then information technology had to be a psychopath to do this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah. But you lot have to be so very careful. It'due south war. You lot're surviving. Your twenty-four hours-to-24-hour interval life is filled with fear. Your family might be arrested the next twenty-four hours. You lot're thinking everyday about your ain survival. So that'southward the context.
Jon Wertheim: In a vacuum it had to be a psychopath to do this. Only given the context--
Bram van der Meer: That'southward right.
Jon Wertheim: Then what kinda person might practice this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah, and then—and and so you end upwards in, in a situation where information technology could be everyone.
Over fourth dimension, their focus shifted to someone who, on the surface, might not accept raised suspicions. This suspect wasn't a neighbor of the Franks and didn't piece of work for them. Simply the FBI man's sixth sense kicked in. Arnold van den Bergh was a prominent Jewish businessman with a wife and kids in Amsterdam. After the invasion, he served on the Jewish council, a trunk the Nazis fix, nefariously, to behave out their policies within the Jewish customs. 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 late September of 1943 and they were sent to the camps. We figured, well, if Arnold van den Bergh is in a military camp somewhere, he certainly can't be privy to information that would lead to the compromise of the annex.
Jon Wertheim: Was he in a camp somewhere?
Vince Pankoke: Well, we thought he was. So due diligence, we started a search. And we couldn't detect Arnold van den Bergh or any of his immediate family unit 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 middle of Amsterdam, Vince Pankoke says, only possible, if Van den Bergh had some kind of leverage.
Jon Wertheim: To my ears, y'all're describing an operator. Is that fair?
Vince Pankoke: I'd call him a chess player. He idea in terms of layers of protection, by obtaining different exemptions from being placed into the camps.
As information technology happened, Van den Bergh—who died in 1950—had come up before, in a report from the 1963 investigation. Though astonishingly, there was footling apparent follow up past police.
Vince Pankoke: We read merely one pocket-sized 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 addendum, every bit Arnold van den Bergh.
Jon Wertheim: Wait, wait. So, in the files, there's reference to a note that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific name?
Vince Pankoke: Remarkably so. Yes. It'southward listed right at that place.
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? Whatsoever seasoned investigator will tell you that, ideally, good shoe leather comes garnished with proficient luck. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and team located the son of ane of the old investigators. At that place in the son's dwelling, buried in some old files: Otto's re-create of the note.
Jon Wertheim: I just wanna get this straight. You're talking to the son of an investigator. He says, "Yeah, 50 years ago my dad looked into this and I might have some material."
Vince Pankoke: Yeah. We were lucky.
Jon Wertheim: You lot've held the metaphorical smoking gun in your paw before in the FBI. This anonymous note. Does it feel like a smoking gun?
Vince Pankoke: Not a smoking gun, only information technology feels like a warm gun with the evidence of the bullet sitting nearby.
Back at the archives, they showed it to us, Otto'due south copy. The team used forensic techniques which they say authenticates it. That handwriting you see: the scribblings of the 1963 detective. The anonymous annotation 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 anonymous note knew so much, that knew that lists were turned in.
Jon Wertheim: And this is information you were able to approve.
Vince Pankoke: Pieter was able to locate, in the national archive, records that indicated that in fact somebody from the Jewish Quango, of which Arnold Van Den Bergh was a fellow 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?
Vince Pankoke: Well, in his role equally being 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 serial 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 show he knew who he was giving up?
Vince Pankoke: There's no testify to betoken that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses. They were merely 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 show 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 cold case team began to confront the real possibility that Otto Frank might have known the identity of the betrayer. What reason, they wondered, would Otto have had to go along this to himself?
Vince Pankoke: He knew that Arnold van den Bergh was Jewish, and in this flow after the war, antisemitism was still around. And so maybe he only felt that if I bring this up again, with Arnold van den Bergh existence Jewish, it'll only stoke the fires farther. Merely we have to keep in mind that the fact that he was Jewish just meant the he was placed into a untenable position by the Nazis to do something to salve 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 exist fodder for bigots and antisemites.
Jon Wertheim: The conclusion was that this culprit was a Jewish man who by all accounts was doing what he did to protect his ain family unit.
Thijs Bayens: Yeah.
Jon Wertheim: What was your emotion when y'all heard this?
Thijs Bayens: I found it very painful. Maybe you could say I fifty-fifty hoped information technology wouldn't be something like this.
Jon Wertheim: Why?
Thijs Bayens: Because I experience the hurting of all these people being put in— in— in a situation which is very hard for us to understand.
Jon Wertheim: I doubtable when this is revealed people around the world are gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that a Jew betrayed some other Jew.
Thijs Bayens: I hope so.
Jon Wertheim: Y'all promise they will be?
Thijs Bayens: Yes. Considering it shows you lot how bizarre the Nazi government really operated, and how they brought people to do these terrible things. The— the real question is, what would I have done? That'southward the real question.
Throughout the project, 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 existence served here?
Menachem Sebbag: I promise and then. I truly hope and then. I hope that people volition sympathize that ane of the things that the Nazi ideology 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 equally not acting morally right. That gives them dorsum their own humanity, because that'southward the way human beings are when they're faced with existential threats.
After years of investigating this vii-decade-old common cold case, we had a hypothetical for Vince Pankoke.
Jon Wertheim: You're back to beingness an FBI agent. You lot've got this case you've built. Y'all've got your testify and you manus it over to the prosecutor, the U.S. chaser. You remember yous're getting a conviction?
Vince Pankoke: No. There could exist some reasonable doubt.
Jon Wertheim: To exist clear, it'southward a circumstantial instance.
Vince Pankoke: It is a coexisting case, as many cases are. In today'due south crime solving, they want positive Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence or video surveillance tape. We can't give you whatever of that. But in a historical case this one-time, with all the evidence that we obtained, I call up it's pretty convincing.
Now back in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's glimpsed a new way to thaw cold cases. He marvels that an investigation that put no 1 behind bars, turned out to be the most significant case of his career and i, he believes, brought an respond to a painful historical question.
Produced by David M. Levine. Associate producers, Jacqueline Kalil and Elizabeth Germino. Circulate associates, Annabelle Hanflig and Eliza Costas. Edited by Michael Mongulla.
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anne-frank-betrayal-investigation-60-minutes-2022-01-16/
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