Anne Frank was ‘discovered’ in ration fraud raid
NETHERLANDS: FOR nearly 70 years, the assumption has been that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed by an anonymous phone call to the German security service just months before the end of the Second World War.
Countless dramas have portrayed a bookcase pulled aside to reveal the secret ‘‘back house’’ of an office building, Nazi boots thudding up stairs, and the inhabitants carted away in a truck.
Anne died in Belsen-belsen concentration camp and only her father Otto survived the war, to edit Anne’s record that he published as The Diary of Anne Frank.
But researchers from the Anne Frank House museum in the Neth- erlands now believe that she may not have been betrayed.
Instead, a Dutch-led, bureaucratic investigation into rationcoupon fraud may have instigated the raid on Prinsengracht 263 on August 4 1944.
Researcher Dr Gertjan Broek has published an investigation into the truth of who betrayed the family, and the answer is, he says, possibly nobody.
He has studied Anne’s diary from March 1944, police reports, judicial documents and personal statements from witnesses.
Together, they suggest that the raid was linked to their helpers’ forged food coupons that enabled the eight people in hiding to eat.
‘‘Until now, most people were under the impression that there had to be an actual denunciation and an individual to pinpoint,’’ he told The Sunday Telegraph.
‘‘That possibility is definitely not refuted by this research. But I think the most likely reason is that detectives came in to investigate something going on at the premises, without being aware of people actually hiding there.’’
Otto Frank had moved his company to the location in 1940, and his family and others ended up hiding there for two years, from July 6, 1942, during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
Broek said that of the three men who discovered the secret annex that day, one was Amsterdam policeman Gezinus Gringhuis, who worked in ‘‘food fraud’’, supervised by the occupying German authorities.
‘‘The Anne Frank House wants to develop its own research,’’ he said. ‘‘What happened on that day? ‘‘I don’t know if Dutch bureaucracy is worse than any others, but at the time, when food supply was rationed, fiddling around with that system was under police scrutiny, and there were special detective squads to investigate.’’
- Telegraph Group