I am 90 per cent certain that we’ve got the right guy
The author of controversial new book ‘The Betrayal of Anne Frank’ talks to Jake Kerridge
One expert has said van den Bergh would not have had a list of Jewish hiding places
On August 4 1944 Anne Frank was arrested along with her family, after 761 days of hiding in a secret annexe at her father’s office premises in Amsterdam – now the Anne Frank House museum. There is reportedly one question that its millions of visitors ask more than any other: who betrayed her?
It is no surprise therefore that Rosemary Sullivan’s new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, has excited a great deal of attention, as it comes as close as we may be able to get to a convincing answer. Sullivan points the finger at Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary known to have had business dealings with Goering and other Nazis, as the informant.
Sullivan, the Canadian writer best known for Stalin’s Daughter, her masterly biography of the dictator’s youngest child, has long been fascinated by the diary Anne Frank left behind – “it’s so human, full of hope and fear, ambition and yet childishness, pettiness and courage, with all the more impact when you read it because you know this child will be murdered within a year”, she says. So she he was delighted to be asked ed in 2019 to chronicle the work rk of a
Cold Case Team – headed by retired FBI agent Vince ince Pankoke – devoted to identifying the betrayer. rayer.
“Vince seems like e a quiet guy who might be selling real estate or something, thing, but he is very much h exactly what you want ant in an FBI officer: gutsy, y, sees the world as black and white, but ut has a deep heart,” she he says. Sullivan’s research entailed long days at the Cold Case Team’s HQ in Amsterdam, which she describes as having a “very serious” atmosphere, with photographs of Nazis and self-styled Dutch “Jew-hunters” glowering down from a “wall of shame”.
The project, which began in 2016, was slowed down by the sheer number of documents left behind by the bureaucracy-loving Nazis. “They ploughed over the bodies and they took down the [concentration camp] buildings, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the records,” she says.
Improved forensic techniques and the use of AI for cross-referencing names and dates have given this team the edge over the police team who conducted an investigation in the 1960s, but Sullivan insists a lot of legwork has been involved too: “old-fashioned gumshoe stuff, knocking on people’s doors and saying, ‘Can I look out of your window?’ so we can see what the neighbours would have seen.” One sad conclusion the team came to in the course of their research re is that “the Holocaust is no not something younger peop people know about now”. But the there were some young Dutch historians who wanted to be part of the team. “What I didn’t d realise before before, because Anne Frank has become a unive universal symbol for the s six million Jewish peop people who were exte exterminated in the cam camps, is how much this i is a Dutch story. The n number of Jewish peopl people who were
depo deported from the Netherlands, compared with other western European countries, was very high, usually estimated at 72 per cent. I think these young researchers see it as a moral imperative to look at why that was.” The answer to that question, she says, is more complex than “simple anti-Semitism”, involving “the terrifying way human nature changes in a war context”.
The Anne Frank story is particularly ripe for retelling, Sullivan thinks, because of the rise of the alt-Right in the Netherlands and elsewhere. “The rhetoric we hear today is so familiar, it scares the hell out of me. This story is a warning about the power of propaganda. Something I came across in my research was the US Office of Strategic Services in 1943 analysing Hitler’s modus operandi: they said it was ‘Never admit a fault, never accept blame, concentrate on one enemy, blame them for everything.’ It sounds awfully familiar.”
Another result of her research has been to make her appreciate the extraordinary qualities of Anne’s father Otto, the sole family member to survive the concentration camps. “He had been a rather nervous man, but after the war began he transformed himself into this calm core of strength to help those around him, and then later ensured that his daughter’s diary would be one of the points of light out of this horror, even though having to continually defend it against claims of its fraudulence must have been hard.”
Sullivan’s book argues convincingly that Otto Frank believed he had identified Arnold van den Bergh as his betrayer but chose not to make the knowledge public. What does she think of van den Bergh?
“I feel that he’s a tragic figure. He knew as a Jew he was at risk, always. He got cornered and gave up addresses, with no names, as a way of saving himself and his family. [Neither he nor his daughter were deported to the Nazi camps.] It’s very possible that the addresses were already a year old, and he didn’t know whether some of the people in hiding had moved on.”
In the case of Otto Frank, whose whole family was exterminated, Sullivan says she is sure van den Bergh would have struggled to live with the guilt. Van den Bergh died of cancer in 1950.
How convinced is she of the notary’s guilt? David Barnouw, a Dutch author of the 2003 book Who Betrayed Anne Frank?, said last week that he didn’t believe van den Bergh would have had access to a list of Jewish hiding places, while Ronald Leopold, the director of the Anne Frank House, said he wanted more evidence before definitively naming the notary as the guilty party.
Sullivan says she is “90 per cent” convinced by the team’s conclusions. “It is circumstantial evidence, but at the same time I think that it’s pretty convincing,” she says.
Telling the truth is not always the easy option, and Sullivan admits that she worries about fuelling antiSemitism. “But I don’t see it as primarily the story of a Jewish betrayer. When you see the integrity of Otto Frank, when you see the Resistance fighters who are Jewish and then you see van den Bergh, it’s a story of human nature, in its strength and weakness.”
The Betrayal of Anne Frank (William Collins, £20) is out now