Former FBI agent looks into cold Anne Frank case

AMSTERDAM — Hiding from the Gestapo in a secret annex of her father’s warehouse in Amsterdam during World War II, Anne Frank heard a little knock on the wall. She could not be sure who or what it was, and it frightened her.

She was right to be scared: Just months later, on Aug. 4, 1944, the police discovered the hideout during a raid and arrested her and seven others living behind a movable bookcase. All but Otto Frank, the diarist’s father, and later the editor of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” perished in Nazi death camps.

Who gave them up has remained a mystery. Now, almost 75 years later, a team of experts led by a retired FBI agent is bringing modern forensic science and criminology to bear in hopes of solving one of history’s most famous cold case files.

“We will put special emphasis on new leads,” said the retired special agent, Vince Pankoke, 59, who is leading the effort. “We need to verify stories as they come in, and we know that is going to lead to further investigation.”

In the search for new leads, he and his team are digitally combing through millions of pages of scanned material from the National Archives in Washington as well as archives in the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.

The use of other modern techniques such as forensic accounting, crowd sourcing, behavioral science and testimonial reconstruction may also be promising. The team, for example, is carrying out a three-dimensional scan of the original house and using computer models to determine how far sounds might have traveled.

Those techniques may allow them to re-evaluate old evidence — for instance, whether the knock on the wall, described in Anne Frank’s diary, was someone telling those hiding that they were being too loud, or whether it could have been a trap.