Pankoke trying to find who betrayed Anne Frank

them finding out and didn’t entirely trust them.

One of the main suspects has always been Wilhelm van Maaren, who took over the warehouse operations in 1943.

Otto Frank, who reportedly said “we were betrayed by Jews,” thought he was the informant. Mr. Van Maaren was suspicious and inquisitive by nature. He thought people were visiting the warehouse at night and lay subtle traps for them to prove it.

“He places books and bits of paper on the very edges of things in the warehouse so that if anyone walks by they fall off,” Anne Frank wrote.

The family also suspected him of stealing from them.

The Dutch police investigations focused largely on him. The 1963 case did prove that Mr. Van Maaren was a thief, but it revealed no evidence to show he was the informant.

Other theories have zeroed in on different employees, such as Joseph Jansen, who suspected Otto Frank of having an affair with his wife and wrote a letter denouncing him in 1941 for making anti-German comments, according to a 2003 biography of Otto Frank by Carol Ann Lee. Anton Ahlers, a Dutch Nazi party member, intercepted the letter and presented it to Mr. Frank as part of a blackmail scheme. The book concludes that he was the likely informant. But it’s all speculation. “Did Ahlers even know about the annex, and if he did, why would he betray the person who was paying him money?” asks the Cold Case Diary website.

Other writers and amateur sleuths have suggested the betrayer was Lena Hartog-van Bladeren, the Franks’ cleaning lady, who was married to a warehouse worker, or Ans van Dijk, a Jewish woman who became an agent for the Gestapo and betrayed dozens of Jews in hiding.

Mr. Pankoke and his team know all of these stories. But their job is to find the smoking gun in the troves of records.

Among the team members who could provide that link is Roger Depue, 79, the former head of the FBI’s behavioral science unit who successfully identified Mark Felt as Deep Throat in the Watergate investigation by studying the quotes from the book “All the President’s Men.”

A pioneering profiler, his mission is to examine statements to try to assemble a portrait of the suspect.

“Hopefully I can make a contribution,” he said from his home in Virginia. “We can do a great deal in constructing the profile of anyone by examining their words, either orally or written.”

He says he is happy to work with Mr. Pankoke, who recruited him, and says Mr. Pankoke is the type of strong leader who will take charge of the investigation and make sure it is done right.

“Vince is one of the best investigators I know,” he says. “He’s very thorough. Very courageous.”

Mr. Pankoke’s first order of business was to examine the police investigations. And what he found was that they were more like inquiries than real police cases.

“I wanted to find out what had been done. Reading reports, I found myself saying, ‘This was not thorough,’ “he says. “It was nothing like an FBI investigation.”

The first case in 1948, handled by the “political investigation” division of the Amsterdam police, was substandard because most of the experienced police officers in Amsterdam had been kicked out after the war for cooperating with the Gestapo.

“Looking back, we can say that the investigation was flawed,” the Anne Frank museum website concludes. “Many questions were not asked, and the whole inquiry was rather superficial.”

The 1963 investigation was more professional. It was launched after Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal tracked down Karl Silberbauer, the Nazi officer in charge of the Anne Frank arrest. Mr. Silberbauer, who died in 1972, remembered the arrest but not the betrayer. His superior, Julius Dettman, who had reportedly taken the phone call from the informant, killed himself shortly after the war.

The 1963 case closed without any conclusions.

In addition to the deaths of witnesses, earlier investigations were hindered by the fact that many of the World War II generation were unwilling to deal with the legacy of the Nazi era.

But Mr. Pankoke says that has changed. The second and third generations following the war are much more open, and the internet gives them an easy way to share information. One tip recently came from a woman who lived near the Anne Frank house and had first-person knowledge of staunch Dutch Nazis in the area.