Anne Frank was ‘very likely’ betrayed by a Jewish businessman who was trying to ‘save his own family’, a cold case investigation has concluded.
A team of experts, including a former FBI agent, looked again at the tragic case using modern techniques in an attempt to find out what happened to the diarist and her family.
They have named Arnold van den Bergh as the prime suspect, although admitted that the evidence against him was mostly circumstantial.
For 75 years the mystery of who betrayed the Franks has been one of the biggest unanswered questions of the 20th century.
The family hid for two years in an canal-side Amsterdam annex before being found in 1944 by Nazi officers and sent to concentration camps, where all but Anne’s father, Otto, died.
After he published his 15-year-old daughter’s diary in 1947 to worldwide acclaim, Otto dedicated much of the rest of his life to finding out how they had been discovered.
The team behind the six year investigation speculated he likely knew about Van den Bergh after receiving a tip-off but decided not to go public.
Until now a relatively unknown figure, the businessman was a member of the Jewish Council, set up by the Nazis in Amsterdam to act as intermediaries between the regime and the Jewish community.
The experts also looked again at Wilhelm van Maaren, a warehouseman who for years was suspected as being the culprit.
But they decided that the petty criminal would not have had access to the senior officers who received the information or a phone in order to make the fateful call.
The attempt to identify the betrayer was not intended to lead to prosecution, but to solve one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in the Netherlands of World War Two.
The findings of the new research will be published in a book by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, ‘The Betrayal of Anne Frank’, which will be released on Tuesday.
They also feature in an episode of CBS’ flagship documentary series, 60 Minutes.
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