Sullivan details and debunks some of these at length. Then she painstakingly escorts us down various blind alleys that the investigative team pursued, as it whittled 30 theories down to a dozen possible scenarios. Sullivan concentrates on explaining how the Frank family and their friends ended up in the annex - and what happened after they were arrested. The first section of “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” lays out the background, touching only lightly on events in the diary itself, and its complicated cultural afterlife. The investigators speculate, convincingly, that Frank chose not to publicize the information because it implicated a fellow Jew - and he was fearful of stoking continuing European anti-Semitism.Īn emerita professor at the University of Toronto and a prolific writer of nonfiction, Sullivan is best known for her acclaimed 2015 biography “ Stalin’s Daughter.” In 2006, she chronicled another story of Jewish rescue in “ Villa Air-Bel,” about a safe house for artists and intellectuals outside Marseille. Van den Bergh, who died in 1950, was “put into a devil’s dilemma by circumstances for which he was not to blame,” Sullivan writes. They also decoded its historical context, which they say included van den Bergh’s access to the addresses of hidden Jews, his high-level Nazi contacts, his frantic efforts to protect his family from deportation to the death camps, and his likely use of the addresses as a bargaining chip.īetraying the annex fugitives, if the notary was indeed the culprit, was nothing personal - but also intensely personal, a desperate means of survival in impossible times. Under the leadership of former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke, the Cold Case Team found and authenticated that key document. Frank took the note seriously enough to give a copy to Dutch police in the 1960s. After the raid, she salvaged Anne’s diary.Īs Sullivan tells it, an anonymous note sent to Frank after the war offered the betrayer’s identity: the notary Arnold van den Bergh, a member of Amsterdam’s controversial Jewish Council, which helped implement Nazi policies in the hope of protecting at least some Jews (including themselves). Both an employee of Otto Frank and a close friend, Gies helped provision the families in the annex. The book’s cover tips its hand, suggesting that the identity of the betrayer is “less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept.” Among those apparently keeping the secret, amazingly enough, were Otto Frank and the most famous of the family’s Dutch rescuers, Miep Gies, who died in 2010 at 100. “The Cold Case Team … wanted to understand what happens to a population under enemy occupation when ordinary life is threaded with fear,” Sullivan writes. But the book is most engrossing as a portrait of wartime Amsterdam, a city of conflicting and cross-cutting loyalties, where personal peril could erase the line between heroism and villainy. Sullivan describes the Cold Case Team’s interdisciplinary methods, from criminal profiling, historical research and crowdsourcing to a Microsoft artificial intelligence program that found connections within a blizzard of archival documents. The investigative project, initiated by the Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens with the assistance of journalist Pieter van Twisk, also is producing a documentary. “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” is the meticulous official account of a five-year-long “cold case” investigation purporting, finally, to reveal the culprit - as well as why his identity has remained concealed for so long.
Historians have proposed competing hypotheses without definitive proof. Two Dutch investigations, in 1947-64, targeted the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, but were inconclusive.
Since then, as in an Agatha Christie mystery or game of Clue, suspects for the role of the family’s “betrayer” have proliferated.
In 1947, he published his daughter’s adolescent diary, to this day among the most heartbreaking artifacts of the Holocaust. Of the eight people hiding in the annex, only Anne’s father, the businessman Otto Frank, survived.
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