Huddled together with her family in a secret annexe, its entrance hidden behind a bookcase in an Amsterdam warehouse, 15-year-old Anne Frank confided to her diary her anxious hopes for final liberation — for future life.
‘Will this year, 1944, bring us victory? We don’t know yet,’ she wrote after hearing the BBC announce the D-Day landings on their wireless set.
‘But where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.’
But it wasn’t to be. Tragically, 1944 brought only capture and, a year later, death for the young Anne.
While the Netherlands’ liberation by Allied forces began just the following month, on August 4 the Franks — along with four other Jewish people — were discovered after having successfully hidden from the Gestapo for two years.
The investigation found Amsterdam businessman Arnold van den Bergh, pictured, revealed where the teenager was hiding
Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, days after the death of her sister, Margot. Their mother Edith had died that January — separated from her daughters in Auschwitz.
Their father, Otto, was the only one to survive. And in 1947 he published Anne’s diary about their life in hiding, submitting to history arguably the most moving testament of World War II.
It remains one of the most widely read books in the world, with more than 30 million people having read The Diary Of A Young Girl in 70 languages.
Its author has become an icon of quiet defiance against the Nazis and a symbol of the indomitable human spirit.
Otto Frank is pictured with his daughters Margot and Anne (sitting on his lap), circa 1931
Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945
Yet the book — with its last entry made just three days before the Franks’ capture — leaves readers with a gnawing mystery: who betrayed the family?
The detectives in the Jew-hunting unit who found the Franks appeared to know exactly who they were looking for.
But after decades of speculation, two inquiries in 1947 and 1967, a string of suspects and theories, we’ve been left with no concrete conclusions as to how they were tipped off.
That is, until now — as a new forensic investigation led by a former FBI agent believes it has finally found the answer.
And — perhaps most shockingly — the investigators apportion blame to a fellow Jew: a wealthy Amsterdam businessman named Arnold van den Bergh.
The hunt that led to him started in 2016 when Thijs Bayens and Pieter van Twisk, a Dutch film-maker and journalist respectively, contacted Vince Pankoke, a retired FBI agent and cold-case specialist from Florida whose illustrious career had included tracking down Colombian drug cartels and 9/11 suspects.
Pankoke, pictured right, had a team which included an investigative psychologist, a war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists plus several archival researchers
Having read Frank’s book himself at school and been moved by it, Pankoke agreed to take on the case, which Bayens and van Twisk documented.
And the result is both a forthcoming film and a book — The Betrayal Of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan — published this week.
With funding from Amsterdam’s government — as well as from the book deal — Pankoke assembled a 23-strong international team including criminologists, forensic scientists, psychologists, handwriting experts, archival researchers and a rabbi.
Given that all the witnesses were long dead, the Amsterdam-based team came to rely heavily on an artificial-intelligence program developed by Microsoft to analyse tens of thousands of pages of government documents for clues. Perhaps rather usefully in retrospect, the Nazis had insisted on keeping detailed records of everything.
‘The [investigation] files were incomplete. And they were scattered about in probably a dozen different archives,’ Pankoke said.
Anne Frank lived here in Amsterdam and hid with her parents to escape from the Nazis between June 1942 and August 4, 1944
‘Reports were missing. Witnesses had passed on. Memories had failed’
The Franks had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the rise of Hitler and established a new life with Otto setting up a manufacturing business. But in 1940 the Nazis came to occupy the Netherlands and when, two years later, they started to deport Jews to concentration camps, the Franks went into hiding.
Just a handful of Otto’s staff knew their location on two cramped floors and would bring them food. One theory of how the family came to be captured was a tip off by a neighbour, who heard them making too much noise or saw them coming too close to a window.
Pankoke’s investigators drew up a database of everyone living in the immediate area, mapping potential threats in the form of Nazi Party members and known informants.
The computer software trawled through everything from letters to photos, maps and even books (investigators consulted 29 archives in countries including the UK, Canada, Russia and Israel).
Arrest records from before and after the Franks’ capture were of particular interest, since the Nazis relied heavily on offering arrested Jews the chance of survival in exchange for betraying the whereabouts
