Thesis Statment on How Tonny Ahlers Betrayed the Frank Family
Common cold case files —
Retired FBI agent has new theory about who betrayed Anne Frank'due south family unit to Nazis
Vincent Pankoke ID'd Jewish Council fellow member Arnold van den Bergh as most likely culprit.
Enlarge / Anne Frank in 1940. A new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Common cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan, claims that a retired FBI special agent and a team of investigators have solved the mystery of who betrayed the Frank family unit to the Nazis.
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Former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke was looking forrard to a relaxing retirement hanging out at the embankment when he left the agency. Instead, he was drawn into solving a famous common cold case: the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to the Franks' arrest and deportation to a concentration military camp. Just the father, Otto Frank, survived. To discover the traitor, Pankoke assembled his ain crack team of dogged investigators. He and his team spent v years poring over every bit of pertinent material, setting up an all-encompassing online database, and developing an AI program to aid them sift through it all and find new connections.
While admitting that the case is coexisting and some reasonable dubiety remains, Pankoke et al. believe the most probable culprit is a local Jewish leader named Arnold van den Bergh. In lodge to protect his own family unit, van den Bergh may have handed over lists of addresses where fellow Jews were hiding to the Nazis. The Pankoke team'south story was featured in a segment on sixty Minutes earlier this calendar week (see the video at end of this mail service) and is covered in detail in a new volume past Rosemary Sullivan: The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Common cold Case Investigation.
Millions of people have read The Diary of Anne Frank since information technology was first published posthumously in 1947. It has been translated into 70 languages and inspired a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 flick, featuring Millie Perkins in the title role. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but she and her family fled the state and settled in Amsterdam afterwards Adolf Hitler came to ability. They didn't abscond quite far enough: the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940 and eventually forced the Franks (and many other Jews) into hiding.
Enlarge / A model of the building where Anne Frank stayed, including the Hole-and-corner Annex.
Anne received the famous diary on June 12, 1942, for her 13th altogether, around the time the Gestapo began deporting Jews in Amsterdam. On July 6, the Frank family unit began their lives in the Underground Annex attached to the office building at Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank had worked. It was only accessible via a door on the landing, kept hidden past a bookcase. Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew where the Franks (and later, the Van Pels family) were hiding. The iv supplied the families with nutrient and other necessities, knowing full well that they could be condemned to death by the Nazis for aiding Jews.
Anne chronicled their lives in the Annex in her diary for the next two years, making her concluding entry on Baronial 1, 1944. Just three days later, German police force led past SS officers stormed the Annex, arresting the Franks and the Van Pels family and transferring them to the Westerbork transit camp later on interrogation. Kugler and Kleiman were also arrested and held at a penal camp for "enemies of the regime."
Gies and Voskuijl were questioned but non detained. When they returned to the Annex, they institute the pages of Anne's diary strewn across the floor, and the duo decided to preserve information technology for posterity. As the whole world now knows, 15-yr-old Anne Frank died (likely of typhoid fever) a solar day afterwards her older sis, Margot, at the Bergen-Belsen expiry camp between February and Apr 1945. Their mother, Edith, had died of starvation the year earlier.
Enlarge / A reproduction of Anne Frank's diary, office of a permanent exhibition about the life of Anne Frank at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance.
Katie Falkenberg/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
There were two separate official investigations into who may have betrayed the family unit: one in 1947-1948 and the second (conducted by the Dutch police) in 1963-1964. In both cases, the findings were inconclusive. Since then, several independent investigations have identified different possible suspects.
For instance, Melissa Muller's 1998 biography of Anne Frank concluded that a adult female named Lena Hartog, married woman of the company'south banana warehouse director, betrayed the family unit. In 2003, Ballad Ann Lee came to a different conclusion in her biography of Otto Frank: the culprit was a man named Anton "Tonny" Ahlers, a fellow member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands. Stockroom managing director Willem van Maaren was another suspect, and since several possible culprits knew each other, at that place is also the possibility that more than one person betrayed the Frank family.
A 2015 biography of Bep Voskuijl (co-authored by her son Joop) suggested that i of Bep's sisters, Nelly, may have snitched on the Franks. Nelly fell in dear with a young Austrian Nazi and had worked for a year on a German language air base. Her political leanings had estranged her and then much from her family unit that she left their house. This theory holds that Nelly—who returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when her romance soured—may have been the anonymous female caller who (allegedly) tipped off the SS virtually the Hugger-mugger Annex, per the testimony of SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, who made the arrests.
The Anne Frank Firm undertook its ain investigation and arrived at a surprising new theory in 2017, thanks to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. It'south possible, Brock suggested, that in that location was no betrayal, and the SS raid was really part of ongoing attempts to runway down purveyors of illegal goods. This theory holds that the officers just happened to stumble upon the Jewish families hiding in the attic.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/retired-fbi-agent-has-new-theory-about-who-betrayed-anne-franks-family-to-nazis/
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