How Did Anne Frank and Her Family Get Caught

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70-five years later on its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world. Blinkering betwixt hope and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager's life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave vox and a confront to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, nevertheless one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family'southward hiding place? Ii Dutch constabulary inquiries and countless historians have come up upwardly with theories, but no house conclusion.

Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and engineering to this cold case. And at present, they believe they have an answer—one we'll share with you this evening—to a question that's bedeviled historians, and haunted Holland: who was responsible for the betrayal?

Vince Pankoke had turned in his badge and gun. He was two years into a comfortable Florida retirement, when his telephone rang in the spring of 2016.

Vince Pankoke: I received a call from a colleague from the netherlands who said, "If you—if you lot're done laying on the beach, we have a case for you lot."

Jon Wertheim: Were you laying on the embankment?

Vince Pankoke: I was actually driving to the beach. I due west— (Express joy) I wasn't quite in that location yet.

Pankoke spent three decades every bit an FBI special agent, targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work had also taken him to the Netherlands, where his investigative chops left an impression.

Jon Wertheim: Were you looking to get back when he told you lot what it was about?

Vince Pankoke: After he told me it was to, you know, attempt to solve the mystery of what caused the raid—for Anne Frank and the others in the addendum. I needed to hear more.

Iv-thou miles away, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been asking effectually for a credentialed investigator to dig into a question that he feels Holland has never quite reckoned with, one that gets to the essence of human being nature.

Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really important to investigate what makes the states-- give upwards on each other. The area where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And information technology's a very warm expanse with the butcher and the doctor and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people start to beguile on each other. How could that happen?

Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do yous think this ane resonates the mode information technology does?

Thijs Bayens: I recollect right later the state of war people were shown the concentration camps, the atrocities that took identify, the horror. And, suddenly yous discover this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. And she equally a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And and so I think humanity said, "This is who we are.

Betraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the netherlands, simply ii police probes and a whole library of books dedicated to the Anne Frank case, yielded neither convictions nor definitive conclusions.

Jon Wertheim: This question of who betrayed Anne Frank, that had been investigated for years. What was gonna make your investigation different than the ones before information technology?

Thijs Bayens: If it'southward a criminal deed, information technology should be investigated by the police. And then we set it up as a cold instance.

Like so many, Pankoke had read the diary in centre school in Western Pennsylvania and it left a mark. There would be no perp walks or disrepair crime syndicates here, but he was intrigued… cautiously.

Jon Wertheim: You hear, "We're gonna go dorsum and look at Anne Frank." And that might have the ring of some schlocky media creation. Did that worry you?

Vince Pankoke: Oh, it did. It did. Considering equally a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with whatever blazon of a tabloid type investigation.

Jon Wertheim: You lot had to make sure this was serious.

Vince Pankoke: Let'due south face up it. I mean, the honor of the diary, the accolade of Anne Frank, we had to treat this with utmost respect.

What ultimately sealed it for Vince Pankoke, the guarantee of absolute autonomy. The ground rules: Thijs Bayens would oversee the operation and could movie the procedure for a documentary he's been making. There would be a volume about information technology, which helped finance the project along with funding from the city of Amsterdam, but this was going to be an independent undertaking with serious investigators. And Vince Pankoke was going to take the lead excavation in.

Jon Wertheim: You lot'd done cold cases before. Earlier this, what was the biggest gap in time betwixt when you were approached and when the— the crime occurred?

Vince Pankoke: It was nearly a 5-year crime at that indicate.

Jon Wertheim: It'south 75 years. So a little different.

Vince Pankoke: It's a lot dissimilar.

Jon Wertheim: This is more than cold.

Vince Pankoke: This— yep. This was frozen.

To scrap away, Pankoke had to describe up his own blueprint. He knew that at that place was going to exist more information to plow through than any human could handle and that artificial intelligence could be a underground weapon.

An FBI human being's dream team was assembled… an investigative psychologist, a war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists plus an army of archival researchers.

Jon Wertheim: What did all these people with disparate skills bring to this?

Vince Pankoke: They brought a different view. It was all of these skills that help us understand and put into context, a crime that happened, you know, in 1944. We have to wait at things differently.

Together, they pigeon into a familiar story: the Frank family unit had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the ascension of Hitler. They found safe in The netherlands, where Otto Frank ran a manufacturing business. But then the Nazis invaded in 1940, two years later, the Franks—Otto, wife Edith, Anne and her sister Margot—forth with four other Jewish friends of the family unit went into hiding in an addendum behind Otto's warehouse. Today, information technology'south preserved as a museum. Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian at the Anne Frank Firm, showed united states of america in.

Contributor Jon Wertheim and Dr. Gertjan Broek in front end of the bookcase that hid the archway to the Franks' hiding place.

Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow. This— this is the famous—

Dr. Gertjan Broek: This is the bookcase.

Jon Wertheim: —bookcase.

Dr. Gertjan Broek: This is the bookcase. It was used to camouflage the archway to the hiding place.

The bookcase helped protect the Franks, as did a scattering of Otto'due south close colleagues at the warehouse who were in on the secret.

Dr. Gertjan Broek: Nosotros get inside, mind your head.

Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow.

Afterwards the raid, the Nazis took annihilation that wasn't nailed downward. Recreations testify what it looked like. Two crammed floors, 761 days, more than two excruciating years indoors. The function workers brought nutrient and supplies, but the eight in hiding couldn't brand a audio during the day. By dark they could mind to the radio, desperately plotting updates from the front end on this map.

Dr. Gertjan Broek: Here'southward a newspaper clipping from shortly after D-Day, so June, 1944. With the pins that tried to follow the advances of the allied troops in the days and weeks probably afterwards.

Jon Wertheim: This is June, 1944—

Dr. Gertjan Broek: four June—

Jon Wertheim: —so...

Dr. Gertjan Broek: So there'southward hope considering Allied forces are on the way. Their life depended on what would happen.

Anne'due south bedroom walls, familiar to whatsoever teenager, preserved from the twenty-four hours she was taken abroad. Here, she chronicled the monotony and the horror of life in hiding. "Outside things are terrible, day and dark," she wrote in Jan 1943. "These poor people are being dragged abroad, with zippo but a backpack and a little scrap of coin."

Her last entry was dated August 1st, 1944. She was xv.

Jon Wertheim: Take me to the day of the raid. It'south the summertime of 1944 and what happens that twenty-four hour period?

Dr. Gertjan Broek: It's a warm solar day, sunny. And around x:30, between 10:30 and 11:00, a couple of men walk in.

They were detectives with a Dutch police unit working with the Nazis. An SS officeholder named Silberbauer led the squad. They demanded to be shown around the warehouse.

Dr. Gertjan Broek: They terminate upwardly in front end of the bookcase, which is hiding the entrance to the annex. And it'southward of import I think to realize that two of the policemen present had been seasoned detectives, well experienced. They had been searching this type of building in the inner city of Amsterdam earlier.

They knew in that location was likely something backside that bookcase. The stunned inhabitants they found were marched out. On the flooring behind them, Anne's diary—which a quick-thinking office worker, loyal to the Franks, preserved. Of the 8 taken away, Otto Frank was the only survivor. The others were among the 100,000 Dutch Jews—three-quarters of the country'due south Jewish population—to die at the hands of the Nazis.

In an interview with CBS in 1964, Otto recounted what happened when his family unit was put on the cattle cars to Auschwitz a month afterwards their capture.

Otto Frank: On September 4th, 1944, the concluding transport went to Auschwitz. Well, when we arrived at Auschwitz there were men standing at that place with clubs—women here, men there. We were separated right on the station, so women went to Birkenau Campsite and we went to Auschwitz Camp from the station and I never saw my family again.

After the war, Otto Frank was adamant to observe out who betrayed the hiding place to the Nazis. It was the question many readers asked after he published his daughter's diary in 1947. But after a couple of years, Otto abruptly stopped looking—more than on that curious decision, later. When Vince Pankoke went to Amsterdam to begin his search, his first stop, naturally, was the scene of the crime.

Vince Pankoke: I called this the most visited crime scene in the globe because and then many people from all over the world, you lot know, millions of people come up here.

Jon Wertheim: So when you come here for the first fourth dimension, what are you looking for?

Vince Pankoke: Well, as an investigator I wanna see what's in the expanse. Of class I wanna encounter inside the edifice. I wanna reconstruct how the actual arrest took identify, and who participated in it.

Pankoke and his team spent hours in the annex looking for whatever inkling, however remote.

He besides cased the outside—today almost exactly as information technology was then.

Vince Pankoke: This is the courtyard that is behind the annex. And it's—every bit yous can run across, information technology's totally enclosed. This courtyard area is surrounded by the buildings of the neighborhood.

Jon Wertheim: I'chiliad thinking one cough that gets overheard, ane window that happens to be open at the incorrect time, the sheer take chances factor hither is extraordinary.

Vince Pankoke: Information technology is extraordinary. When nosotros first started the case, one of the theories that was out at that place is that the raid may have been acquired by somebody in the immediate area seeing something, hearing something, and reporting it. So, therefore, nosotros tracked and identified every resident that lived in this block and adjacent streets.

Using the artificial intelligence program, Pankoke and his team mapped potential threats. In the courtyard surrounding the annex, they found Nazi party members and even known informants.

Vince Pankoke: All living only a wall or two away from 1 another. When y'all take a look at the threats the question isn't, you know, what caused the raid. The question might be: how did they final more than 2 years without being discovered?

Jon Wertheim: It strikes me in a case like this, anyone could be a doubtable. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk past and hear a cough. How did y'all navigate that?

Vince Pankoke: We had to consider all those options. The team and I sat down and we compiled a list of means in which the annex coulda been compromised. You know, was it abandon of the people occupying the annex maybe making too much noise or being seen in the windows? You know, was it expose?

Jon Wertheim: There is a theory out there that no one betrayed the Frank family. This was coincidence, or this was expert detective work. You lot purchase that at all?

Vince Pankoke: No. No. I hateful, nosotros took that theory apart, yous know, bit past flake.

Jon Wertheim: This doesn't play out the way information technology does, but for a specific tip.

Vince Pankoke: Exactly.

Vince Pankoke, the 30-year FBI veteran, had worked enough of common cold cases, merely none this common cold. It had been more than vii decades since Anne Frank and her family had been discovered in their hiding place in primal Amsterdam and ultimately put on cattle cars to Auschwitz. As to the question of who betrayed the family to the Nazis, all the witnesses were long dead, their bear witness thinned by time, but Pankoke leaned on decades of experience and intuition, starting with the quondam case files.

Vince Pankoke: In a normal cold case, you get to a file. You pull it out. Y'all read through everything that the previous investigation did. Interviews, leads that were followed up on.

2 previous Dutch police force investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding identify - one in 1948 and some other in 1963 - were not exactly masterclasses in detective work. And a lot of time had passed.

Vince Pankoke: The files were incomplete. And they were scattered nigh in probably a dozen different athenaeum. Reports were missing. Witnesses had passed on. Memories had failed.

Pulling from the standard common cold example playbook, Vince Pankoke followed upwardly on what leads he could. Otherwise he and his team had to have a fresh arroyo. They spent years in places similar the Amsterdam city archives, where the meticulous Dutch record-keeping used and then brutally by the Nazis proved a major asset to the investigation.

Along with Pieter van Twisk—a veteran Dutch announcer who co-founded this project and led the research squad—they showed united states a trove of items they dug up. Including a residence card belonging to Anne frank.

Pieter van Twisk: You tin encounter here her proper noun: her first proper name, second name, and her surname; and the appointment of nascence. Here you see "Due north.I.", which stands for Nederlands. Israelis, which is her faith.

Jon Wertheim: "Netherland Israeli." And so this—

Pieter van Twisk: Yeah, I don't—

Jon Wertheim: —she's Jewish.

Pieter van Twisk: —know why. That's Jewish, she was Jewish, yeah,

Jon Wertheim: Every Dutch resident had to have ane of these?

Pieter van Twisk: Yah. Yah.

Jon Wertheim: This is— This is very detailed, and this has her— her parents' birthdates on it.

Pieter van Twisk: Yah. That's, of class, as well why it was quite easy for the Nazis to find people in holland, and to know if who was Jewish, or who was not Jewish.

Jon Wertheim: Ane slice of paper in the '40s, and you've got everything you could desire to know almost someone.

Pieter van Twisk: Yah.

The squad fed every morsel they could—messages, maps, photos, even whole books—into the artificial intelligence database, developed specifically for the project. Then they let machine learning do its thing.

Vince Pankoke: It would place relationships betwixt people, addresses that were alike. And nosotros were looking for those connections. Clues to solving this.

Jon Wertheim: Quantify how much fourth dimension that saved you.

Vince Pankoke: Oh—thousands and thousands of man-hours.

Jon Wertheim: This likewise tells you what's garbage, what'southward excluded, what isn't gonna assist your case.

Vince Pankoke: Oh, yeah, because much of what we do is eliminating the unnecessary.

The team paid particular attention to abort records from the time. The Nazis were hellbent on ridding the netherlands of all Jews, part of the Final Solution. Past 1942, the Franks were among some 25,000 Jews in hiding across the country. The Nazis were coldly skilled at getting people to talk.

Vince Pankoke: Their typical MO was once they arrested somebody, the get-go question that was posed to them, "Do you know where whatsoever other Jews are in hiding?" So what we did is we chronicled all the arrests prior to and just after the annex raid to try to find any connection, any loose thread that would show us that they went from one arrest to some other so ultimately to the annex.

Jon Wertheim: And the implication is, "I'll brand your judgement more lenient if yous surrender some names."

Vince Pankoke: Yeah.

Jon Wertheim: Constructive?

Vince Pankoke: Oh, it was very effective.

Before long, suspects emerged. Dozens of them, like Willem van Maaren, an employee in the warehouse where the Franks were hiding, whom the Dutch police had interviewed in their investigations.

Vince Pankoke: He was prime number suspect number one after the war. He'southward working downstairs in the warehouse. He was very shifty, suspicious. Actually a thief.

Jon Wertheim: And then you lot say shifty, suspicious, thief. And notwithstanding, you eliminated him as a doubtable.

Vince Pankoke: Not a betrayer, though. He was not antisemitic. He had incentive not to betray them considering if he did, he would have lost his job, the business would have been closed.

Jon Wertheim: What specifically are you looking for when you're because suspects?

Vince Pankoke: We're looking at, did they accept the knowledge? Nosotros look at their motive. Yous know, what would the motive exist? Were they antisemitic? Were they trying to do this for coin? Then opportunity. Were they even in town?

Jon Wertheim: And so this—knowledge, motive, opportunity, that's I'm guessing what you were using when you're infiltrating drug cartels. I mean, this is standard FBI technique—

Vince Pankoke: Information technology's standard law enforcement technique.

Jon Wertheim: What kind of a person would beguile the Frank family?

Bram van der Meer: You would expect possibly that a very bad person did this, a person with—I would say a psychopathic mind would, would practice this.

Bram van de Meer knows psychopathic minds. He had been an investigative psychologist with the national police forcefulness in kingdom of the netherlands. On Vince Pankoke's team, he analyzed the behavior and mindsets of suspects they were considering.

Jon Wertheim: That's your first instinct? So it had to exist a psychopath to do this?

Bram van der Meer: Yeah. But you take to be then very conscientious. It'due south war. You're surviving. Your twenty-four hour period-to-day life is filled with fright. Your family might be arrested the next day. You're thinking everyday virtually your own survival. So that's the context.

Jon Wertheim: In a vacuum information technology had to exist a psychopath to practise this. But given the context--

Bram van der Meer: That'southward correct.

Jon Wertheim: Then what kinda person might practise this?

Bram van der Meer: Yep, and then—and then you lot finish up in, in a situation where it could be anybody.

Over fourth dimension, their focus shifted to someone who, on the surface, might non have raised suspicions. This suspect wasn't a neighbor of the Franks and didn't work for them. Only the FBI man's 6th sense kicked in. Arnold van den Bergh was a prominent Jewish man of affairs with a wife and kids in Amsterdam. After the invasion, he served on the Jewish quango, a body the Nazis fix upwardly, nefariously, to carry out their policies inside the Jewish community. In substitution for doing the Nazis' bidding, members might exist spared the gas chambers.

Vince Pankoke: We know from history that the Jewish Council was dissolved in late September of 1943 and they were sent to the camps. We figured, well, if Arnold van den Bergh is in a military camp somewhere, he certainly tin't be privy to information that would lead to the compromise of the annex.

Jon Wertheim: Was he in a camp somewhere?

Vince Pankoke: Well, nosotros thought he was. Then due diligence, we started a search. And we couldn't notice Arnold van den Bergh or any of his immediate family members in those camps.

Jon Wertheim: Why not?

Vince Pankoke: Well, that was the question. If he wasn't in the camps, where was he?

Turned out, he was living an open life in the eye of Amsterdam, Vince Pankoke says, but possible, if Van den Bergh had some kind of leverage.

Jon Wertheim: To my ears, you lot're describing an operator. Is that fair?

Vince Pankoke: I'd call him a chess thespian. He thought in terms of layers of protection, by obtaining dissimilar exemptions from being placed into the camps.

Every bit it happened, Van den Bergh—who died in 1950—had come up before, in a study from the 1963 investigation. Though astonishingly, at that place was little apparent follow upwardly by law.

Vince Pankoke: Nosotros read but one small-scale paragraph that mentioned that during the interview of Otto Frank, he told them that shortly after liberation, he received an anonymous notation identifying his betrayer of the address where they were staying, the annex, as Arnold van den Bergh.

Jon Wertheim: Look, wait. So, in the files, at that place's reference to a annotation that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific name?

Vince Pankoke: Remarkably and then. Yes. It'southward listed right at that place.

The notation was then striking to Otto Frank that he typed up a copy for his records. Naturally, the veteran FBI man wanted to know: where was that note? Any seasoned investigator will tell y'all that, ideally, good shoe leather comes garnished with expert luck. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and team located the son of one of the former investigators. There in the son's home, buried in some quondam files: Otto's re-create of the notation.

Jon Wertheim: I just wanna get this direct. You lot're talking to the son of an investigator. He says, "Yes, 50 years ago my dad looked into this and I might have some material."

Vince Pankoke: Yeah. We were lucky.

Jon Wertheim: Y'all've held the metaphorical smoking gun in your hand before in the FBI. This anonymous note. Does it feel similar a smoking gun?

Vince Pankoke: Not a smoking gun, but it feels similar a warm gun with the bear witness of the bullet sitting nearby.

Dorsum at the archives, they showed information technology to us, Otto's copy. The squad used forensic techniques which they say authenticates it. That handwriting yous come across: the scribblings of the 1963 detective. The bearding note informed Otto that he'd been betrayed by Arnold van den Bergh who'd handed the Nazis an entire list of addresses where Jews were hiding.

Vince Pankoke: Whoever it was that authored this anonymous annotation knew so much, that knew that lists were turned in.

Jon Wertheim: And this is data you were able to corroborate.

Vince Pankoke: Pieter was able to locate, in the national annal, records that indicated that in fact somebody from the Jewish Council, of which Arnold Van Den Bergh was a fellow member, was turning over lists of addresses where Jews were in hiding.

Jon Wertheim: And so what's your theory of the case here? How and why would Arnold van den Bergh have betrayed the Frank family?

Vince Pankoke: Well, in his function every bit existence a founding member of the Jewish Council, he would have had privy to addresses where Jews were hiding. When van den Bergh lost all his series of protections exempting him from having to go to the camps, he had to provide something valuable to the Nazis that he's had contact with to let him and his married woman at that time stay safe.

Jon Wertheim: Is in that location any evidence he knew who he was giving upwardly?

Vince Pankoke: There'south no prove to indicate that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses. They were only addresses that were provided that where Jews were known to take been in hiding.

We contacted the foundation Otto Frank started in Switzerland and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam—neither of which formally participated in the investigation—to attempt to notice out whether they could provide whatever other testify that might implicate or articulate Arnold van den Bergh. The Anne Frank house said they could non. The foundation is reserving comment until they've seen the entire results of the investigation.

The cold case team began to face the real possibility that Otto Frank might have known the identity of the betrayer. What reason, they wondered, would Otto have had to keep this to himself?

Vince Pankoke: He knew that Arnold van den Bergh was Jewish, and in this catamenia after the war, antisemitism was still around. So perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up again, with Arnold van den Bergh existence Jewish, it'll just stoke the fires farther. But we accept to go along in mind that the fact that he was Jewish simply meant the he was placed into a untenable position by the Nazis to exercise something to save his life.

The squad wrestled with these upstanding questions. Thijs Buyens, the filmmaker and documentarian who conceived of the projection, wondered whether the revelation would be fodder for bigots and antisemites.

Jon Wertheim: The conclusion was that this culprit was a Jewish man who by all accounts was doing what he did to protect his ain family.

Thijs Bayens: Yeah.

Jon Wertheim: What was your emotion when you heard this?

Thijs Bayens: I found it very painful. Peradventure you could say I even hoped it wouldn't be something like this.

Jon Wertheim: Why?

Thijs Bayens: Because I feel the pain of all these people existence put in— in— in a situation which is very difficult for us to empathize.

Jon Wertheim: I doubtable when this is revealed people effectually the world are gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that a Jew betrayed another Jew.

Thijs Bayens: I hope so.

Jon Wertheim: You lot promise they will be?

Thijs Bayens: Yes. Because it shows you how bizarre the Nazi authorities really operated, and how they brought people to do these terrible things. The— the real question is, what would I have done? That'south the real question.

Throughout the projection, Bayens sought counsel from Menachem Sebbag, an Orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam who also serves as chief Jewish chaplain in the Dutch Ground forces.

Jon Wertheim: Is a greater adept being served here?

Menachem Sebbag: I hope and so. I truly hope so. I hope that people will empathise that 1 of the things that the Nazi ideology did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize Jewish people. And going back into history and looking for the truth and attaining truth is actually giving the Jewish people dorsum their own humanity. Fifty-fifty if that means that sometimes Jewish people are seen every bit non acting morally correct. That gives them dorsum their own humanity, because that's the fashion human beings are when they're faced with existential threats.

Afterwards years of investigating this seven-decade-old common cold example, we had a hypothetical for Vince Pankoke.

Jon Wertheim: You lot're back to being an FBI agent. You've got this case you've built. You've got your testify and you lot hand information technology over to the prosecutor, the U.Southward. attorney. Y'all recollect you're getting a conviction?

Vince Pankoke: No. There could be some reasonable doubt.

Jon Wertheim: To be clear, it'south a circumstantial case.

Vince Pankoke: It is a circumstantial instance, equally many cases are. In today's crime solving, they want positive DNA testify or video surveillance tape. We can't give you whatever of that. But in a historical case this onetime, with all the evidence that nosotros obtained, I think information technology's pretty convincing.

Now dorsum in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's glimpsed a new mode to thaw cold cases. He marvels that an investigation that put no one behind bars, turned out to be the most significant case of his career and one, he believes, brought an reply to a painful historical question.

Produced by David M. Levine. Associate producers, Jacqueline Kalil and Elizabeth Germino. Broadcast associates, Annabelle Hanflig and Eliza Costas. Edited past Michael Mongulla.