Betraying Anne Frank: 1

From CBS:

“Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis”'

Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world. Blinkering between hope and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager's life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave voice and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family's hiding place? Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusions… Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and technology to this cold case. And now, they believe they have an answer—one we'll share with you tonight—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 phone rang in the spring of 2016.

Vince Pankoke: I received a call from a colleague from the Netherlands who said, "If you-- if you're done laying on the beach, we have a case for you." Jon Wertheim: Were you laying on the beach? Vince Pankoke: I-- I was actually driving to the beach. I w-- (LAUGH) I wasn't quite there yet. Pankoke spent three decades as 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 what it was about? Vince Pankoke: After he told me it was to, you know, try to solve the mystery of what caused the raid-- for Anne Frank and the others in the annex. I needed to hear more.

(Vince Pankoke)

Four-thousand miles away, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been asking around 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 nature.  

Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really important to investigate what makes us-- give up on each other. The area where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And it's a very warm area with the butcher and the doctor and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people start to betray on each other. How could that happen? Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do you think this one resonates the way it does? Thijs Bayens: I think right after the war people were shown-- the concentration camps, the atrocities that took place, the horror. And, suddenly you find this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And then I think humanity said, "This is who we are. Betraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but two 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 it? Thijs Bayens: If it's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police. So we set it up as a cold case.

(Thijs Bayens)

Like so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle school in Western Pennsylvania and it left a mark. There would be no perp walks or busted crime syndicates here, but he was intrigued… cautiously. Jon Wertheim: You hear, "We're gonna go back 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. Because as a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with any type of a tabloid type investigation. Jon Wertheim: You had to make sure this was serious. Vince Pankoke: Let's face it. I mean, the honor of the diary, the honor 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 film the process for a documentary he's been making. There would be a book about it, 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 digging in.

Jon Wertheim: You'd done cold cases before. Before this, what was the biggest gap in time between when you were approached and when the-- the crime occurred? Vince Pankoke: It was about a five year crime at that point. Jon Wertheim: It's 75 years. So a little different. Vince Pankoke: It's a lot different-- Jon Wertheim: This is more than cold. Vince Pankoke: This-- yeah. This was frozen.

To chip away, Pankoke had to draw up his own blueprint. He knew that there was going to be more information to plow through than any human could handle and that artificial intelligence could be a secret weapon. An FBI man'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 look at things differently.

Together, they dove into a familiar story: the Frank family had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the rise of Hitler. They found safety in Holland, 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—along with four other Jewish friends of the family went into hiding in an annex behind Otto's warehouse. Today, it's preserved as a museum. Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian at the Anne Frank house, showed us in.

(Correspondent Jon Wertheim and Dr. Gertjan Broek in front of the bookcase that hid the entrance 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: Th-- this is the bookcase. It was used to camouflage the entrance to the hiding place.

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

Dr. Gertjan Broek: We go inside, mind your head. Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow.

After the raid, the Nazis took anything that wasn't nailed down. Recreations show what it looked like. Two crammed floors, 761 days, more than two excruciating years indoors. The office workers brought food and supplies, but the eight in hiding couldn't make a sound during the day. By night they could listen to the radio, desperately plotting updates from the front on this map.

Dr. Gertjan Broek: Here's 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 after. Jon Wertheim: This is June, 1944-- Dr. Gertjan Broek: 4 June-- Jon Wertheim: --so-- Dr. Gertjan Broek: So there's hope because allied forces are on the way. Their life depended on what would happen.

Anne's bedroom walls, familiar to any teenager, preserved from the day she was taken away. Here, she chronicled the monotony and the horror of life in hiding. "Outside things are terrible, day and night," she wrote in January 1943. "These poor people are being dragged away, with nothing but a backpack and a little bit of money." Her last entry was dated August 1st, 1944. She was 15.

Jon Wertheim: Take me to the day of the raid. It's the summer of 1944 and what happens that day? Dr. Gertjan Broek: It's a warm day, sunny. And around 10:30, 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 officer named Silberbauer led the team. They demanded to be shown around the warehouse. Dr. Gertjan Broek: They end up in front of the bookcase, which is hiding the entrance to the annex. And it's important 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 before.

They knew there was likely something behind that bookcase. The stunned inhabitants they found were marched out. On the floor behind them, Anne's diary - which a quick-thinking office worker, loyal to the Franks, preserved. Of the eight taken away, Otto Frank was the only survivor. The others were among the 100,000 Dutch Jews - 3/4ths of the country's Jewish population - to die at the hands of the Nazis. In an interview with CBS in 1964, Otto recounted what happened when his family was put on the cattle cars to Auschwitz a month after their capture.

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

After the war, Otto Frank was determined to find 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 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 world because so many people from all over the world, you know, millions of people come here. Jon Wertheim: So when you come here for the first time, what are you looking for? Vince Pankoke: Well, as an investigator I wanna see what's in the area. Of course I wanna see inside the building. I wanna reconstruct how the actual arrest took place, and who participated in it.

Pankoke and his team spent hours in the annex looking for any clue, however remote. He also cased the exterior —today almost exactly as it was then.

Vince Pankoke: This is the courtyard that is behind the annex. And it's-- as you can see, it's totally enclosed. This courtyard area is surrounded by the buildings of the neighborhood. Jon Wertheim: I'm thinking one cough that gets overheard, one window that happens to be open at the wrong time, the sheer risk factor here is extraordinary. Vince Pankoke: It is extraordinary. When we first started the case, one of the theories that was out there is that the raid may have been caused by somebody in the immediate area seeing something, hearing something, and reporting it. So, therefore, we 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 just a wall or two away from one another. When you take a look at the threats the question isn't, you know, what caused the raid. The question might be: how did they last more than two years without being discovered? Jon Wertheim: It strikes me in a case like this, anyone could be a suspect. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk by and hear a cough. How did you navigate that? Vince Pankoke: We had to consider all those options. The team and I sat down and we compiled a list of ways in which the annex coulda been compromised. You know, was it carelessness of the people occupying the annex maybe making too much noise or being seen in the windows? You know, was it betrayal?  Jon Wertheim: There is a theory out there that no one betrayed the Frank family. This was coincidence, or this was good detective work. You buy that at all? Vince Pankoke: No. No. I mean, we took that theory apart, you know, bit by bit. Jon Wertheim: This doesn't play out the way it does, but for a specific tip. Vince Pankoke: Exactly.

Vince Pankoke, the 30-year FBI veteran, had worked plenty of cold cases, but none this cold. It had been more than seven decades since Anne Frank and her family had been discovered in their hiding place in central 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 evidence thinned by time, but Pankoke leaned on decades of experience and intuition, starting with the old case files.

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

Two previous Dutch police investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding place - one in 1948 and another 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 about in probably a dozen different archives. Reports were missing. Witnesses had passed on. Memories had failed.

Pulling from the standard cold case playbook, Vince Pankoke followed up on what leads he could. Otherwise he and his team had to take a fresh approach. They spent years in places like the Amsterdam city archives, where the meticulous Dutch record-keeping used so brutally by the Nazis proved a major asset to the investigation.

^ I just watched this and it is very interesting. I worked at the Holocaust Museum in DC and visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. 11 days from today is Holocaust Remembrance Day so it is fitting to learn and hear these kinds of stories. ^

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anne-frank-betrayal-investigation-60-minutes-2022-01-16/