Betraying Anne Frank: 2

From CBS:

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

 

(Wertheim, Pieter van Twisk and Pankoke)

Along with Pieter van Twisk— a veteran dutch journalist who co-founded this project and led the research team—they showed us a trove of items they dug up. Including a residence card belonging to Anne frank.

Pieter van Twisk: You can see here her name: her first name, second name, and her surname; and the date of birth. Here you see "N.I.", which stands for Nederlands (PH) Israelis (PH)-- which is her religion. Jon Wertheim: "Netherland Israeli." 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 one 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 course, also why it was quite easy for the Nazis to find people in the Netherlands, and to know if who was Jewish, or who was not Jewish. Jon Wertheim: One piece of paper in the '40s, and you've got everything you could want to know about someone. Pieter van Twisk: Yah.

The team fed every morsel they could - letters, 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 identify relationships between people, addresses that were alike. And we were looking for those connections. Clues to solving this. Jon Wertheim: Quantify how much time that saved you. Vince Pankoke: Oh-- thousands and thousands of man hours. Jon Wertheim: This also tells you what's garbage, what's excluded, what isn't gonna help your case. Vince Pankoke: Oh, yeah, because much of what we do is eliminating the unnecessary.

The team paid particular attention to arrest records from the time. The Nazis were hellbent on ridding the Netherlands of all Jews, part of the Final Solution. By 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 first question that was posed to them, "Do you know where any 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 another and then ultimately to the annex. Jon Wertheim: And the implication is, "I'll make your sentence more lenient if you give up some names." Vince Pankoke: Yeah.  Jon Wertheim: Effective? 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 suspect number one after the war. He's working downstairs in the warehouse. He was very shifty, suspicious. Actually a thief. Jon Wertheim: So you say shifty, suspicious, thief. And yet, you eliminated him as a suspect. Vince Pankoke: Not a betrayer, though. He was not antisemitic. He had incentive n-- not to betray them because if he did, he woulda lost his job, the business woulda been closed. Jon Wertheim: What specifically are you looking for when you're considering suspects? Vince Pankoke: We're looking at, did they have the knowledge? We look at their motive. You know, what would the motive be? Were they antisemitic? Were they trying to do this for money? And then opportunity. Were they even in town?  Jon Wertheim: 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: It's standard law enforcement technique.

(Bram van der Meer)

Jon Wertheim: What kind of a person would betray the Frank family? Bram van der Meer: You would expect maybe that a very bad person did this, a person with-- I would say-- a psychopathic mind would- would do this.

Bram van de Meer knows psychopathic minds. He had been an investigative psychologist with the national police force in 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 be a psychopath to do this? Bram van der Meer: Yeah. But you have to be so very careful. It's war. You're surviving. Your day-to-day life is filled with fear. Your family might be arrested the next day. You're thinking everyday about your own survival. So that's the context. Jon Wertheim: In a vacuum it had to be a psychopath to do this. But given the context-- Bram van der Meer: That's right. Jon Wertheim: Then what kinda person might do this? Bram van der Meer: Yeah, and then-- and then you end up in-- in a situation where it could be anybody.

Over time, their focus shifted to someone who, on the surface, might not have raised suspicions. This suspect wasn't a neighbor of the Franks and didn't work for them. But the FBI man's sixth sense kicked in. Arnold van den Bergh was a prominent Jewish businessman with a wife and kids in Amsterdam. After the invasion, he served on the Jewish council, a body the Nazis set up, nefariously, to carry out their policies within the Jewish community. In exchange for doing the Nazis' bidding, members might be 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 camp somewhere, he certainly can'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, we thought he was. So due diligence, we started a search. And we couldn't find 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 middle of Amsterdam, Vince Pankoke says, only possible, if Van den Bergh had some kind of leverage.

Jon Wertheim: To my ears, you're describing an operator. Is that fair?  Vince Pankoke: I'd call him a chess player. He thought in terms of layers of protection, by obtaining different exemptions from being placed into the camps.

As it happened, Van den Bergh—who died in 1950— had come up before, in a report from the 1963 investigation. Though astonishingly, there was little apparent follow up by police.

Vince Pankoke: We read just one small paragraph that mentioned that during the interview of Otto Frank, he told them that shortly after liberation, he received an anonymous note identifying his betrayer of the address where they were staying, the annex, as Arnold van den Bergh. Jon Wertheim: Wait, wait. So, in the files, there's reference to a note that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific name? Vince Pankoke: Remarkably so. Yes. It's listed right there.

The note was so 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 you that, ideally, good shoe leather comes garnished with good 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 old files: Otto's copy of the note.

Jon Wertheim: I just wanna get this straight. You're talking to the son of an investigator. He says, "Yeah, 50 years ago my dad looked into this and I might have some material." Vince Pankoke: Yeah. We were lucky. Jon Wertheim: You've held the metaphorical smoking gun in your hand before in the FBI. This anonymous note. Does it feel like a smoking gun? Vince Pankoke: Not a smoking gun, but-- it feels-- like a warm gun with the evidence-- of the bullet sitting nearby.

Back at the archives, they showed it to us, Otto's copy. The team used forensic techniques which they say authenticates it. That handwriting you see: the scribblings of the 1963 detective. The anonymous 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 note knew so much that-- knew that lists were turned in. Jon Wertheim: And this is information you were able to corroborate. Vince Pankoke: Pieter was able to locate, in the national archive, records that indicated that in fact somebody from the-- Jewish Council, of which Arnold Van Den Bergh was a member, was turning over lists of addresses where Jews were in hiding. Jon Wertheim: 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 role as being 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 wife at that time stay safe.  Jon Wertheim: Is there any evidence he knew who he was giving up? Vince Pankoke: There's no evidence to indicate that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses. They were just addresses that were provided that-- where Jews were known to have 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 try to find out whether they could provide any other evidence that might implicate or clear Arnold van den Bergh. The Anne Frank house said they could not. The foundation is reserving comment until they've seen the entire results of the investigation. The cold case team began to confront 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 period after the war, antisemitism was still around. So perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up again, with Arnold van den Bergh being Jewish, it'll only stoke the fires further. But we have to keep in mind that the fact that he was Jewish just meant the he was placed into a untenable position by the Nazis to do something to save his life.

The team wrestled with these ethical questions. Thijs Buyens, the filmmaker and documentarian who conceived of the project, 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 own family. Thijs Bayens: Yeah. Jon Wertheim: What was your emotion when you heard this? Thijs Bayens: I found it very painful. Maybe 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 being put in-- in-- in a situation which is very hard for us to understand.  Jon Wertheim: I suspect when this is revealed people around the world are gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that a Jew betrayed another Jew. Thijs Bayens: I hope so. Jon Wertheim: You hope they will be? Thijs Bayens: Yes. Because it shows you how bizarre the Nazi regime really operated, and how they brought people to do these terrible things. The-- the real question is, what would I have done? That's the real question.

(Menachem Sebbag)

Throughout the project, Bayens sought counsel from Menachem Sebbag, an orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam who also serves as Chief Jewish Chaplain in the Dutch Army. 

Jon Wertheim: Is a greater good being served here? Menachem Sebbag: I hope so. I truly hope so. I hope that people will understand that one 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 back their own humanity. Even if that means that sometimes Jewish people are seen as not acting morally correct. That gives them back their own humanity, because that's the way human beings are when they're faced with existential threats.

After years of investigating this seven-decade-old cold case, we had a hypothetical for Vince Pankoke.

Jon Wertheim: You're back to being an FBI agent. You've got this case you've built. You've got your evidence and you hand it over to the prosecutor, the U.S. attorney. You think you're getting a conviction? Vince Pankoke: No. There could be some reasonable doubt. Jon Wertheim: To be clear, it's a circumstantial case. Vince Pankoke: It is a circumstantial case, as many cases are. In today's crime solving, they want positive DNA evidence or video surveillance tape. We can't give you any of that. But in a historical case this old, with all the evidence that we obtained, I think it's pretty convincing.

Now back in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's glimpsed a new way 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 answer to a painful historical question.

^ 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/