Everyone has heard of The Diary of Anne Frank.
In class, in the library, in the history books, we've all seen the story of this poor Jewish girl.
(Anne Frank)
To escape the Nazis, Anne Frank and her family hid in a secret room in her father's company building.
She spent two years in a small, depressing space, writing a diary and recording the whole thing from the perspective of a childlike and honest child.
On August 4, 1944, because of whistleblowing, the German SS searched the building, found frank's family and two other Jewish families hiding in the chamber, and sent them to nazi concentration camps.
Soon, Anne's mother starved to death, and Anne and her sister contracted typhus and died in February 1945.
In the end, of the 8 people living in the Chamber of Secrets, only Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived.
Because of Otto's efforts, The Diary of Anne Frank has become a global hit, and almost all children have read the book in elementary school.
While learning about the cruelty of fascism, countless readers also want to know an answer:
Who betrayed the Franks?
From the time "Anne Frank Diary" was first published, many people asked who was behind it.
The Dutch government, in 1947 and 1963, investigated twice into those who betrayed the inhabitants of the Chamber of Secrets, but did not find results.
In the civil society, biographers, journalists and detectives have come up with one possibility after another, and they can always find loopholes.
By now, it was a 77-year-old case, and it seemed impossible to find a whistleblower.
But today, an international cold case investigation team announced that they had found the answer.
Led by retired FBI agent Vince Pancock, the team includes nearly 30 Dutch experts, including criminal psychologists, forensic experts, archivists, historians, war crimes investigators, plus dozens of volunteers.
Over the past five years, the FBI Dream Team has been fully investigating the whistleblower case, finding hundreds of thousands of dossiers in 8 countries, talking to more than 70 people involved, and even finding actors to recreate the scene at that time.
They also worked with the Dutch big data company Xomnia to develop an ai-intelligence database dedicated to investigating the case, typing in all the information, including maps, letters, photos, documents, and the entire Anne Frank's Diary, mapping the distribution of Nazis and informants around the Chamber of Secrets in 1944, and a relationship map of everyone.
Finally, they found a name, an unremarkable name buried in a pile of old paper.
In the popular whistleblower theory, no one mentions him.
But amazingly, the investigation team found that Anne's father, Otto Frank, already knew the identity of the informant and even kept it a secret for him...
(Otto Frank)
The investigation was led by Dutch filmmaker Tess Bayes.
Over the years, he wanted to make a documentary about Anne Frank's whistleblower, arguing that it would touch on the essence of human nature and allow the Netherlands to relive serious history.
In 2016, on recommendation, he approached Vince Pencock, a former American secret agent who had been retired for two years, and asked him to find out who had betrayed frank's family that year.
(Vince Pancock)
Pancock's previous cases were all about tracking down Colombian drug lords, and even if the cold case was investigated, it would not exceed 5 years of history.
But because he read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school, he took over the 77-year-old cold case.
If you want to investigate old cases, it is important to restore history.
He flew to Amsterdam to 263 Prinsengracht-Graten, home to Anne Frank and the scene of the incident.
The Frank family was not originally Dutch, but German citizens, living in the Farak Fortorn Busch district.
Initially, their lives were quite prosperous.
Anne's father, Otto, a German government official during World War I and a medal, rented a two-story apartment in the Dornbusch district and had a well-stocked private library.
In 1933, after Hitler's Nazi Party won the Reichstag elections, anti-Semitism rose in Germany, and Otto felt that the situation was not good, and moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to open a company, and his wife and two daughters were reunited with him the following year.
(Eldest daughter Margot)
Otto was a businessman, and he soon owned two companies, one called Opekta, which sold pectin extracted from fruit, and the other called Pectacon, which sold spices for pickled sausages.
Otto's daughters Anne and Margot also excelled in school, and they basically grew up in the Netherlands.
In May 1940, germany invaded the Netherlands and the newly formed Dutch government began to enforce anti-Semitic laws.
In order to prevent the two companies from being confiscated by the government as Jewish enterprises, Otto resold all his shares, resigned as a director, and transferred his assets to trusted friends.
They wanted to go to the United States, but their visas were denied, and two years later, because their eldest daughter Margot received an order to go to the labor camp, the family hid in the opekta company's secret room.
When renovating the office that year, just in case, Otto built a secret space behind the bookshelves in the corridor.
If you don't touch the bookshelf, it's hard to spot.
(Bookshelves in the Vault)
(Restored Chamber of Secrets)
Six people, including former secretary Mae Pugs and the company's new boss, John Nes Kleiman, helped them, bringing them food and water on a regular basis.
But not everyone in the company is trustworthy, such as warehouse manager William Van Mullen.
For decades, Mullen was the number one "betrayer" suspect, and after the war, his father Otto was the first to look for him.
He was cunning and suspicious, and when he first went to work, his hands and feet were unclean, and he stole things in the warehouse. Anne also wrote in her diary that she hated him (but neither of them had seen it).
(William Van Mullen)
The worst part was that Mullen noticed that someone was sneaking next door, and he felt that someone was walking around the building at night, so he put paper in the corner of the table, and if anyone walked by, he would sweep the piece of paper away, confirming his suspicions.
In 1944, Mullen told another colleague that he knew there were Jews hiding in the building. He also asked others where the former boss, Otto, lived.
The Dutch government investigated him twice, but on both occasions it failed to find key evidence and was criticized for paying too much attention to a suspect.
After Pancock investigates, he also crosses out Mullen, although his personality is not pleasing, but Mullen is not an anti-Semite.
After Anne and the others were arrested, Mullen also helped his secretary rescue her diary.
He also had no motive for committing the crime, because the building harbored Jews, and the owner, John Nesklay, would be arrested, and he could not risk losing his job.
Pencock then investigates the sister of Otto's former employee, Beppe Foxkil.
Bepp was the one who helped frank's family, but her sister Nelly was an anti-Semite, and in 2015 Bepp's son wrote a biography accusing Nelly of betraying frank's family.
The book says That Bepp's sister and fiancé remember that Nellie called the SS on the morning of August 4, 1944, criticizing Bepp and John Neskleiman for harboring Jews.
(Nellie Foxkil)
There has always been a rumor that Julius Deitman, who received the whistleblower call, heard the "voice of a young woman".
This is against Nelly.
But Pancock thought it impossible, on the one hand, that Carl Silberbauer, who was on an arrest mission, said at trial that his superior, Dertman, told him only the address, not who the caller was.
After the war, Deitman committed suicide in prison and did not disclose any information.
(Carl Silberbauer, who carried out the arrests)
On the other hand, Nellie was just an ordinary citizen, and an analysis of the documents at the time showed that private calls in the summer of 1944 were deactivated due to large-scale disconnections, and ordinary people could not make calls.
At the same time, Julius Deitman's rank is quite high, and ordinary people do not have the right to call him directly.
This reason also excluded the Tony Allers, who had heard Otto criticize Germany and extorted him a sum of money.
For this reason, he was used as a whistleblower by many people. But he had no right to call, and there was no evidence that he knew where the Otto family lived.
(Tony Allers)
In April 1944, in order to successfully inform, there must be motivation, information, and the right to call, all three are indispensable.
Through a note, The Pancock team found it.
The man, Arnold van Denberg, was a highly respected Jewish notary who had become acquainted with Nazi high-ranking officials for notarizing a series of works of art.
He held a high position in the Jewish community, and after the German invasion, he was appointed a member of the Dutch Jewish Council, which carried out Nazi policies on their behalf in order to ensure that he would not be sent to concentration camps.
(Arnold van Denberg)
In September 1943, the Dutch Jewish Council was dissolved and the Nazis sent everyone inside to concentration camps.
Supposedly, Denberg must have been inside, but Pancock's team searched the concentration camp records and couldn't find his name.
Not only was he not in the camp, but neither was his wife and three daughters.
One of Denberg's granddaughters is still alive, and the investigation team has found her, saying that no one in the family has ever been to the concentration camp.
Then, the investigative team found evidence that the Denberg family was living in Amsterdam after the committee was disbanded, and they didn't even have to hide like ordinary Jews.
(Photo of the Jewish Council, fifth from left is Denberg)
It's weird...
Even stranger, after scanning past information with an intelligent database, the investigation team approached Otto in a short interview in 1963 that mentioned that someone had sent him an anonymous letter after the war, saying that Denberg was the one who betrayed them!
This is important information, but where is the anonymous letter?
Pancock searched the archives of various countries and could not find the letter, and he asked about the Anne Frank Museum, who also said that he did not know.
Finally, he approached the Dutch prosecutor who had previously investigated the case, and finally found the letter at the home of the son of Arend van Herden, who was in charge of the investigation in 1963.
It was a letter that had been sleeping for 58 years, but not an original, but a print by Otto.
The anonymous letter was short, but specific, stating Denberg's address at the time and what the specific reporting process was.
The letter also mentions that Denberg handed over the list of Jews in one go, and the victims were not only Frank and 8 other people.
Because of Denberg's prestige in the community, coupled with his power in the Jewish Council, it would not be difficult to obtain a list of Jews hiding.
Coupled with his access to the Nazi hierarchy, it was also feasible to call Directly to report it to Julius Deitman.
Information, call power, he has it all, so what about motivations?
The motivation, of course, is self-preservation, in order to save oneself, but also to preserve one's family.
As a member of the Jewish Council and with Nazi personal friends, Denberg used these as an umbrella to protect himself and his family from suffering.
For a time, he changed his identity to non-Jew and lived the life of an ordinary Dutchman.
But in 1944, that protection disappeared.
A notary who had a vendetta against him began to smear him in front of the Nazi hierarchy and turn him back into a Jew.
Denberg was so frightened that in order to make himself useful, he handed over the hiding place of his compatriots.
Pancock found that the Nazis were particularly fond of hiding information, and whistleblowers could receive many benefits.
At the same time, they found a testimony that had witnesses saying that the Jewish Council had a list of hundreds of Jewish hiding places, which was also correct.
Looking up here, the producer Tes Bayes was in a very depressed mood,
He did not expect that it would be the Jews who had betrayed the Jews.
However, he stressed in the documentary that it was an extraordinary time, because life was in danger, and it was not advisable to choose to do so for self-help, but it was understandable.
(Tess Bayes)
At the same time, the investigation team also noticed Otto's attitude towards Denberg.
Because Otto's description of the anonymous letter was understated, Herden, who was investigating the case, did not notice it.
But the strange thing is, if Otto does not believe the contents of the letter, why would he print it for backup immediately after receiving it?
His behavior was also contradictory, and originally Otto was the one who cared most about who the whistleblower was, but a few years after the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank, he seemed to no longer care.
But this was only superficial, and privately he began to investigate Denberg. The investigation team found that in the years after the war, he was secretly studying Denberg and even went to prison to ask a Nazi about Denberg.
In his transcripts of an exchange with journalist Friso Ender, he also mentioned that his family had been betrayed by someone in the Jewish community.
Otto's secretary, Maple, seems to know the inside story, because when she went to the United States in 1994 to give a speech, she accidentally said that the person in the informant room was dead.
Records show that Denberg died in 1950.
(Mapp Guise)
Why did Otto and Maple cover up for Denberg?
"Because he knew Arnold van Denberg was Jewish, anti-Semitism was still prevalent during the post-war period," Pancock said. Maybe he felt that if he brought it up again, it would add fuel to the fire. ”
The Anne Frank Museum said they were impressed by the work of the investigative team. They didn't say whether they agreed, but thought it provided important information and made a "fascinating hypothesis."
The producer who followed the film, Tes Bayes, was thoroughly convinced, but he was worried that such news would be used by the current anti-Semites when it came out.
On this point, The Judaism pastor Menachem Cartaneg said, it is better to stick to the truth.
(Menachem Cartaneg)
"One of the things the Nazis did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize the Jews. To go back to history, to seek the truth, to attain the truth, is in effect to return the Jews to their own humanity. Even if it means that sometimes Jews do something wrong morally. ”
A cold case of 77 years has ushered in the answer.
But Pankowk's answer is just one of many, and in the future, someone may come up with a better and more well-documented answer.
Or maybe someone added to his theory and became the answer that everyone adopted.
No matter who the whistleblower is, the most important thing in this kind of search is to face history and face the atrocities that have been committed by someone.
Only by reliving history at all times will we not let the tragedy repeat itself...