The news goes around the world, with the well-orchestrated release on January 17 of a book by Canadian Rosemary Sullivan – The Betrayal of Anne Frank (Barnes & Noble) – and the broadcast of a documentary on CBS News. Both retrace the long-term investigation carried out over five years by a retired FBI agent, Vince Pankoke, at the head of a team of twenty historians, criminologists and data specialists.
→ MAINTENANCE. Book on the betrayal of Anne Frank: “Be careful not to mistake the culprits”
Their question: who denounced the hiding place of the family of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, deported in August 1944? The conclusion, which falls seventy-seven years after the facts, leans towards an act of denunciation committed by a member of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. This organization created in 1941 had made it possible to methodically identify members of the Jewish community, facilitating the crimes of the Nazis.
Main exhibit: an anonymous letter
It was a notary named Arnold van der Bergh, himself a Jew who died in 1950, who allegedly sought to protect his family under the occupation, by revealing the locations of numerous hiding places, including that of the Frank family.
Main exhibit: an anonymous letter received after the war by Otto Frank, Anne’s father. The original is missing, but a copy was found in the file of a Dutch policeman who was investigating the case after the war. Otto Frank, who died in 1980, only made the existence of this missive public in 1964, during a new investigation. Considered slanderous, this revelation fizzled: Anne Frank’s father would not have wanted to broadcast it, to protect Van der Bergh’s children and not to provoke anti-Semitism, according to Vince Pankoke.
“No evidence”, according to a renowned historian
The Anne Frank House, one of the most visited museums in the world (1.3 million visitors in 2019), welcomes the work with a certain distance. She specifies that she did not participate in Vince Pankoke’s investigation, but that she opened her archives to him. The director of the museum, Ronald Leopold, believes that this work “has generated important new information and a fascinating hypothesis that deserves further research”.
“Strong accusations must be accompanied by solid evidence, said for his part on a daily basis NRC Handelsblad l’historien Johannes Houwink ten Cate. But here, there is none. » It is not established either, according to this specialist in the Holocaust, that the Jewish Council drew up lists of addresses of hiding places in which the Jews were holed up, threatened with deportation.
Over 75% of Dutch Jews deported
Be that as it may, these new hypotheses, which are widely covered by the Dutch press, are rekindling a very sensitive wound. The collaboration and deportation of more than 75% of Dutch Jews during the Second World War taints the good conscience of the kingdom. The Hague took several decades to recognize its share of responsibility. It was only in 2019 that the Dutch railways decided to compensate the few survivors, up to 35 million euros.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte made his first official apology in 2020, while a memorial to Holocaust victims was erected in Amsterdam in 2021. “I am the Second World War”, said one of the country’s greatest authors, Harry Mulisch (1927-2010), tirelessly tapping into a collective memory more focused on omission than frank discussion. Born of a Jewish mother and an Austro-Prussian father and collaborator, this pillar of Dutch literature has never stopped revisiting this past in his essays and novels.
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