why did willem van maaren betray the franks

But the evidence against Van Maaren was again inconclusive, and he died in 1971 professing his innocence. | READ MORE. This theory continues on an assumption that in itself is insufficiently proven, that is that betrayal by telephone led to the raid. Previously, Voskuijl and others had placed suspicion on a disgruntled male warehouse employee, Willem van Maaren. Explanations for the discovery are mainly based on testimonies, because no documents about the raid on the Secret Annex have been preserved. "There's no smoking gun, and the theory has too many loose ends," he said. Pankoke and his team eliminated her as a suspect for a few reasons. Please try again or choose an option below. That evening, Peter heard sounds from the warehouse. But despite suspicions, there was no conclusive evidence van Maaren betrayed the family. These are two of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to Anne Frank. Instead, he was drawn into solving a famous cold case: the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to the Franks' arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. While admitting that the case is circumstantial and some reasonable doubt remains, Pankoke et al. The diary Frank kept during her confinement is now considered one of the most important accounts of the Holocaust, but the circumstances of her arrest have always been cloaked in mystery. Registering also lets you comment on articles and helps us improve your experience. But then we'll want to be. Ahlers was among the suspects Pankoke and his team investigated and ultimately ruled out. One of the people who has been most often scrutinized as the potential betrayer is Wilhelm van Maaren, a worker in the warehouse building where the Franks hid. They were successful, and the burglars ran off. Bep Voskuijl was only 18 when she started working for the spice and jam company owned by Otto Frank. Anne received the famous diary on June 12, 1942, for her 13th birthday, around the time the Gestapo began deporting Jews in Amsterdam. This should be part of her biography.. Read our affiliate link policy. 2022 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. They will also scrutinise the letters of Anne's father, Otto, for clues and examine police transcripts of interviews dating back to the 1940s. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. See: Barnouw, David & Stroom, Gerrold van der, Who betrayed Anne Frank? The four supplied the families with food and other necessities, knowing full well that they could be condemned to death by the Nazis for aiding Jews. Wootson Jr. of the Post reports that the teams work will be chronicled in a podcast and, possibly, a documentary. Voskuijls father, Johan, was also in on the secret of the Jews in hiding. Fox on Parkinson's: "Every day it gets tougher". This theory holds that Nellywho returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when her romance souredmay have been the anonymous female caller who (allegedly) tipped off the SS about the Secret Annex, per the testimony of SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, who made the arrests. The eight people in hiding did not trust him, and often felt suspicious of him. After spending two years eluding Nazi capture while in hiding in Amsterdam, the Frank family was discovered on Aug. 4, 1944, and promptly deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. Meanwhile, in 2018, a book claimed to offer evidence that Anne Frankand her family were betrayed by a Jewish woman who was executed after World War II for collaborating with the Nazis. Nobody knows for sure who betrayed the Franks, but after doing research, I believe that Tony Ahlers is guilty. The Anne Frank House undertook its own investigation and arrived at a surprising new theory in 2017, thanks to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. "There's no smoking gun but we are going to make a comparison of the two theories and see what we can rule out and in. Most were gassed with brutal assembly-line efficiency. But two police investigations - one immediately after the. Ahlers said he believed his father received money from Frank, because the flow of funds stopped when Frank died in 1980. The men went down with whatever they could use as weapons and Hermann van Pels shouted Police. The first police investigation: Was WILLEM VAN MAAREN the betrayer? Hermann van Pels hit the ground with an axe, which finally drove them away. Now, a biographer of Anne Frank has published a new theory which has intrigued the nation and revived a dark chapter in Dutch history - the failure to protect Jewish citizens from the genocidal Nazis. It takes just a few seconds. Erik Somers, a historian at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, praised the depth of the investigation but criticized its conclusion. You have reached your limit of free articles. Throughout the course of the hiding, Bep and Kugler had fallen in love, as Bep later confessed to her sister Diny with red cheeks, wrote Van Wijk. } He vehemently denied any involvement and said that Victor Kugler had known about the pieces of wood and other things. The encounter ended with Nelly shouting, Just go to your Jews!. Cookie Policy [My mother] often lived in the past after the war and mulled over the split she found herself in: the loss of her Jewish loved ones from the Annex on the one hand, and her loyalty to her sister [Nelly] who had proven her services to the occupier on the other hand, wrote Van Wijk. My mother had lots of troubles with Nelly during the war and after the war, Van Wijk told The Times of Israel. According to Pankoke, for Van den Bergh to have that level of protection, he must have had some leverage with the Nazis. Nelly didnt just engage in an adolescent relationship with a soldier it went far beyond that, wrote Van Wijk. It is my contribution to peace, understanding, respect, and above all loyalty to every human being.. The book by Carol Ann Lee, a British author living in Amsterdam, says the likely informant was a former business associate of Otto Frank, Anne's father. Out of the seven others who hid with her, her father, Otto Frank, was the only one who survived the Holocaust. First published on January 16, 2022 / 8:09 PM. Two other plausible suspects emerged over the years: Lena van Bladeren-Hartog (died 1963) and Tonny Ahlers (1917 - 2000). The burglars had ripped a panel out of the warehouses street door in order to get in. It's been such a long time, and most of the people who knew are dead.". In 1947, Otto Frank and the helpers filed a complaint against him with the political police on suspicion of betrayal. Hours earlier, Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Austrian commander of the squad, received a phone call from the head of the Amsterdam security police who said eight Jews were hiding in the warehouse. The case against Ahlers fell apart, Pankoke told Wertheim, when it came to knowledge. And if what we could do would be to offer anonymous addresses, I dont know that I know many people who could resist it.. The Anne Frank House has opened its archives to Pankoke and his team, and, according to Boffey of the Guardian, welcomes the new research initiative. display: none; ", Dutch historians investigate new claims to identity of person who revealed hiding place of Jewish family, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. In that statement we indicated the need for further research. It is still early days for the investigation, but Pankoke told Wootson Jr. of the Post that the team has already produced some interesting information. display: none; He found Voskuijl in a desperate state with a mouthful of sleeping pills. She made him keep the episode their secret, he wrote. Beginning in 2016, Pankoke led a team of expert investigators equipped with modern crime-solving techniques to try to crack the case. Not only was she carousing with German soldiers, but Nellys rowdy behavior earned her a stint in police custody. Gies and Voskuijl were questioned but not detained. Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew where the Franks (and later, the Van Pels family) were hiding. As he tells Anthony Deutsch and Stephanie van den Berg of Reuters, van den Bergh was a very influential man who couldve avoided deportation for any number of reasons. The key to the mystery proved to be a note sent to Otto Frank shortly after his return to Amsterdam in June 1945. "However, after Otto Frank went into hiding, Tonny Ahlers was out doing other things in different parts of the city. We have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario, filmmaker and team member Thijs Bayens tells Mike Corder of the Associated Press (AP). Prior to that, Frank always said he did not want to know who betrayed his family. Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel, 2023 The Times of Israel , All Rights Reserved, Anne Frank, aged 12, at her school desk in Amsterdam, 1941. In 1963, the National Police Internal Investigation Department investigated the raid. One of the reasons his aunt has been overlooked by past investigators, believes Van Wijk, involves his familys darkest secret. Trending News Cookie Settings, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Five Places Where You Can Still Find Gold in the United States, Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Otherand the Birds Loved It, Balto's DNA Provides a New Look at the Intrepid Sled Dog, The Science of California's 'Super Bloom,' Visible From Space, What We're Still Learning About Rosalind Franklins Unheralded Brilliance. You couldn't just do that.". ", Ms Lee is also cautious but believes the secret of who shopped Anne Frank is there to be unearthed. Her political leanings had estranged her so much from her family that she left their house. War diary of life in hiding became world bestseller The Diary of Anne Frank, first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, is one of the most widely read books in the world. Photo collection: Nationaal Archief/ Anefo, access number 2.24.01.04, item number 919-6449. And it really matters to me, and I think it mattered to the group, that that was an anonymous list of addressesthere were no names. He also was distrustful of the Ahlers family, saying they simply may be seeking notoriety. All the more so because betrayal was never established beyond a doubt. When Frank returned from Auschwitz in 1945, having lost his wife and two daughters, he may have feared his company would be confiscated if his prewar business with Germany became known. The team looked at dozens of potential suspects before arriving at the person they believe likely gave up the Franks' location: Arnold van den Bergh. .component--type-recirculation .item:nth-child(5) { But Anne was not yet famous and staff were overworked. Writer Rosemary Sullivan chronicled the painstaking process in a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. On 17 January 2022 the cold case teampresentedtheir findings. The people in hiding did not sleep a wink for the rest of the night. The warehouse workers were not to know that there were people hiding in the Secret Annex. But Pankoke said Van Maaren did not hold up as a suspect once investigators examined all the information they found. Around the time of the investigation into the SS officer, Voskuijl ceased granting interviews, wrote Van Wijk. "I think he actually made the call. It is believed, however, that documents pertaining to Anne Frank and other residents of the annex were destroyed in a 1940s bombing. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the researchers who published the authoritative version the diary and the caretaker of the Frank papers, said Ahlers had not been a suspect until Lee started probing his background for her book, "The Hidden Life of Otto Frank," published in March. That same week, the Franks were arrestedwhile Van Dijk was away in the Hague. Titled Anne Frank: A Cold Case Diary, the investigative project was initiated by filmmaker Thijs Bayens and supported through crowd funding. There was another important reason Pankoke crossed Van Dijk off the list of suspects. If Frank had known that Van Dijk had also betrayed his family, Pankoke reasoned, he would have had no incentive to keep the information quiet. Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusion. One year before his death in 1980, Frank told an interviewer he believed a woman made the call to the Gestapo. Many experts believe that someone alerted Nazi authorities to the hiding place, but the identity of the culprit has never been conclusively determined. The evidence that led Pankoke's investigators to their conclusion pointed to the alleged betrayer as much as it ruled out other suspects including some who had previously been the subject of speculation. During the next six months a team of experts from the Netherlands' Institute for War Documentation (NIWD) will pore over government records drawn up at the end of the war which detail the extent of Dutch collaboration with the Nazis. Former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke was looking forward to a relaxing retirement hanging out at the beach when he left the agency. The case. This is not the first time that hopes of unlocking the mystery have been raised. After Lee's book was published, Ahlers' son was quoted as saying he was convinced her theory is true. Suddenly, a passer-by used a flashlight to take a look inside. The team hopes to reveal the results of its investigation on August 4, 2019the 75th anniversary of Anne Franks arrest. This deterioration took place around the period in which a call was made to Gestapo headquarters by a young woman it was later claimed to inform on the Frank familys hiding place. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. First published in English in 1952 as "The Diary of a Young Girl" and later as a stage play and film, her story made her a symbol both of the Holocaust and of Dutch bravery. In both cases, the findings were inconclusive. The subject is still being researched. When they returned to the Annex, they found the pages of Anne's diary strewn across the floor, and the duo decided to preserve it for posterity. Maarten Kuiper was one of the major betrayers of Jews in hiding during that time.". Vince Pankoke, who tracked Colombian drug traffickers in recentyears atthe FBI, will lead a multidisciplinary team of experts, among them historians, psychological profilers and police detectives. Thats obvious, said Bertus Hulsman, who was the wartime boyfriend of Voskuijl and sometimes mentioned in the diary. There is no smoking gun because betrayal is circumstantial.. In the years since Anne Franks diary was published, investigators and historians have proposed several other potential informants. Historians have proposed competing hypotheses without definitive proof . When the people in hiding put it back, it was brutally kicked in again. warehouse employee named Willem van Maaren, who had sparked concerns among the Franks and the people who helped them hide . Their biggest fear was that the police would come back again, but fortunately, that didn't happen. His name was Anton Ahlers. Van Maaren was later the subject of multiple investigations related to the betrayalincluding one by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthalbut he always maintained his innocence, and none of the cases ever produced any evidence against him. Van Maaren pointed up the stairs, but the police already seemed to know exactly where to go. That, Ms Lee suggests, is more likely to have been a man called Maarten Kuiper, who made a living from the betrayal of Jews and who moved into Ahlers' flat with him the day before the raid. A petty thief and unsavory braggart, Van Maaren was investigated shortly after the war, but nothing was proved. The involvement of Van Dijk, who was executed in 1948 after admitting to collaborating in the capture of 145 people, had been previously claimed. But Dutch government historians disclosed yesterday that two new theories about who betrayed 15-year-old Jewish schoolgirl Anne Frank to the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam are so compelling that they are reopening their investigations. Lee says Ahlers not only turned in the Frank family, but may have blackmailed Otto Frank for years after the war, receiving payment for his silence about Frank's business with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. On August 4, 1944, police in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam raided a warehouse and arrested eight Jews who were hiding in an annex disguised behind a bookcase. He only stuck to the logic of assumptions of which he did not know the validity, nor did he need to know the validity in order to give a reasoned answer. And who among us, if our families were on the line and heading to extermination camps, wouldnt do what we could? After tracking down Hulsman for the book, Van Wijk learned of a heated conversation between Nelly and other members of the Voskuijl family during the hiding period. Lages answered that the credibility of the tip-off would have been checked first, unless it came from an informant who had proved to be reliable before. In his 2018 book The Backyard of the Secret Annex author Gerard Kremer claimed that Ans van Dijk betrayed those hiding in the annex. It has been translated into 70 languages and inspired a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 film, featuring Millie Perkins in the title role. A new book suggests the informant may have been a business associate of Anne's father, the only family member to survive World War II. Specifically, the author believes Nelly was involved in the betrayal of the so-called Secret Annex Jews, including the iconic teenage diarist. Anne and her family hid for 25 months in a canal-side warehouse in central Amsterdam, where the teen-ager wrote her thoughts, yearnings and descriptions of life in the cramped annex into notebooks. This went well until Johan fell ill in 1943 and was replaced by Willem van Maaren. All Rights Reserved. ", Photo of Ans van Dijk courtesy of Ben van Meerendonk/IISH. I think he is the one who gave away the Franks' whereabouts to the caller although I don't think he physically made the call himself.". As fast as they could, they all fled back to the hiding place. Per BBC, he wasn't deported and had lost his Jewish identity during the war. Victor Kugler believed he placed small pieces of wood and other items in the warehouse, in such a way that in the morning he could see if anyone had been there. Within several years the book had been translated into German, French and English, and was made into a film in 1959. At the time of Bep Voskuijls death in 1983, she was the least known of the four Dutch resisters who helped hide Anne Frank. Pankoke and his team are compiling a huge database of other documents that may contain information relevant to the Frank case: lists of Nazi informants, lists of Jews who were turned over to the authorities, names of Gestapo agents who lived in Amsterdam, police records and so on. Fox on Parkinson's, and maintaining optimism "The NIWD has never tried to find out who betrayed the Franks but they have contacts which I don't have and know how archives in the Netherlands work. In 1963, the SS officer who conducted the annex raid told investigators a young woman made the betrayal call. It has been proven beyond doubt, says Ms Lee, that Ahlers knew where the Franks were hiding and even his own family believe that he is the traitor. After the war, Frank removed content from Annes diary regarding Nellys collaboration. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter, Despite decades of research, betrayal as a point of departure has delivered nothing conclusive, Ronald Leopold, Executive Director of the Anne Frank House museum, said in statement. January 16, 2022 / 8:09 PM It was very dangerous for the people in hiding, because what could they do if they were discovered? In the authors opinion, his mother had an internal conflict that led her to opt for as little attention as possible, practically complete radio silence, from the beginning of the Sixties, he wrote. The helpers did not trust warehouse worker Willem van Maaren. 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