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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Bestseller
Less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept...
Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team--led by an obsessed retired FBI agent--has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?
Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teen-aged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many works--journalism, books, plays and novels--devoted to Anne's story, none has ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years--and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.
With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents--some never before seen--and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the infamous arrest--and came to a shocking conclusion.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behavior of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
On 4 August 1944 Gestapo officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, together with three Dutch policemen, marched into a spice merchant's on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht and demanded: "Where are the Jews?" It was a piercing moment in 20th-century history, one that never becomes dulled by retelling. Within minutes Silberbauer and his accomplices had located a dummy bookshelf, behind which lay a secret suite of rooms where two families had been hiding for two years. Placed under arrest, these eight men and women were subsequently sent to concentration camps in the east from which only one, the business's owner, Otto Frank, returned. We know all this because one of Frank's first postwar acts was to publish the journal that his 15-year-old daughter had kept during their immuration. The Diary of Anne Frank became a canonical text, one of the few accounts we have of living through Hitler's Final Solution in real time. And it is Anne's face - peaky, clever, ferociously alive - that has become the emblem of all the evil unleashed by antisemitism in Europe's terrible mid-century. Yet despite the story being so familiar, there is one detail that remains a mystery. Who tipped off the authorities that there were people hiding at the back of Prinsengracht 263? That was the question Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan set out to answer in her account of the recent attempt by Dutch film-maker Thijs Bayens and journalist Pieter van Twisk to find this final puzzle piece. Using the methodology and tropes of a police procedural, Bayens and van Twisk assembled what they insist on calling a "cold case team", headed by recently retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke. Among his 30 staff, Pankoke had criminologists, psychologists, archivists, forensic scientists and a much vaunted artificial intelligence whizz who built a database that stores thousands of data points - addresses, biographies, political affiliations - in ways designed to throw up new suspects. Since publication, the results of their work have been disputed, and the Dutch publisher, Ambo Anthos, has suspended a further print run pending investigation. A member of the team, meanwhile, defended the research, arguing it was "appropriately caveated". Whatever the eventual verdict, it's clear that Sullivan's book struggles to find a form and style that serves her material. In particular she seems uncertain about how much prior knowledge she can assume in her readers, which means that two thirds of this book are spent rehashing the story of the Franks' murder, and the postwar publication of Anne's diary. Only once Sullivan moves on to actual "persons of interest" does the narrative begin to pick up, even though here again much of this information has long been in the public domain. Up first is Job Jansen, the estranged and paranoid husband of one of Otto's employees, who is convinced that his Jewish wife is having an affair with Herr Frank. Then there is Nelly Voskuijl, a Nazi fraterniser whose sister is one of the office workers helping the Franks to hide. Or what about long-time suspect Willem van Maaren, the light-fingered warehouse manager who might perhaps have been after the bounty money of 7.5 guilders (£35 today)? Most chillingly of all, there is the notorious Anna van Dijk, who from 1943 begins to collaborate with the Germans by luring her fellow Jews into carefully laid traps. Van Dijk was hanged after the war for the sheer scale of her crimes, yet the evidence for her turning in the Franks simply isn't there. In the end, though, the cold case team single out a prominent Jewish notary called Arnold van den Bergh, whom they speculate may have passed on the information to the Nazis as a way of keeping his own family out of the concentration camps. Blowback from historians has focused on the highly circumstantial evidence advanced for Van den Bergh's "guilt". Specifically they have questioned the claim that, as a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council, he would have known the addresses of the places where Jewish people were hiding. Regardless, what Sullivan does manage to do is assemble a compelling picture of what it was like to live in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation: here is a collection of increasingly isolated individuals, hungry, terrified and daily faced with impossible choices about whether to save themselves, their loved ones, or the nice family that lives next door. And it is this moral vacuum that follows in the wake of antisemitism, rather than any particular "perp", that betrayed Anne Frank.
Kirkus Review
An extraordinary tale of modern science and old-fashioned gumshoe work applied to a world-renowned crime 80 years after the fact. On Aug. 4, 1944, a German "Jew-hunting unit" searched an Amsterdam warehouse and discovered the family of young Anne Frank in a hidden apartment. The Franks had been sheltering there for more than two years, shielded by paterfamilias Otto's workers. He alone survived the death camps. Hauntingly, as Sullivan writes, the last sighting of Anne was at Auschwitz, where, "delirious with typhus," she was "naked except for a blanket covering her shoulders." The officer who led that German squad wound up as an inspector in the Austrian police, while Otto spent his life overseeing Anne's memory through the publication of her diary. But who exposed the Franks' hiding place to the Nazis? That was the question some 50 data scientists, historians, forensic scientists, and other researchers, mostly Dutch, had before them, and it's the overarching question of this book. With the aid of retired FBI special agent Vince Pankoke, the team used artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and other modern methods to find out, examining numerous possible suspects. Only one met the familiar categories of knowledge, motive, and opportunity. The investigative team determined that he was a Jewish notary who used the Franks' sanctum as a bargaining chip to save his own family. On returning to Amsterdam, Otto received an anonymous note revealing his betrayer's identity. He did not broadcast it because, the investigators conclude, Frank may have recognized the man's desperate situation as he made that fateful decision to collaborate. Sullivan's narrative, full of twists and turns and dead-end leads, commands attention at every page, dramatic without being sensational. She writes, memorably, of Otto's work after the death of their Judas: "He wanted [everyone] to know that fascism builds slowly and then one day it is an iron wall that looms and cannot be circumvented." Every reader of Anne Frank's Diary will want to have this superbly rendered tale of scholarly detection at hand. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Sullivan (Stalin's Daughter) offers a fascinating overview of a six-year cold case investigation by FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and his amazing team of psychologists, criminologists, archivists, and forensic scientists, who aimed to definitively identify the person or people who in 1944 betrayed Anne Frank, her family, and four Dutch Jews to the Gestapo. Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has been read by more 30 million people, but it ends just before the eight people hiding in an attic in Amsterdam during World War II are discovered and sent to a concentration camp. Sullivan's excellent attempt to understand how eight people can go undetected for more than two years allows her to offer a vivid picture of Amsterdam, wartime, and the best and worst of the human heart. Julie Whelan's narration of the audiobook creates the tension necessary for listeners to get lost in the Franks' story--living in a time and place where it was difficult to know who to trust and where all actions had to be questioned. VERDICT A memorable cold case investigation that answers numerous nagging questions about how the Nazis discovered where Anne Frank and seven others were hiding during World War II.--Pam Kingsbury
Table of Contents
| Preface: Memorial Day and the Memory of Unfreedom | p. xi |
| Part I The Background Story | |
| 1 The Raid and the Green Policeman | p. 3 |
| 2 The Diary of Anne Frank | p. 9 |
| 3 The Cold Case Team | p. 14 |
| 4 The Stakeholders | p. 23 |
| 5 "Let's See What the Man Can Do!" | p. 29 |
| 6 An Interlude of Safety | p. 35 |
| 7 The Onslaught | p. 41 |
| 8 Prinsengracht 263 | p. 48 |
| 9 The Hiding | p. 51 |
| 10 You Were Asked. You Said Yes | p. 56 |
| 11 A Harrowing Incident | p. 63 |
| 12 Anatomy of a Raid | p. 67 |
| 13 Camp Westerbork | p. 74 |
| 14 The Return | p. 79 |
| 15 The Collaborators | p. 85 |
| 16 They Aren't Corning Back | p. 90 |
| Part II Cold Case Investigation | |
| 17 The Investigation | p. 97 |
| 18 The Documents Men | p. 106 |
| 19 The Other Bookcase | p. 110 |
| 20 The First Betrayal | p. 113 |
| 21 The Blackmailer | p. 121 |
| 22 The Neighborhood | p. 129 |
| 23 The Nanny | p. 137 |
| 24 Another Theory | p. 143 |
| 25 The "Jew Hunters" | p. 148 |
| 26 The V-Frau | p. 155 |
| 27 No Substantial Proof, Part I | p. 164 |
| 28 "Just Go to Your Jews!" | p. 170 |
| 29 Probing Memory | p. 181 |
| 30 "The Man Who Arrested Frank Family Discovered in Vienna" | p. 190 |
| 31 What Miep Knew | p. 198 |
| 32 No Substantial Proof, Part II | p. 202 |
| 33 The Greengrocer | p. 208 |
| 34 The Jewish Council | p. 219 |
| 35 A Second Look | p. 224 |
| 36 The Dutch Notary | p. 228 |
| 37 Experts at Work | p. 237 |
| 38 A Note Between Friends | p. 246 |
| 39 The Typist | p. 250 |
| 40 The Granddaughter | p. 255 |
| 41 The Goudstikker Affair | p. 260 |
| 42 A Bombshell | p. 266 |
| 43 A Secret Well Kept | p. 272 |
| Epilogue: The Shadow City | p. 286 |
| Afterword | p. 297 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 303 |
| Archives and Institutes | p. 313 |
| Glossary | p. 315 |
| Notes | p. 327 |
| Bibliography | p. 359 |
| Index | p. 367 |
