Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis

I was skimming through different sources of the news, as I often do, when I ran across this article from CBS News. The title of the thread describes the subject matter perfectly. Like many in our country and elsewhere, when I was young I had read The Diary of Anne Frank. Later, during visits to Amsterdam in the Netherlands over the years, I more than once visited the Anne Frank house. So when I saw this story I began to read. Here is the beginning. The rest can be found through the link at the bottom of the page. It is well worth reading.

Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis
BY JON WERTHEIM
JANUARY 16, 2022 / 8:06 PM / CBS NEWS

Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world. Blinkering between hope and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager's life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave voice and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family's hiding place? Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusions… Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and technology to this cold case. And now, they believe they have an answer—one we'll share with you tonight—to a question that's bedeviled historians, and haunted Holland: who was responsible for the betrayal?

Vince Pankoke had turned in his badge and gun. He was two years into a comfortable Florida retirement, when his phone rang in the spring of 2016.

Vince Pankoke: I received a call from a colleague from the Netherlands who said, "If you-- if you're done laying on the beach, we have a case for you."

Jon Wertheim: Were you laying on the beach?

Vince Pankoke: I-- I was actually driving to the beach. I w-- (LAUGH) I wasn't quite there yet.

Pankoke spent three decades as an FBI special agent, targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work had also taken him to the Netherlands, where his investigative chops left an impression.

Jon Wertheim: Were you looking to get back when he told you what it was about?

Vince Pankoke: After he told me it was to, you know, try to solve the mystery of what caused the raid-- for Anne Frank and the others in the annex. I needed to hear more.

Four-thousand miles away, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been asking around for a credentialed investigator to dig into a question that he feels Holland has never quite reckoned with, one that gets to the essence of human nature.

Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really important to investigate what makes us-- give up on each other. The area where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And it's a very warm area with the butcher and the doctor and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people start to betray on each other. How could that happen?

Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do you think this one resonates the way it does?

Thijs Bayens: I think right after the war people were shown-- the concentration camps, the atrocities that took place, the horror. And, suddenly you find this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And then I think humanity said, "This is who we are.

Betraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but two police probes and a whole library of books dedicated to the Anne Frank case, yielded neither convictions nor definitive conclusions.

Jon Wertheim: This question of who betrayed Anne Frank, that had been investigated for years. What was gonna make your investigation different than the ones before it?

Thijs Bayens: If it's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police. So we set it up as a cold case.
Like so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle school in Western Pennsylvania and it left a mark. There would be no perp walks or busted crime syndicates here, but he was intrigued… cautiously.

Jon Wertheim: You hear, "We're gonna go back and look at Anne Frank." And that might have the ring of some schlocky media creation. Did that worry you?

Vince Pankoke: Oh, it did. It did. Because as a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with any type of a tabloid type investigation.

Jon Wertheim: You had to make sure this was serious.

Vince Pankoke: Let's face it. I mean, the honor of the diary, the honor of-- Anne Frank, we had to treat this with utmost respect.

What ultimately sealed it for Vince Pankoke, the guarantee of absolute autonomy. The ground rules: Thijs Bayens would oversee the operation and could film the process for a documentary he's been making. There would be a book about it, which helped finance the project along with funding from the city of Amsterdam, but this was going to be an independent undertaking with serious investigators. And Vince Pankoke was going to take the lead digging in.

Jon Wertheim: You'd done cold cases before. Before this, what was the biggest gap in time between when you were approached and when the-- the crime occurred?

Vince Pankoke: It was about a five year crime at that point.

Jon Wertheim: It's 75 years. So a little different.

Vince Pankoke: It's a lot different--

Jon Wertheim: This is more than cold.

Vince Pankoke: This-- yeah. This was frozen.

To chip away, Pankoke had to draw up his own blueprint. He knew that there was going to be more information to plow through than any human could handle and that artificial intelligence could be a secret weapon.

An FBI man's dream team was assembled… an investigative psychologist, a war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists plus an army of archival researchers.

Jon Wertheim: What did all these people with disparate skills bring to this?

Vince Pankoke: They brought a different view. It was all of these skills that help us understand and put into context, a crime that happened, you know, in 1944. We have to look at things differently.

Together, they dove into a familiar story: the Frank family had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the rise of Hitler. They found safety in Holland, where Otto Frank ran a manufacturing business. But then the Nazis invaded in 1940, two years later, the Franks—Otto, wife Edith, Anne and her sister Margot—along with four other Jewish friends of the family went into hiding in an annex behind Otto's warehouse. Today, it's preserved as a museum. Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian at the Anne Frank house, showed us in.

Produced by David M. Levine. Associate producers, Jacqueline Kalil and Elizabeth Germino. Broadcast associates, Annabelle Hanflig and Eliza Costas. Edited by Michael Mongulla.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anne-frank-betrayal-investigation-60-minutes-2022-01-16/

 

Good post. That's exactly what the ultimate purpose of the investigation was about. It's discussed in the article.