Researchers Claim To Have Identified The Man Who Betrayed Anne Frank
Wikimedia CommonsAnne Frank was 15 years old when the SS raided her family’s hiding place in Amsterdam in 1944.
In 2022, researchers made waves when they announced they’d answered the question “Who betrayed Anne Frank?” Academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, who wrote a book about the investigation, claimed that a man named Arnold van den Bergh had revealed Anne and her family’s hiding place to the Nazis.
A Jewish notary, van den Bergh had been floated as a suspect before. Anne’s father, Otto, had received an anonymous tip that van den Bergh had betrayed his family in 1945. And the researchers behind the book claimed that van den Bergh had a list of where Jewish families in Amsterdam were hiding, which he allegedly gave to the Nazis to save himself and his own family.
But others immediately pushed back against the allegation. For starters, there’s no physical evidence that the list even existed. Some accused the researchers of wild speculation without establishing concrete facts.
And although Sullivan published her book about the researchers’ findings, it ended up getting pulled by a Dutch publisher just months later. According to NPR, a group of Dutch historians released an in-depth piece of criticism about the investigation, calling the discoveries “a shaky house of cards.”
One researcher responded to the historians’ criticism, saying that it was “very detailed and extremely solid,” but “for the time being I do not see that Van den Bergh can be definitively removed as the main suspect.”
