“Ridiculous and reprehensible”. Dutch historians reject the alleged revelations about who betrayed Anne Frank by handing her family over to the Nazis. Just released and the result of six years of investigations, the book “The betrayal of Anne Frank: investigations into a cold case” supports the thesis that a Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, revealed where the Franks were hiding in Amsterdam. But several Dutch scholars, the Times of Israel writes, contest the book’s entire layout and its conclusions about who betrayed the teenager whose Diary moved millions of readers around the world, making him a symbol of Nazi persecution of Jews. Meanwhile, a granddaughter of Van den Berg also said she was certain that her grandfather was innocent.
The theory supported by the author of the book, Rosemary Sullivan, is based on an anonymous letter that Otto Frank, Anna’s father and the family’s only survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, received after the war.. The letter, the original of which has been lost but which was copied by Frank, it contained the accusation that Van den Berg, a member of the Jewish Council appointed by the Nazis, had denounced him.
The assumption is that the Council had a list with the hiding places of Dutch Jews. But the book, it is pointed out, offers no evidence that that list existed or that it contained the Frank’s secret address. Nor does it explain the reasons for the existence of such a compromising list, or why hidden people should communicate their address to an organization in communication with the Nazis.
Van den Berg had no interest in reporting
“Big conclusions need big evidence,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust History at the University of Amsterdam.. “I don’t think a member of the Jewish council got freedom in exchange for addresses. After the council was abolished, its members were deported to concentration camps, or went into hiding,” he explains.
Van den Berg remained in hiding for much of 1944, including in August when the Nazis broke into the Frank hiding place and deported them together with the Van Daan family to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. “If he had betrayed the Frank family, he would have had to come out, exactly what he wanted to avoid,” argues Houwink ten Cate
After the war, the Jewish Council was criticized for “cooperating” with the Nazis. Some of its members, including Van den Berg, who died in 1950, were tried. But no one has ever accused the Council, dissolved by the Nazis in 1943, of having a list of Jewish hiding places, nor has it ever been proven that it did, the historian notes.
“It is not proven, known or proven that the Jewish Council had a list of the addresses of hiding places,” says Annemiek Gringold, curator of the Dutch National Holocaust Museum. “All the experts I have heard confirm that this is not true”, accusing Van den Berg “is to go even further”, he notes.
“It does not appear plausible that people would want to give information about their hiding places, or those of family members, to the Jewish Council, which followed a legalistic approach of cooperating with the Nazis. The Council was strictly controlled by the German authorities, it would have been very risky to keep such lists, “says Laurien Vastenhout, researcher at the National Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
archives destroyed, the truth will probably never be known
This list story “doesn’t make sense,” says Bart van der Boom of Leiden University. In his opinion, the anonymous letter proves only that someone “believed or wanted Otto Frank to believe that Van den Berg was a traitor.” And this happened immediately after the war, at a time when many were looking for revenge or revenge in Holland. “Not knowing who wrote it, there is no way of knowing how reliable it was,” argues the scholar, according to whom the book’s conclusions are “ridiculous and reprehensible.”
According to Houwink ten Cate, it is possible that it will never be found out who betrayed the Franks, as the Nazis destroyed 95% of their archives on the persecution of Jews. And it is not even said that there was a betrayal, the arrest could be due to an imprudence of the Frank.
Furthermore, the Diary of Anne Frank itself tells how the family had disseminated false clues to make it appear that the whole family had fled abroad. When they fled their home, the Franks had left an address in Maastricht in plain sight, while word had been spread that a friend of theirs from that city wanted to help them escape to Switzerland. It seems highly unlikely that they had communicated the address of their hiding place in Amsterdam to the Jewish Council.
grandson van den Berg claims grandfather’s innocence
Finally, one of Van den Berg’s granddaughters claimed her grandfather’s innocence, through family friend Paul Theelen, reached by the Daily Mail. In 1944, the notary, his wife and three daughters hid in separate places with the help of the Dutch resistance. Daughter Anne Marie was in hiding from Theelen’s family until 1945. Van den Berg was hiding in the town of Laren with his wife and had no reason to go out into the open with the Nazis in Amsterdam to denounce the Franks. Among other things, Van de Berg lost his sister Zadok and his niece Millie, who died respectively in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor.
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