Arnold van der Berg, a member of the city Jewish council, could have extradited the family of Anne Frank to the Nazis – investigation

The family of Anne Frank, who hid in a shelter in Amsterdam for 761 days, could be betrayed to the Nazis by a local businessman and member of the collaborationist Judenrat (city Jewish council) Arnold van der Berg, think the authors of the investigation, which was conducted for 6 years under the leadership of former FBI agent Vince Pancoke.

Van der Berg’s name appeared in an anonymous letter to Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, but this letter had not been taken seriously before, although the investigators knew about it.

Pancoke found out that after the dissolution of the Amsterdam Judenrat in 1943, all council members were sent to camps, and van der Berg remained in the city with his family, because he got documents stating that they were not Jews (van der Berg died in 1950) . According to the investigation team, he was spared his life in exchange for information about the Jews who were wanted by the Nazis.

Penkoke worked out all the versions put forward and came to the conclusion that the hypothesis about the absence of an informer and the accidental discovery of the Franks is untenable. In an interview with CBS, Pancoke suggested that the van der Bergh story may not have been carefully worked out for fear that investigators would be accused of anti-Semitism.

The Frank family and four of their Jewish friends took refuge in July 1942 in the hidden premises of the building where the office of Otto Frank’s former company Opekta and its warehouses were located. Illegals were housed on three floors, the only passage to which was closed by a door hidden behind a bookcase. Initially, only four employees of the company and their families knew about the shelter.

In the shelter, Anna kept a diary in letters in Dutch. She wrote these letters to her fictitious friend Kitty, telling every day about everything that happened to her and to other residents of the shelter. Anna called her diary The Secret Annex (“In the back house”).

The only family member who survived the Nazi camps was Anne’s father, Otto Frank. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam, and in 1953 he moved to Basel (Switzerland). Died in 1980.

The one who personally found in Amsterdam, detained and sent to the concentration camp Anne Frank, her family and several other Jews is known – this is the SS man Karl Josef Silberbauer, who stood out for cruelty even in his organization.