03-04-2025
Who Betrayed Anne Frank? One Study Suggests an Unfathomable Answer
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On August 4, 1944, members of the German Sicherheitsdienst, in tandem with Dutch Nazis, carried out a raid on a building at Prinsengracht 263-267 in Amsterdam. The Jewish people found hiding within were arrested and shipped off to concentration camps.
It was a scene not dissimilar to many others that had occurred throughout the country. As the National World War II Museum notes: 'Of the nearly 30,000 Jewish people in hiding in the Netherlands, around 12,000 were arrested and sent to prison or concentration camps. Some were betrayed by neighbors and paid informants, while others were discovered by police raids.'$22.89 at
The reason the August 4 raid is known to even people with a cursory education in Holocaust history is due to one of the families caught in that raid: that of German-born businessman Otto Frank. His teenage daughter Anne Frank had been keeping a journal of their time in hiding that would ultimately be published as The Diary of a Young Girl, perhaps the most widely read firsthand account of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe.
Anne's chronicling of her family's time stowed away in a small portion of the Amsterdam office building they had dubbed the Secret Annex began on her 13th birthday and spanned two years. Her diary blended observations about the world, both within those walls and out, alongside her own internal ruminations that were at times hopeful or despairing.
After the raid, Anne, Otto, and the rest of the Frank family were first brought to Camp Westerbrook then to Auschwitz, where Otto was separated from his wife and daughters. He wouldn't see them alive again. Anne and her sister, Margot, died of a typhus outbreak at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945.
Otto, the family's sole survivor, later published Anne's diary in 1947. By then, Otto was already seeking out answers, answers he would never find, answers that still allude historians to this day. Who exactly betrayed Anne Frank and the other Jews hiding away in The Secret Annex, condemning many of them to death?
As it turns out, the lack of answers might be a matter of asking the wrong question.
The man Otto Frank most fervently suspected of selling out the residents of the Secret Annex was Willem van Maaren, a laborer who worked on the premises of Prinsengracht 263 from March 1943 to June 1945. Otto wasn't the only member of the Frank family to view van Maaren with suspicion, either. Years before the raid, Anne mentioned van Maaren in her diary, including a rather foreboding entry on September 16, 1943:
'Another fact that doesn't exactly brighten up our days is that Mr. van Maaren, the man who works in the warehouse, is getting suspicious about the Annex[…] We wouldn't care what Mr. van Maaren thought of the situation except that he's known to be unreliable and to possess a high degree of curiosity. He's not one who can be put off with a flimsy excuse.'
In a novel, like the kind young Anne had hoped to write when she was older, the reader might take such comments as foreshadowing. There's a temptation for those who read the diary to do the same. But as the Anne Frank House points out, despite suspicion, no actual evidence was found of van Maaren's guilt.
'In 1947, Otto Frank and the helpers filed a complaint against him with the political police on suspicion of betrayal,' they summarize. 'However, the investigation did not prove his guilt. Van Maaren fought the accusations and rejected a settlement. The Subdistrict Court dismissed the complaint.'
The Anne Frank House devotes a whole section of its website to the van Maaren accusations and other allegations that haven't been 'sufficiently substantiated.' The museum notes, for example, that Dutch Nazi Tonny Ahlers has been suggested as a possible betrayer. When Ahlers purpotedly found out that Otto Frank had spoken negatively about the German war effort, he reportedly 'pressured Frank and extracted money from him.' Biographer Carol Ann Lee put forward Ahlers as having turned in the Franks, but the Anne Frank House notes that 'there is no indication that Ahlers knew about people in hiding in the Secret Annex.'
The museum offers a similar rebuff to the assertion made by journalist Sytze van der Zee that the traitor was Ans van Dijk, 'a Jewish woman who, after being arrested, was given the choice between deportation and helping the authorities track down other Jews.' Van Dijk did indeed help Nazi authorities capture over 100 (some suggest as many as 700) Jews while pretending to offer them hiding places.
For her crimes, van Dijk was sentenced to death by the Special Court in Amsterdam and executed by firing squad on January 14, 1948. But there is no substantial evidence van Dijk had anything to do with the Frank family's capture, and the Anne Frank House notes the books that have proposed her as the betrayer are 'based on post-war memories that were written down even later by third parties,' making those claims entirely unverifiable.
Headlines were made in 2022 when a team of investigators, including an ex-FBI agent, claimed to have used 'modern investigative techniques' such as 'computer algorithms to search for connections' in order to determine just who betrayed the Frank family. Their shocking conclusion was that the Secret Annex had been brought to Nazi attention by Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish resident of Amsterdam. As the BBC noted in January 2022, the team claimed that van den Bergh ''gave up' the Franks to save his own family.'
Their conclusion offered more than one shocking revelation, however. 'The team said it had struggled with the revelation that another Jewish person was probably the betrayer,' the January BBC article wrote. 'But it also found evidence suggesting Otto Frank, Anne's father, may himself have known that and kept it secret.' The issue wasn't a long unsolved mystery, their conclusion asserted, but rather a conspiracy to cover up the truth that it had actually been a fellow Jew who betrayed the Franks.
The claim was as audacious as it was specious. Not long after the conclusion was made public, in a book titled The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, historians emerged to speak out against what they decried as an 'amateurish' investigation. By March 2022, as the BBC reported, 'a team of World War Two experts and historians' declared that 'there is not any serious evidence for this grave accusation.' The book was roundly discredited, pulled by its Dutch publisher, and ultimately dropped by its intended English publisher as well.
Some of the individuals who had a hand in the Franks' discovery have been known for decades. In 1945, Otto identified two of the Dutch policemen who had been involved in their arrests, Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst. By 1946, SS member Karl Silberbauer had been identified as well. None of those men ended up serving their initial sentences, and Silberbauer was actually recruited by West Germany to infiltrate communist organizations later in life.
Given these undeniable participants, why do so many people still search for who betrayed Anne Frank? Certainly, the young diarist's enduring legacy has contributed to the fascination.
However, a 2016 study by the Anne Frank House suggests the Franks might not have had a betrayer at all and that the raid on 263 Prinsengracht might not have initially intended to find hidden Jews. Study author Gertjan Broek, a historical researcher at the museum, found that 'compared to an 'ordinary' case of betrayal... [the Franks'] account contains a number of striking aspects.' Broek highlights the length of the search, more than two hours, as being 'longer than necessary for rounding up betrayed Jews in hiding.' Among other inconsistencies was the fact that Gringhuis was working as an economic fraud investigator at the time of the raid, meaning he wasn't primarily focused on finding Jews.
In the parts of the building beyond the Secret Annex, other activities took place, including illegal work and fraud with ration coupons, all of which could have caught the attention of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). As the museum notes in its summary of the study, 'it is possible that the SD searched the building because of this illegal work and fraud with ration coupons, and that the SD investigators discovered Anne Frank and the seven others in hiding simply by chance.'
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