WAS ANNE FRANK BETRAYED?

Former FBI agent sets out to uncover who betrayed Anne Frank: Cold case review will use modern investigative techniques to discover how Jewish girl was captured by the Nazis

By Gareth Davies

Daily Mail
October 3, 2017

A former FBI agent has set out to uncover who betrayed Anne Frank by turning her family over to the Nazis.

Vince Pankoke is to lead a team of 19 experts using methods developed since the turn of the century to comb through the evidence left behind by one of the most extraordinary stories of World War Two.

The Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, now one of the city's most popular attractions having been converted to a museum, have welcomed the development and has opened its doors to Pankoke's team.

Last year the museum published a theory the Jewish family were found by chance rather than it being a case of betrayal.

But the new investigative team have decided to leave nothing to chance and will forensically pick apart the evidence collected over the years.

Using modern-day techniques, Pankoke hopes poring over interviews and testimonies that may have previously gone unnoticed will help tie up the loose ends in the tragic story.

Pankoke, 59, told The Guardian: 'We are not trying to point fingers or prosecute. I am just trying to solve the last case of my career.

'There is no statute of limitation on the truth.'

Declassified documents shipped back to the US after the war in 1944 hold the secret, according to the retired FBI agent, who has drafted in one of the founding fathers of the FBI's behavioural science unit Roger Depue to analyse witness statements and interviews.

The process of the cold case review is to be filmed after Dutch journalists and film makers hired the former FBI man after they crowdfunded the project.

Ronald Leopold, the executive director of the Anne Frank House, told The Guardian: 'Despite decades of research, betrayal as a point of departure has delivered nothing conclusive. We are interested to see the results.'

Work started on the weekend in the Joordan area of Amsterdam which is where the Anne Frank museum is located.

People have been asked to come forward with information.

Anne Frank wrote her diary while in hiding from Nazi persecution during World War Two.

By 1940 the Nazis had occupied the Netherlands, leaving the family trapped.

In 1942 the family went into hiding in secret rooms of Otto Frank's office building.

But after two years the group were anonymously betrayed and were sent to their deaths at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne died of typhus in 1945.

Otto Frank, Anne's father, returned to Amsterdam after the war and discovered her diary had been saved.

It was published in 1947, leading to her posthumous fame.