60 Minutes Segment on Anne Frank Identifies Likely Suspect Who Outed Them in Hiding

CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a segment on Sunday about who may have outed Anne Frank and her family while they were hiding from the Nazis.

Frank and her family hid in an annex in Amsterdam for a couple years until they were apprehended and sent to concentration camps. The annex was surrounded by homes that had Nazi sympathizers living in them at the time. Frank’s father, Otto Frank, was the only surviving member of the family, and died in 1980.

Correspondent Jon Wertheim’s segment featured a retired FBI agent, Vince Pankoke, who was asked in 2016 to solve the mystery of who ratted out Frank and her family to the Nazis.

It has been widely believed that Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee who worked for Otto Frank, outed the Frank family. He worked in the same building where the Franks were hiding. However, Pankoke and his team ruled him out as the suspect.

“Not a betrayer, though. He was not anti-Semitic,” said Pankoke. “He had incentive not to betray them because if he did, he would have lost his job, the business would have been closed.”

Van Maaren died in 1971.

Instead, the investigation found Arnold van den Bergh as having likely outed the Frank family. He was a Jewish businessman that served on the Jewish Council, which was set up by the Nazis that enabled Jews to betray their fellow Jews to the Nazis in exchange for possible favorable treatment such as not being deported to the gas chambers. Van den Bergh died in 1950.

Pankoke explained that “in his role as being a founding member of the Jewish Council, he would have had privy to addresses where Jews were hiding. When Van den Bergh lost all his series of protections exempting him from having to go to the camps, he had to provide something valuable to the Nazis that he’s had contact with to let him and his wife at that time stay safe.”

The segment revealed that Otto Frank knew of Van den Bergh through a note he saw after World War II.

“He knew that Arnold van den Bergh was Jewish, and in this period after the war, anti-Semitism was still around. So perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up again, with Arnold van den Bergh being Jewish, it’ll only stoke the fires further,” explained Pankoke. “But we have to keep in mind that the fact that he was Jewish just meant … he was placed into a untenable position by the Nazis to do something to save his life.”

Pankoke noted that the evidence collected was circumstantial and therefore would not be sufficient to convict Van den Bergh were he alive today, as “[b]etraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands,” narrated Wertheim.

Watch above, via CBS.