Almost eighty years later, a new investigation has led to the identification of the person who betrayed Anne Frank and her family, condemning the young German Jew, who became famous all over the world for the famous diary written during the German occupation of Holland in the Second World War, to die at the age of fifteen in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
It would be Arnold van den Bergh, a member of the Jewish community of Amsterdam and a member of the Jewish Council, a collaborationist organization that facilitated the implementation of the Nazi occupation policy, except in any case being dismantled in 1943 with the final sending of its members to the lager. Van den Bergh allegedly betrayed the Frank family, "after losing a series of protections and finding himself in the need to offer some valuable information to the Nazis, to try to keep himself and his wife safe," said Vince Pankoke, former FBI agent and member of the investigative team, in an interview with 60 Minutes by the American CBS, taken by the BBC, among others.
The investigation was conducted in the United States: it took six years of work in which historians and experts took part. Modern methods have been used for the reopening of cold cases, including computer algorithms capable of digging into the historical connections between numerous people.
Apparently Otto Frank knew the name of those who had betrayed them: among the papers a note was found with the name of van den Bergh sent to Anna's father.
The young girl, born in Frankfurt, spent much of her short life in Amsterdam after the Nazis came to power in Germany. In 1935 she was deprived of German citizenship and became stateless: in her diary she had written that after the war she would like to obtain citizenship in the Netherlands, where she had grown up. A dream, unfortunately, destined to remain on a sheet of paper.
(Unioneonline / D)
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