A retired FBI special agent and a team of investigators believe they've solved one of the world's most well-known and tragic cold cases.
Seventy-five years after its publication,"The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world.
Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do you think this one resonates the way it does? Thijs Bayens: If it's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police. So we set it up as a cold case.Like so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle school in Western Pennsylvania and it left a mark. There would be no perp walks or busted crime syndicates here, but he was intrigued… cautiously.
Jon Wertheim: You'd done cold cases before. Before this, what was the biggest gap in time between when you were approached and when the-- the crime occurred?Jon Wertheim: It's 75 years. So a little different.Vince Pankoke: This-- yeah. This was frozen.To chip away, Pankoke had to draw up his own blueprint. He knew that there was going to be more information to plow through than any human could handle and that artificial intelligence could be a secret weapon.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Th-- this is the bookcase. It was used to camouflage the entrance to the hiding place. Dr. Gertjan Broek: It's a warm day, sunny. And around 10:30, between 10:30 and 11:00, a couple of men walk in. Otto Frank: On September 4th, 1944, the last transport went to Auschwitz. Well, when we arrived at Auschwitz there were men standing there with clubs — women here, men there. We were separated right on the station, so women went to Birkenau Camp and we went to Auschwitz Camp from the station and I never saw my family again.
Jon Wertheim: I'm thinking one cough that gets overheard, one window that happens to be open at the wrong time, the sheer risk factor here is extraordinary. Jon Wertheim: It strikes me in a case like this, anyone could be a suspect. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk by and hear a cough. How did you navigate that?
Two previous Dutch police investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding place - one in 1948 and another in 1963 - were not exactly masterclasses in detective work. And a lot of time had passed. Pieter van Twisk: Yah. That's, of course, also why it was quite easy for the Nazis to find people in the Netherlands, and to know if who was Jewish, or who was not Jewish.
Vince Pankoke: Their typical MO was once they arrested somebody, the first question that was posed to them,"Do you know where any other Jews are in hiding?" So what we did is we chronicled all the arrests prior to and just after the annex raid to try to find any connection, any loose thread that would show us that they went from one arrest to another and then ultimately to the annex.
Bram van der Meer: You would expect maybe that a very bad person did this, a person with-- I would say-- a psychopathic mind would- would do this. Vince Pankoke: We know from history that the Jewish Council was dissolved in late September of 1943 and they were sent to the camps. We figured, well, if Arnold van den Bergh is in a camp somewhere, he certainly can't be privy to information that would lead to the compromise of the annex.Vince Pankoke: Well, we thought he was. So due diligence, we started a search. And we couldn't find Arnold van den Bergh or any of his immediate family members in those camps.
Jon Wertheim: Wait, wait. So, in the files, there's reference to a note that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific name?The note was so striking to Otto Frank that he typed up a copy for his records. Naturally, the veteran FBI man wanted to know: where was that note? Any seasoned investigator will tell you that, ideally, good shoe leather comes garnished with good luck. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and team located the son of one of the former investigators.
Vince Pankoke: Whoever it was that authored this anonymous note knew so much that-- knew that lists were turned in.Vince Pankoke: Pieter was able to locate, in the national archive, records that indicated that in fact somebody from the-- Jewish Council, of which Arnold Van Den Bergh was a member, was turning over lists of addresses where Jews were in hiding.
The cold case team began to confront the real possibility that Otto Frank might have known the identity of the betrayer. What reason, they wondered, would Otto have had to keep this to himself?