(PresidentialWire.com)- In a report on 60 Minutes, investigators claimed they believe they might have discovered who it was who told the Nazis where to find Anne Frank and her family.
The team was headed up by former FBI special agent Vince Pankoke who told 60 Minutes that they believe the person responsible was a prominent Jewish businessman from Amsterdam named Arnold van den Bergh who, to protect himself and his family, allegedly worked as a Nazi informer.
By feeding documents, letters, maps, photos, and even books into an artificial intelligence database developed specifically for the project, Pankoke and his team were able to identify possible links between people in Amsterdam at the time. This led them to Van den Bergh.
Arnold van den Bergh served on the Jewish council, a group set up by the Nazis to carry out their policies within the Jewish community. The men on the council joined to avoid being sent to concentration camps.
In combing through the official Dutch archives, the investigators discovered that someone on the Jewish council was providing the Nazis with the addresses where Jews were known to be hiding in Amsterdam.
Because Van den Bergh and his family were never sent to a death camp after the Nazis disbanded the Jewish councils, Pankoke’s team concluded that he must have been the informant mentioned in the archives.
What’s more, Van den Bergh’s name appeared in a 1963 probe regarding the fate of Anne Frank that was never fully investigated.
In one paragraph, the team discovered that during an interview with Anne’s father Otto Frank, he told them that shortly after the liberation, he received an anonymous note identifying Van den Bergh as the one who betrayed his family.
In 2018, Pankoke’s team found the son of one of the former investigators in the 1963 probe who was able to locate the actual anonymous note Otto Frank received.
Pankoke admitted that the evidence they recovered isn’t exactly a “smoking gun,” describing it instead as a “warm gun with the evidence of a bullet sitting nearby.”
