When “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” was published on January 18 across a number of languages, it caused a publishing phenomenon. The non-fiction book’s premise was the outcome of a six-year cold case study to determine who handed the Frank family away during the Holocaust.
However, Jürgen Welte, publisher of Harper Collins Germany, wants to examine the contentious claims made in the book before it is released in German on March 22. Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish Dutch notary, is accused of turning on Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo, but he warned in a written declaration that doing so carries risks:
“We are currently going through an internal evaluation of the document following two professional edits. The somewhat late publishing date of the German-language edition demonstrates how seriously we are treating this delicate subject.”
When questioned by DW, a press representative for Harper Collins Germany, the German division of the global publishing firm of the same name, said she was unable to comment at this time on whether the publication’s release date will be postponed or cancelled. The publisher also refuses to respond to DW’s inquiry regarding the expected duration of the internal review.
Contents
A Betrayal Theory of Anne Frank
The Gestapo eventually discovered the Franks in August 1944 after they had been hiding for approximately two years in a hidden annex in an Amsterdam warehouse along a canal. The entire Frank family was thereafter transported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.
While living in hiding in Amsterdam, Anne Frank, who passed away at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she and her sister had been sent, kept her well-known diary. One of the most important stories of Jewish life under the Nazis, her journal was later published by her father Otto Frank in 1947.
Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish Dutchman, was identified as the source of the betrayal by an inquiry team searching for the reasons behind it in January.
A list of Jewish hideouts in Amsterdam purportedly was given to the German occupiers by Van den Bergh, an Amsterdam legal notary, in order to rescue his own family. One of them included Anne Frank’s lodging address, which was a rear house on Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.
But since that hypothesis is being challenged, “The Betrayal of Anne Frankclaims “‘s have been reviewed by the German publisher, and its Dutch publisher has stopped publishing the book.
Claims Might not Hold Up.
Some have questioned the evidence, which consists of a single anonymous letter, despite the fact that the cold case investigators included veteran US FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and roughly 20 historians, criminologists, and data specialists. The letter, which Otto Frank received, identified Van den Bergh as a Jewish Council member who received special treatment from the Nazis in exchange for disclosing the whereabouts of other Jews’ hiding spots.
There is no proof that the Jewish Council compiled a list of addresses for Jewish hiding places during World War II, according to Johannes Houwink ten Cate, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies in Amsterdam.
35 Years Of Investigation
In my 35 years of investigation, I have never seen anything like that, he claimed. Houwink ten Cate remarked, “There is no evidence. Major charges require a lot of evidence. Van den Bergh himself had spent a significant portion of 1944 hiding, he said.
The inquiry was “full of inaccuracies” and resembled a “conspiracy theory,” according to John Goldsmith, the executive director of the Anne Frank Fund that Otto Frank founded.
Ben Wallet, an Amsterdam historian, stated to Der Spiegel, a German news publication, that the investigators’ evidence was “as unstable as a house of cards.”
Leiden University’s Bart van der Boom referred to the findings as “slanderous garbage.”
Suspended Book Printing
Ambo Anthos, the publisher of “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” in the Dutch language, allegedly wrote to the Canadian author of the book, Rosemary Sullivan, as well as the investigative team to complain that the publishing house should have taken a more “critical stance” on the book.