The Hunt For Anne Frank’s Betrayer Continues – Now With High-Tech
Anne Frank Image by Getty
By Benjamin Gladstone August 5, 2019
The search for Anne Frank’s betrayer is still on – but now, it’s bolstered by high-tech research methods.
Former FBI agent Vincent Pankoke is directing a team of forensic scientists and others in the hunt for the person who turned Anne Frank and her family in to the Nazis, National Geographic reported. The “cold case” team is revisiting archival material with the help of a program developed by the data science company Xomnia and is using three-dimensional scanning technology to assess who might have heard a sound from the Frank family’s hiding place.
Over seventy years since Frank was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus, there is no clear answer as to why she and the others hiding with her were found. Some experts on the Frank family have expressed skepticism that the Frank family was betrayed at all.
“By asking ‘Who betrayed Anne Frank?,’ you actually assume tunnel vision already,” Anne Frank House researcher Gertjan Broek told National Geographic. “You leave out other options.”
Broek supports the theory that German and Dutch Nazis stumbled upon the Frank family’s hiding place during an investigation of suspicious activity related to ration coupons.
Frank’s diary, published by her father after her death, is today one of the most important texts in Holocaust education. After the eight people hiding in the attic with her were discovered, they were deported to concentration camps. Only Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, survived the Holocaust. When Frank died, she was 15.
Benjamin Gladstone is an intern at the Forward. Contact him by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @bensgladstone
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
