The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation

by Rosemary Sullivan

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A decades-long puzzle: Who betrayed the Franks to the Nazis in 1944, after two years hiding in an attic, behind a bookcase, in the heart of occupied Amsterdam? Enter a driven, former FBI agent and a team of historians, profilers, analysts and scientists, using modern cold case investigative techniques, and an author who knows how to write a sweeping and complicated story with all the suspense, punch and human drama of a great mystery well told.

Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team—led by an obsessed retired FBI agent—has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?

Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal that teenaged Anne Frank kept during World War II. Anne, along with her family and four other people, lived in an attic in Amsterdam until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But although many works—journal articles, books, plays and novels—have been devoted to Anne’s story, no one has yet conclusively explained how these eight people managed to hide, undetected, for over two years, and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.

With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents—some never-before seen—and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the cold case team painstakingly pieced together the months leading up to the infamous arrest and came to a shocking conclusion. 

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, is the riveting story of this mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behaviour of both the captives and their captors, and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam, a place where no matter how wealthy, educated or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062892386
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	41,420
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

ROSEMARY SULLIVAN, the author of fifteen books, is best known for her recent biography Stalin’s Daughter.  Published in twenty-three countries, it won the Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and was a finalist for the PEN /Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Her book Villa Air-Bel was awarded the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History. She is a professor emeritus at the university of Toronto and has lectured in Canada, the U.S., Europe, India, and Latin America.  

Table of Contents

Preface: Memorial Day and the Memory of Unfreedom xi

Part I The Background Story

1 The Raid and the Green Policeman 3

2 The Diary of Anne Frank 9

3 The Cold Case Team 14

4 The Stakeholders 23

5 "Let's See What the Man Can Do!" 29

6 An Interlude of Safety 35

7 The Onslaught 41

8 Prinsengracht 263 48

9 The Hiding 51

10 You Were Asked. You Said Yes. 56

11 A Harrowing Incident 63

12 Anatomy of a Raid 67

13 Camp Westerbork 74

14 The Return 79

15 The Collaborators 85

16 They Aren't Coming Back 90

Part II Cold Case Investigation

17 The Investigation 97

18 The Documents Men 106

19 The Other Bookcase 110

20 The First Betrayal 113

21 The Blackmailer 121

22 The Neighborhood 129

23 The Nanny 137

24 Another Theory 143

25 The "Jew Hunters" 148

26 The V-Frau 155

27 No Substantial Proof, Part I 164

28 "Just Go to Your Jews!" 170

29 Probing Memory 181

30 "The Man Who Arrested Frank Family Discovered in Vienna" 190

31 What Miep Knew 198

32 No Substantial Proof, Part II 202

33 The Greengrocer 208

34 The Jewish Council 219

35 A Second Look 224

36 The Dutch Notary 228

37 Experts at Work 237

38 A Note Between Friends 246

39 The Typist 250

40 The Granddaughter 255

41 The Goudstikker Affair 260

42 In the Archives 266

43 A Secret Well Kept 276

Epilogue: The Shadow City 289

Afterword Vince Pankoke 299

Postscript 305

Acknowledgments 313

Archives and Institutes 323

Glossary 325

Notes 337

Bibliography 369

Index 377

Editorial Reviews

There are words of such sorrow in The Betrayal of Anne Frank that they may lodge forever in the cupboards of your mind.” — Winnipeg Free Press

From the Publisher

Hums with living history, human warmth and indignation….Sullivan circles all of these possibilities like Agatha Christie with Zoom and a time machine.

New York Times

"The Betrayal of Anne Frank is a stunning piece of historical detective work, cleverly structured and grippingly written."

Telegraph (UK)

There are words of such sorrow in The Betrayal of Anne Frank that they may lodge forever in the cupboards of your mind.

Winnipeg Free Press

08/01/2021

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is among the most-read books in the world, but despite reams of studies no one has been able to determine who betrayed its author and her family. Finally, as recounted here by award-winning Canadian author Sullivan, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke stepped in with a team of investigators, examining over tens of thousands of pages of documents and interviewing descendants of people familiar with the Franks to come to the conclusions relayed here.

Library Journal

★ 2022-01-26
An extraordinary tale of modern science and old-fashioned gumshoe work applied to a world-renowned crime 80 years after the fact.

On Aug. 4, 1944, a German “Jew-hunting unit” searched an Amsterdam warehouse and discovered the family of young Anne Frank in a hidden apartment. The Franks had been sheltering there for more than two years, shielded by paterfamilias Otto’s workers. He alone survived the death camps. Hauntingly, as Sullivan writes, the last sighting of Anne was at Auschwitz, where, “delirious with typhus,” she was “naked except for a blanket covering her shoulders.” The officer who led that German squad wound up as an inspector in the Austrian police, while Otto spent his life overseeing Anne’s memory through the publication of her diary. But who exposed the Franks’ hiding place to the Nazis? That was the question some 50 data scientists, historians, forensic scientists, and other researchers, mostly Dutch, had before them, and it’s the overarching question of this book. With the aid of retired FBI special agent Vince Pankoke, the team used artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and other modern methods to find out, examining numerous possible suspects. Only one met the familiar categories of knowledge, motive, and opportunity. The investigative team determined that he was a Jewish notary who used the Franks’ sanctum as a bargaining chip to save his own family. On returning to Amsterdam, Otto received an anonymous note revealing his betrayer’s identity. He did not broadcast it because, the investigators conclude, Frank may have recognized the man’s desperate situation as he made that fateful decision to collaborate. Sullivan’s narrative, full of twists and turns and dead-end leads, commands attention at every page, dramatic without being sensational. She writes, memorably, of Otto’s work after the death of their Judas: “He wanted [everyone] to know that fascism builds slowly and then one day it is an iron wall that looms and cannot be circumvented.”

Every reader of Anne Frank’s Diary will want to have this superbly rendered tale of scholarly detection at hand.

Kirkus Reviews