A new book that suggests that a Jewish-Dutch notary gave away Anne Frank’s location to save his own family is in publishing limbo due to uncertainty about its key evidence. The Betrayal of Anne Frank was a publishing sensation when released on January 18.
The book’s hypothesis about a six-year cold case investigation to uncover who gave away the Frank family at the time of Holocaust. The Franks were finally identified by the Gestapo in August 1944, having hidden in a secret annex in a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam for about 2 years. Then the whole family were deported by the Nazis, to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anne Frank expired just at the age of 15 years at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
While living in Amsterdam, she wrote her eminent diary, which was later published by her father Otto Frank in 1947.
Printing of book suspended
Ambo Anthos, the publisher of the Dutch language edition of ‘The Betrayal of Anne Frank’, has now written to the book’s canadian author, Rosemary Sullivan, and the investigation team to say the house should have taken a more critical stance. The authors of the book apologised to the people who might feel offended by the book.
Theory of Frank’s betrayal may not be a blunder
Though the cold case investigators included former US FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and about 20 historians, criminologists and data specialists, some have questioned the evidence, which amounts to a single anonymous letter. Otto Frank received the letter and it pointed out Van den Bergh as a member of the Jewish council who was given preferential treatment by the Nazis for giving away the hiding places of fellow Jews.
The chief of the Anne Frank Fund John Goldsmith told the Swiss newspaper that the investigation was full of errors and equivalent to a conspiracy theory.