Cold case team shines new light on betrayal of Anne Frank

A journalist takes images of pictures of Anne Frank at the renovated Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands (Peter Dejong/AP)

A cold case team that combed through evidence for five years in a bid to unravel one of the Second World War’s enduring mysteries has reached what it calls the “most likely scenario” of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family.

Their answer, outlined in a new book called The Betrayal Of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Canadian academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, is that it could have been a prominent Jewish notary called Arnold van den Bergh, who disclosed the secret annex hiding place of the Frank family to German occupiers to save his own family from deportation and murder in Nazi concentration camps.