Who betrayed Anne Frank?

What is known

On 4 August 1944 police officers came to Prinsengracht 263 and found the eight people hiding in the rooms at the back. They arrested all eight, and two of the people who had been helping them. Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to survive, and the helpers always agreed on the date.

At least three officers took part. They were led by Karl Silberbauer, an Austrian serving in the SD, the German security service, and two of the others were Dutch policemen. No official record of the arrest exists. Almost everything known about that day comes from what people remembered and said afterwards.

The telephone call

For a long time the accepted story was that someone telephoned the SD that morning and gave the address away. That story comes from Silberbauer himself. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down in 1963, and Silberbauer then said that a Dutchman had called. But his statements did not agree with one another, and later he said he was not sure there had been a call at all.

The Anne Frank House points to a practical difficulty as well. By the summer of 1944 private telephone lines had been cut off on a large scale, so an ordinary citizen would have had little chance to make such a call. Its conclusion is that a telephone tip-off has never been proved, and can no longer be proved.

The suspects

Otto Frank and the helpers were convinced they had been betrayed. Their suspicion fell on Willem van Maaren, who worked in the warehouse downstairs, and in 1947 they filed a complaint against him. The investigation did not prove his guilt, and he fought the accusation. A second investigation, after Silberbauer had been found, produced new information and still no evidence against him.

Since then books and biographies have put forward one name after another. The Anne Frank House has examined them and finds that none has been sufficiently substantiated. The list of people accused at one time or another is, in its own words, too long to give in full.

The cold case of 2022

In January 2022 a team led by a former FBI agent announced that it had very probably found the answer. It named Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary in Amsterdam, and suggested that he had passed on addresses of people in hiding to protect himself and his family. The claim went round the world.

It did not stand. The Anne Frank House said the same week that the theory rested on a number of assumptions and that no conclusive evidence had been found. Two months later it reported that historians who had looked into the matter had shown that, on the available information, Van den Bergh cannot be accused of betraying the people in the Annex. The Dutch publisher recalled the book.

The director of the Anne Frank House, Ronald Leopold, put the principle plainly: nobody should go down in history as the betrayer of Anne Frank unless there is conclusive evidence.

Perhaps nobody did

In 2016 the Anne Frank House published research that asked a different question: not who betrayed them, but why the police came to the building at all. More was going on at Prinsengracht 263 than people in hiding. Two men from whom the helpers bought illegal ration coupons had been arrested for black-market dealing. A man was working in the warehouse off the books.

So it is possible that the officers came about ration-coupon fraud or illegal work, and found the people behind the bookcase by chance. The study does not prove this, and it does not rule out betrayal. What it shows is that after decades of research, the honest answer is still that we do not know.