Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains one of the most widely read books in the world. Flickering between hope and despair, the account of the life of a Jewish teenager in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse gave voice and a face to the millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet all these years one question has remained unanswered: who Alerted in 1944 to the hiding place of the Nazi search party, Anne Frank and her family? Two Dutch police interrogations and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusions... Then, in 2016, a team of investigators led by an experienced FBI agent used modern crime-solving techniques in this cold case. And decided to bring technology. And now, he believes he has an answer—which we'll share with you tonight—to a question that perverts historians and haunts Holland: Who was responsible for the betrayal?
Vince Pankoke rolled up his badge and gun. He was two years into a comfortable Florida retirement when his phone call came in the spring of 2016.
Vince Pancock: I got a call from a colleague in the Netherlands who said, "If you-- if you're lying on the beach, we have a case for you."
John Wertheim: Were you lying on the beach?
Vince Pancock: Me-- I was actually driving to the beach. I w-- (laughs) I wasn't quite there yet.
Pankok spent three decades as an FBI special agent targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work also took him to the Netherlands, where his investigative raids made a mark.
John Wertheim: Were you looking to go back when he told you what it was about?
Vince Pancock: When he told me it was, you know, try to solve the mystery of the reason for the raid—for Anne Frank and the other attachments. I wanted to hear more.
Four thousand miles away, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens, a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, was asking a credible investigator to dig a question about who he thinks Hollande has ever been able to capture the essence of human nature. not fully calculated.
Thijs Baynes: For me, it was really important to examine what makes us-- let go of each other. The area where Anne Frank lived is very ordinary. And it's a very hot area with butchers and doctors and policemen. They worked together. they loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people start cheating on each other. How could this happen?
John Wertheim: Out of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do you think it resonates the way it does?
Thijs Baynes: I think people were shown right after the war - the concentration camps, the atrocities that happened, it was appalling. And, all of a sudden you find this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. And she comes out of the darkness as a lighthouse. And then I think humanity said, "This is who we are.
Cheating a fellow Dutchman to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but two police investigations and an entire library of books devoted to the Anne Frank case led to neither convictions nor definitive conclusions.
John Wertheim: The question of who betrayed Anne Frank was being investigated for years. What was going to make your investigation different from the one before it?
Thijs Bayens: If it is a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police. So we set it up as a cold case.
Like many, Pankoke read the diary in middle school in western Pennsylvania, and it made a mark. There wouldn't be any purge walks or busted crime syndicates here, but he was concerned... with caution.
John Wertheim: You hear, "We're going to go back and see Anne Frank." And it may have some scholarly media fabrication ring in it. Did this worry you?
Vince Pancock: Oh, it did. Did it. Because as a career investigator, I didn't want to get involved with any sort of tabloid type of investigation.
John Wertheim: You had to make sure it was serious.
Vince Pancock: Let's face it. I mean, respect the diary, respect - Anne Frank, we had to treat it with the utmost respect.
What ultimately sealed it for Vince Pancock guaranteed complete autonomy. Ground rules: Thijs Baynes will oversee the operation and may film the process for a documentary he's making. There would be a book about it, which helped finance the project, along with funding from the city of Amsterdam, but it was going to be an independent venture with serious investigators. And Vince Pankoke was going to lead the dig.
John Wertheim: You must have done cold cases before. Before that, what was the biggest difference in the time between when you were contacted and when the crime took place?
Vince Pancock: At the time it was a crime of about five years.
John Wertheim: It's been 75 years. So a little different.
Vince Pancock: It's very different--
John Wertheim: It's more than cold.
Vince Pancock: It-- yes. It was frozen.
To overcome, Pankok had to create his own blueprint. He knew that there would be more to solve than any other human and that artificial intelligence could be a secret weapon.
The dream team of an FBI man assembled ... an investigative psychologist, a war crime investigator, historians, criminologists and an army of archival researchers.
John Wertheim: What did all these people with disparate skills bring to it?
Vince Pancock: They came up with a different point of view. All of these skills help us understand and put into context, you know, a crime that happened in 1944. We have to see things differently.
Together, they delve into a familiar story: The Frank family had moved from Germany to Amsterdam to escape the rise of Hitler. He found security in Holland, where Otto Frank ran a construction business. But then the Nazis invaded in 1940. Two years later, Franks—Otto, wife Edith, Anne and his sister Margot—along with four other Jewish family friends hid in an annex behind Otto's warehouse. Today, it is preserved as a museum. Dr. Gertjan Brock, a historian at the Anne Frank House, shows us inside.
John Wertheim: Oh, whoa. This--it's famous--
Dr. Gertzen Brock: This bookcase is-
John Wertheim: --Bookcase.
Dr. Gertzen Brock: Th-- This is the bookcase. It was used to hide the entrance to the hiding place.
The bookcase helped protect the Franks, as did some of Otto's close associates in the warehouse who were in secret.
Dr. Gertzen Brock: We go in, pay attention to your mind.
John Wertheim: Oh, whoa.
After the raid, the Nazis took everything that was not destroyed. Entertainment shows what it looked like. Two cramped floors, 761 days, more than two excruciating years indoors. Office workers brought food and supplies, but could not make a sound during the eight days that were hidden. By night they could listen to the radio, desperately plotting updates on this map from the front.
Dr. Gertzen Brock: A newspaper clipping soon after-- D-Day, hence June, 1944. Perhaps with pins trying to follow the progress of the Allied forces in the days and weeks that followed.
John Wertheim: It's June, 1944--
Dr. Gertzen Brock: June 4th--
John Wertheim: --so--
Dr. Gertgen Brock: So there's hope because Allied forces are on the way. His life depended on what would happen.
The walls of Anne's bedroom, familiar to any teenager, are preserved from the day she was moved. Here, he covertly described the monotony and horrors of life. He wrote in January 1943, "Things outside are terrible, day and night." "These poor people are being dragged away, with only a bag and little money."
His last entry was on August 1, 1944. She was 15 years old.
John Wertheim: Take me to the day of the raid. It's summer 1944 and what happens on that day?
Dr. Gertzen Brock: It's a hot day, sunny. And around 10:30, between 10:30 and 11:00, some men come in.
He was a spy for a Dutch police unit working with the Nazis. An SS officer named Silberbauer led the team. He demanded to be shown around the warehouse.
Dr. Gertzen Brock: They end up in front of the bookcase, which is hiding the entrance to the annex. And I think it's important to realize that two of the policemen present were seasoned detectives, well experienced. They were the first to discover this type of building in the inner city of Amsterdam.
They knew something might be behind that bookcase. Shocked residents they found they were pulled out. On the floor behind them, the diary of Anne—a quick-thinking office worker loyal to the Franks—is preserved. Of the eight, Otto Frank was the only survivor. Another 100,000 were among Dutch Jews - 3/4 of the country's Jewish population - to die at the hands of the Nazis. In a 1964 interview with CBS, Otto described what had happened when his family was put on cattle cars for Auschwitz a month after their capture.
Otto Frank: The last transport went to Auschwitz on September 4, 1944. Well, when we got to Auschwitz there were men standing with the club - women here, men there. We were separated at the station, so the women went to the Birkenau camp and we went from the station to the Auschwitz camp and I never saw my family again.
After the war, Otto Frank was determined to find out who betrayed the hiding place to the Nazis. This question was asked by many readers after his daughter's diary was published in 1947. But after a few years, Otto suddenly stopped watching—more on that curious decision later. When Vince Pancock went to Amsterdam to begin his search, his first stop, naturally, was the crime scene.
Vince Pankoke: I called it the world's most visited crime scene because so many people from all over the world, you know, millions of people come here.
John Wertheim: So when you first got here, what were you looking for?
Vince Pancock: Well, as an investigator I want to see what's in the area. Of course I want to see inside the building. I want to reconstruct how the actual arrest took place and who participated in it.
Pankok and his team spent hours looking for any clues, no matter how far away.
They also put on the outer cover—almost the same today as it was then.
Vince Pancock: This is the courtyard that is behind the annex. And this-- as you can see, it's completely enclosed. This courtyard area is surrounded by neighboring buildings.
John Wertheim: I'm thinking of a cough that audible, a window that pops open at the wrong time, the sheer risk factor here is extraordinary.
Vince Pancock: It's extraordinary. When we first started the case, one theory that stood out is that because of the raid, someone in the immediate area saw something, heard something, and reported it. So, therefore, we tracked and identified each and every resident living in this block and adjoining lanes.
Using an artificial intelligence program, Pankoke and his team mapped out potential threats. In the courtyard surrounding the annex, he found members of the Nazi Party and even well-known informers.
Vince Pancock: Everyone lives just a wall or two away from each other. When you take a look at the threats the question is not what caused the raid. The question may be: How did they last more than two years without being discovered?
John Wertheim: It strikes me in a case like this, one can be suspicious. A Nazi sympathizer, an informer, someone who walks by and hears a cough. How did you navigate it?
Vince Pancock: We had to consider all those options. The team and I sat down and we made a list of ways the contract could be compromised. You know, was it the carelessness of the people in the annex, maybe making a lot of noise or looking into the windows? You know, was it a betrayal?
John Wertheim: There's a theory that nobody betrayed the Frank family. Was it coincidence, or was it good detective work. You buy it at all?
Vince Pancock: No. No, I mean, we put that principle aside, you know, little by little.
John Wertheim: It doesn't play out the way it does, but for a specific tip.
Vince Pancock: Absolutely.
Vince Pancock, a 30-year veteran of the FBI, did a lot of cold cases, but none this cold. It had been more than seven decades since Anne Frank and her family were discovered at their hiding place in central Amsterdam and eventually kept on cattle cars headed for Auschwitz. As far as the Nazis betrayed the family, all witnesses were long dead, their evidence diminished over time, but Pankok relied on decades of experience and intuition, drawn from old case files. had begun.
Vince Pancock: In a typical cold case, you go to a file. You take it out. You read everything that was done in the previous investigation. Interviews, leads that followed.
The last two Dutch police investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding place—one in 1948 and the other in 1963—were not exactly a masterclass in detective work. And a lot of time had passed.
Vince Pancock: The files were incomplete. And they were scattered about a dozen different archives. Reports were missing. The witnesses had passed. Memories had failed.
Departing from the standard cold case playbook, Vince Pancock followed suit on what he could do. Otherwise he and his team had to adopt a new approach. He spent years at places like the archives of the city of Amsterdam, which proved to be a prime asset for the Dutch record-keeping investigations used so ruthlessly by the Nazis.
Together with Peter van Twisch—a veteran Dutch journalist who co-founded the project and led the research team—they showed us a set of objects they had dug up. Including residence card belonging to Anne Frank.
Peter van Twisch: You can see his name here: his first name, second name and his surname; and date of birth. Here you are "N.I." Let's see, what the Netherlands (PH) stands for Israelis (PH) - which is their religion.
John Wertheim: "Netherlands Israel." So this-
Peter van Twisch: Yeah, I don't--
John Wertheim: --He's a "Jew".
Peter van Twisch:- Know why-- she's Jewish, she was Jewish, yeah,
John Wertheim: Every Dutch resident should have had one of these?
Peter Van Twisk: Yeh. Yeh.
John Wertheim: It's -- it's very detailed, and it has his parents' birthdates on it.
Peter Van Twisk: Yeh. This is why it was easy enough for the Nazis to find people in the Netherlands and know who was Jewish or who was not.
John Wertheim: A piece of paper in the 40s, and you have everything you want to know about someone.
Peter Van Twisk: Yeh.
The team fed every morsel – letters, maps, photos, even entire books – into an artificial intelligence database developed specifically for the project. Then he let machine learning do its job.
Vince Pancock: It would identify relationships between people, addresses that were similar. And we were looking for those connections. Clues to solve it.
John Wertheim: Quantify how much time you saved.
Vince Pancock: Oh-- thousands and thousands of man hours.
John Wertheim: It also tells you what's garbage, what isn't, won't help in your case.
Vince Pancock: Oh yeah, because everything we do is eliminating the unnecessary.
The team paid special attention to arresting the records of that time. The Nazis were thrown into hell to rid the Netherlands of all Jews, part of the Final Solution. By 1942, Frank was among some 25,000 Jews hiding across the country. The Nazis were very adept at getting people to talk.
Vince Pancock: His specific MO was when he arrested someone, the first question he was asked was, "Do you know where any other Jews are hiding?" So what we did was that we chronicled all the arrests before and after the contract raid to try to find any connections, any loose threads that would show us that they went from one arrest to the next and eventually the contract. .
John Wertheim: And the implication is, "If you omit some of the names I'll make your sentence more lenient."
Vince Pancock: Yes.
John Wertheim: Effective?
Vince Pancock: Oh, that was very effective.
Before long, suspects surfaced. Dozens of them, like Willem van Maaren, an employee at the warehouse where Frank was hiding, were interviewed by Dutch police in their investigation.
Vince Pancock: He was prime suspect number one after the war. He is working in the warehouse downstairs. He was very fickle, suspicious. Actually a thief.
John Wertheim: So you say fickle, suspicious, thief. And yet, you ended up with him as a suspect.
Vince Pancock: Not treacherous though. He was not anti-Jewish. He had incentive n-- not to cheat them because if he did, he would lose his job, the business would shut down.
John Wertheim: What in particular are you looking for when you're considering suspects?
Vince Pancock: We see, did he have knowledge? We see their purpose. You know, what would be the purpose? Were they anti-Semitic? Were they trying to do this for money? And then the chance. Were they even in town?
John Wertheim: So this -- knowledge, motive, opportunity, I'm guessing that's what you were using when you infiltrated the drug cartel. I mean, it's standard FBI technology--
Vince Pancock: This is standard law enforcement technique.
John Wertheim: What kind of person would betray the Frank family?
Bram van der Meer: You would probably expect that a really bad person did that, a person-- I would say-- with a psychopathic mind- would do that.
Bram van de Meer knows psychopathic minds. He was an investigative psychologist with the National Police Force in the Netherlands. In Vince Pankoke's team, he analyzed the behavior and mindset of the suspects they were considering.
John Wertheim: This is your first instinct? So one had to be a psychopath to do this?
Bram van der Meer: Yes. But you have to be so careful. This is war. you are saved Your daily life is full of fear. Your family may be arrested the next day. You are thinking about your existence every day. So that's the case.
John Wertheim: There must have been a psychopath to do this in the void. But given the context--
Bram van der Meer: That's right.
John Wertheim: Then what kind of person could do that?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah, and then-- and then you get into a situation where it could be anyone.
Over time, his attention shifted to someone who, on the surface, would not have raised doubts. This suspect was not a neighbor of the Franks and did not work for them. But the FBI man's sixth sense worked. Arnold van den Berg was a prominent Jewish businessman in Amsterdam with a wife and children. After the invasion, he served on the Jewish Council, a body the Nazis nefariously set up to carry out their policies within the Jewish community. In exchange for doing the Nazis' bidding, members could be spared from the gas chambers.
Vince Pancock: We know from history that at the end of September 1943 the Jewish Council was dissolved and they were sent to the camps. We figured, well, if Arnold van den Berg is in a camp somewhere, he certainly can't be privy to information that will lead to a compromise of the contract.
John Wertheim: Was he camping somewhere?
Vince Pancock: Well, we thought he was. So after a lot of hard work we started the search. And we could not find Arnold van den Berg or any members of his immediate family in those camps.
John Wertheim: Why not?
Vince Pancock: Well, that was the question. If he was not in the camps, where was he?
Turns out, he was living an open life in the middle of Amsterdam, says Vince Pancock, only possible if van den Berg had some sort of advantage.
John Wertheim: To my ears, you're describing an operator. is that fair?
Vince Pancock: I would call him a chess player. He thought in terms of the layers of security by obtaining various exemptions from being kept in camps.
As it happened, van den Berg – who died in 1950 – had appeared before this in a report of the 1963 investigation. Although surprisingly, there was no clear follow-up action by the police.
Vince Pancock: We just read a short paragraph that mentioned that during the interview with Otto Frank, he told them that soon after the liberation, he received an anonymous note that revealed the address they were living at. The betrayer was identified as Arnold van den. Berg.
John Wertheim: Wait, wait. So, in the files, is there a reference to a note that Otto Frank obtained that mentions this specific name?
Vince Pancock: Remarkably so. Yes. It is listed there.
The note was so appealing to Otto Frank that he typed a copy for his record. Naturally, the veteran FBI person wanted to know: Where was that note? Any experienced investigator will tell you that, ideally, good shoe leather luckily comes decorated. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and the team traced the son of one of the former investigators. There in the son's house, buried in some old files: a copy of Otto's note.
John Wertheim: I just want to get it straight. You are talking to the son of an investigator. "Yes, 50 years ago my dad noticed this and I may have some material," he says.
Vince Pancock: Yes. we were lucky.
John Wertheim: You've held the metaphorical smoking gun in the FBI before. This anonymous note. Does it sound like a smoking gun?
Vince Pankoke: Not a smoking gun, but-- it seems-- like a hot gun with evidence-- of a bullet sitting nearby.
Back in the archives, he showed it to us, Otto's copy. The team used forensic techniques which they say substantiate this. That Handwriting You See: 1963 Spy's Scribblings. The anonymous note informed Otto that he had been deceived by Arnold van den Berg, who handed over to the Nazis a complete list of the addresses where the Jews were hiding.
Vince Pancock: Whoever was going to write this anonymous note knew-- that the lists had been changed.
John Wertheim: And that's the information you were able to confirm.
Vince Pancock: Peter was able to locate records, in the national archive, that indicated that - in fact - someone from the Jewish Council, of which Arnold Van Den Berg was a member, was changing the list of addresses where Jews were hiding .
John Wertheim: So what's your theory of the matter here? How and why would Arnold van den Berg have betrayed the Frank family?
Vince Pancock: Well, in his role as a founding member of the Jewish Council, he would have been aware of the addresses - where the Jews were hiding. When van den Berg lost all his chains to be exempted from going to the camps, he had to offer something valuable to the Nazis, which he and his wife had been contacted at the time to be safe.
John Wertheim: Is there any evidence he knew who he was leaving?
Vince Pankoke: There is no evidence to suggest that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses. Those were the only addresses that were provided-- where Jews were known to have been hiding.
We contacted the foundations Otto Frank started in Switzerland and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam – neither of whom formally participated in the investigation – to try to find out if they could provide any other evidence. who can trap or clear Arnold van den Berg. The Anne Frank House said they couldn't. The foundation is submitting comments until they see the full results of the investigation.
The Cold Case team begins to face the real possibility that Otto Frank may know the identity of the betrayer. They thought, what's the reason, will Otto have to keep it with him?
Vince Pancock: He knew that Arnold van den Berg was Jewish, and in this post-war period, anti-Semitism was still around. So maybe he realized that if I bring it up again, with Arnold van den Berg being Jewish, it will only fuel the fire further. But we have to bear in mind that the fact that he was Jewish meant that he was placed in a precarious position by the Nazis to do something to save his life.
The team wrestled with these ethical questions. The filmmaker and documentarian Thijs Bynes, who conceived the project, wondered whether the revelation would be fodder for the bigoted and anti-Semitism.
John Wertheim: The conclusion was that this perpetrator was a Jewish man who by all accounts was doing what he had done to protect his family.
Thijs Baynes: Yes.
John Wertheim: What was your feeling when you heard this?
Thijs Baynes: I found it very painful. Perhaps you could say that I too expected nothing like this to happen.
John Wertheim: Why?
Thijs Baynes: Because I think the pain of all these people has been put in a position that is very difficult for us to understand.
John Wertheim: I suspect that when it comes out people around the world are going to be uncomfortable with the idea that one Jew betrayed another Jew.
Thijs Beyonce: I hope so.
John Wertheim: You hope they will be?
Thijs Baynes: Yes. Because it shows you just how bizarre the Nazi regime really was, and how they brought people to do these horrible things. The-- The real question is, what would I have done? That is the real question.
Throughout the project, Beyoncé sought advice from Menachem Sebagh, an Orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam who also serves as the chief Jewish pastor in the Dutch army.
John Wertheim: Is more good being served here?
Menachem Sebbag: I hope so. I really hope so. I hope people will understand that what Nazi ideology did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize the Jewish people. And to go back in history and seek the truth and find the truth is really giving back to the Jewish people their own humanity. Even if it means that the Jewish people are sometimes seen as not doing what is morally right. This gives them their own humanity back, because that's how humans are when they face existential threats.
After years of investigating this cold case seven decades old, we had a fictional one for Vince Pankoke.
John Wertheim: You're back to being an FBI agent. You have this case that you made. You've got your evidence and you can bring it to the prosecutor, the U.S. hand over to the attorney. Do you think you are having conviction?
Vince Pankoke: No. There may be some reasonable doubt.
John Wertheim: To be clear, this is a circumstantial matter.
Vince Pancock: It's a circumstantial matter, as many cases as there are. In today's crime solving, they want positive DNA evidence or video surveillance tapes. We can't give you any of this. But in a historical case that's out of date, with all the evidence we've found, I think it's pretty reassuring.
Now in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's found a new way to melt cold cases. He is surprised that an investigation that did not put anyone behind bars turns out to be the most important case in his career and what he believes brought the answer to a painful historical question.