[glib]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60024228

Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish man in Amsterdam has been identified as betraying the Franks.

He was a member of the Amsterdam Jewish Council, which was forced to implement Nazi policy in Jewish areas, until it disbanded in 1943 and members were sent to concentration camps.

However Arnold was not sent to a camp, with suggestions that a former member of this group had been ‘feeding the Nazis with information’ in order to keep him and his wife safe.

Evidence has also been found that Otto Frank, Anne’s dad, KNEW about Arnold, however didn’t say anything ‘as not to re-light anti Semitism’

Otto died in August 1980


Pictured: accused betrayer Arnold van den Berg

[Nicky91]

https://nltimes.nl/2022/01/17/anne-f...-jewish-notary

The hiding place of Anne Frank and her family may have been betrayed to the Nazis by a Jewish notary, according to a 6-year-long study of the betrayal using modern techniques. The researchers believe that prominent Amsterdam notary Arnold van den Bergh passed on Jewish families' hiding addresses to the Germans in an attempt to protect his own family, NOS reports.

The researchers stressed that they found no definitive device, but Otto Frank seems to have taken the theory seriously. It is primarily based on an anonymous note Otto Frank received shortly after the war. The researchers managed to track down a copy of the note in a police officer's family archive. It read: "Your hiding place in Amsterdam was reported to the Jüdische Auswanderung in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat, by A. van den Bergh, who at the time lived near Vondelpark, O. Nassaulaan. At the J.A. there was a whole list of addresses he passed on."

Previous investigations into the betrayal of the Frank family disregarded the note. "Van den Bergh was a member of the Jewish Council, and he was arrested in September 1943, so then he would have had to pass on everything from a concentration camp in August 1944. That seems unlikely. Until we found out that he was not in a camp at all," journalist Pieter van Twisk, one of the Dutch researchers, said to NOS.

According to the researchers, it turned out that Van den Bergh did everything in his power to keep his family out of the concentration camps. As a prominent member of the Jewish Council, he was given a temporary reprieve from deportation. He also managed to convince German official Calmeyer that he was Jewish while arranging a hiding place for his daughters. "He was simply a very smart man who played it safe. Someone who played three-dimensional chess," Van Twisk said.

In 1944, Van den Bergh ran into trouble. His deportation reprieve expired, and after an argument with an NSB colleague, his Calmeyer status was revoked. The researchers believe that this was the moment Van den Bergh decided to pass on the addresses of Jewish people in hiding to the Germans, including that of the Frank family.

The researchers acknowledge that they don't have conclusive evidence, and there are still many questions. "You would like to know exactly how Van den Bergh did it, and we don't know that. You would, of course, also want to know who wrote that anonymous note, and we don't know that either," Van Twisk said to the broadcaster. "I think there are still more pieces of the puzzle to be found. It would be fantastic if more would surface as a result of this research. Perhaps more people received anonymous notes after the war."

Retired FBI detective Vince Pankoke called this the longest and most complex investigation he's ever been involved in, with a mountain of data, lost records, and deceased witnesses. But he is confident in their conclusion. "This was not a cold case. The case was frozen," he said to NOS. "Because there is no DNA evidence or video images in such an old case, you will always have to rely on circumstantial evidence. Yet our theory has a probability of at least 85 percent. We don't have a smoking gun, but we have a hot weapon with empty casings next to it."

[Nicky91]

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/0...lish-rebuttal/

UMM LOL

The Dutch publisher of a controversial book on the betrayal of Anne Frank has withdrawn the book, after a detailed rebuttal by a team of historical experts. Ambo Anthos publishers apologised in English and Dutch and said that ‘based on the conclusions of this report, we have decided that effective immediately, the book will no longer be available’, and bookstores should return their stock.

Meanwhile the granddaughter of Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh, who was accused by a ‘cold case team’ and author Rosemary Sullivan of betraying Anne Frank, called on HarperCollins to stop global publication. At a presentation in Amsterdam on Tuesday evening, given in English for the attention of a worldwide audience, eminent historians refuted the claim that Van den Bergh betrayed Anne Frank’s family as well as other Jewish people in hiding.

Unreliable They have published a peer-reviewed report criticising the argumentation and use of historical sources by a ‘cold case’ team that took six years, artificial intelligence, public subsidy and the help of a retired FBI detective to reach its conclusion. The historians claim there is no credible evidence that there were lists of addresses of Jewish people in hiding, give evidence that months before the raid on the secret annex, Van den Bergh had gone into hiding in Laren, and say an anonymous note accusing him contains factual inaccuracies and is unreliable. Mirjam de Gorter, granddaughter of Van den Bergh, addressed the Canadian book author and publisher directly, saying her own story had been ‘distorted’, interviews with her requested ‘under false pretences’ and accusing the cold case team of displaying ‘a profoundly immoral way of thinking’.

‘Injustice’ ‘I would like to make an urgent appeal to the American publisher HarperCollins, to all other publishers involved and to any potential filmmakers,’ she said. ‘Take the book out of circulation, refrain from making films of television series with this story as their subject. With this story, you are exploiting the story of Anne Frank, you are falsifying history and you are contributing to great injustice.’ She particularly objected to the way an interview with her was used late in the book in presenting the judgement that Van den Bergh was the accuser, and that she had no chance to read what was written about her and her family in advance. ‘Without such a plot, with a Jewish man as the betrayer of Anne Frank, nobody would have been interested,’ she claimed. ‘This case is not about me but the whole context of the story in which, out of the blue, my grandfather Arnold van den Bergh has been portrayed worldwide as a Jewish scapegoat, moreover Anne Frank’s international prominence as an symbol of the Holocaust is exploited in a particularly dishonest way.’

Distress Since the book was published in January, there has been a storm of criticism from historians. Family members have also expressed their criticism and distress. Ruben Vis, general secretary of the Organisation of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands (Nik) claimed that the book’s ‘abhorrent’ conclusions had caused ‘colossal’ damage in terms of anti-Semitism and to Holocaust survivors. Hanco Jürgens, moderator of the presentation, called on the cold case team to look at the new historical report and then revise its conclusions. ‘Tonight a respected Dutch publishing house Ambo Anthos decided to withdraw the book and stop publishing it in the Netherlands,’ he said. ‘We all hope that HarperCollins will do the same.’ The cold case team has since January defended its conclusions, saying that the criticisms have felt like a ‘witch hunt’.

[The Slim Reaper]

Where exactly were you in the the 1940's, Nicky? All seems a bit suspicious to me