In an interview with the CBS ’60 Minutes program, veteran FBI agent Vince Pancock said he was able to find out who the man who leaked the location of Anne Frank and her family to the hiding place in Amsterdam to the Nazi search team. Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to which she was sent from typhoid fever.
“The investigation revealed that Arnold van den Berg, a prominent Jewish businessman who served on the Jewish Council of the Nazis, was the one who reported Frank and her family to the authorities,” Pancock said in an interview. For years historians have grappled with the question of who is actually responsible, a question that has haunted the Netherlands.
The FBI agent detailed: “I assembled an investigative team that included an investigating psychologist, war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists and military archives investigators. The goal was to figure out who revealed the family’s hiding place. “Was there carelessness on the part of the people living in the hiding place? Maybe there was too loud a noise? Did they see them in the windows? Was it a betrayal?”
Pancock said the investigative team, which included 20 investigators, criminologists and historians, investigated using Dutch documents from the period. “The Nazis intended to cleanse the Netherlands of all Jews. That was part of the final solution. In 1942 there were about 25,000 Jews hiding around the country. The Nazis were skilled in their ability to get people to talk.” In order to effectively apprehend Jews who were in hiding, the Nazis apprehended people to donate information about them, an effective way of speaking in order to receive a lighter sentence. This method led to the marking of dozens of suspects by Pancock and his team.
When the team went through the records, the FBI agent identified Van den Berg as a suspect because his Lat family had never been sent to the concentration camps. Pancock claims that Wanden Berg lived a normal and routine life in Amsterdam, while many Jews suffered harassment and deportation to concentration camps.
However, Pancock noted that “one must remember that the fact that he was a Jew put him in an intolerable situation by the Nazis. He had to do something to save his life.”
