A sad and painful discovery in the story of Anne Frank

How will we be judged in 80 years time - for what is happening today. That we either condone, or close our eyes to. And no-one is holding a gun to our head.

I cannot judge him but I do wonder why he needs to be named? If he has surviving descendants how will they feel? It is such a famous betrayal.

No need to name him

My book arrives today. I guess you could say it is just one writer's story about the recent extensive research and findings, so unless it went to court there is no real proof. Three other people have been implicated and named over the years. I think this guy might be different due to some letter at the time? I read somewhere he had 3 daughters, one the same age as Anne, so they might even have been friends.

I agree with others it was a very difficult time and some people did what they had to do to survive.
It is is also not the first time that they to identify the mole and new candidates keep coming up

Such a tragedy for all involved

I can understand why a father would try to save his own children's lives by betraying others.

I am not saying I approve, but honest to God I could be afraid I would have made the same choice in his place. Most of us grew up believing that our first duty was to our own family, especially our own children,

Does anyone know if he suceeded in rescuing his own family?

My knowledge of the SS leads me to believe that they may well have rounded the traitor and his family up the week after Anne Franck and her family.

Yes, it is horrible that others were blamed for this betrayal, but at least they knew they were not guilty of it.

My understanding is that he gave a list of addresses of hiding places but did not necessarily know the people who lived there, or even if they were still there. I listened to an interview with the researchers of the project and they were very clear that this wasnt a case of assigning blame. And yes it was in order to save his own family.

But they have assigned blame Galaxy

They were very clear in the interview I heard annie that it wasnt a case of blame, that it was simply saying what they think happened without laying blame because of the issues we have discussed.

Evidence is circumstantial, I feel sorry for his family, as there is no proof.

I'm only a few chapters in, but as yet there has been no mention of accusing anyone, more the painstaking lengths they had to go to in order to even set up the investigation. Apparently betrayal is a a non forensic crime so the case team needed to work with cutting edge methods of information gathering. I am amazed at the number of experts on the team from so many different counties.

Josieann

OnwardandUpward

That's shockin Josieann. Do you think the person benefitted financially or otherwise for the exchange of information or that they were tortured for it?

I cannot think of a reason why a Jew would betray another Jew, but the times of covid have shown us that people have turned against people, divided over things like views about injections and masks, sadly.

I don't know OnwardandUpward but I assume he was saving himself and his family from the gas chamber. There is a book out about the investigation which I might read. What I want to know is why he revealed the hiding place at the very last minute when he would have known about it for years?

That's so sad Josieann and yet relatable.

I also think that the man and his family may have gone to the ovens anyway, despite sharing that information. I doubt the Nazi's were people of integrity.

The Dutch publisher of the book says that it has decided to suspend further prints of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank". I can't say I am surprised, apparently more work needs to be done around the claims that the informant had a list of Jews in hiding in Amsterdam.
There was some form of an apology to "people who may have been offended" by the book, so we must assume this to have have been the accused's family or the Jewish community. Understandably.
However, I might still hang onto my copy because a lot of the 6 year investigation and detail contains a wealth of historical information.

From early on, the Nazis "persuaded" Jews to betray other Jews to save themselves, but they never intended to save the Jews who betrayed others. Some of these Jews were the "Jewish Policemen".

Once the Jewish Policemen had given them all the information they wanted (usually about who the rabbi was and addresses of other Jews) they treated those people just like all the other Jews, or worse.

For example, in one Polish town I know of, they rounded up all the Jews in the town square in the summer of 1942 prior to selecting those to transport to Belzec, an extermination camp. Then they asked the Jewish policemen to come forward and hanged them in front of everyone present. This was a common pattern all over Poland.

I realise that many approached in this way were very frightened and must have been desperate to save themselves and their own families. In most cases, they were not saving themselves - only fooling themselves that they would be saved.

So the betrayal of Jewish families and their whereabouts as in the case of Anne Frank was a common method used by the Nazis to find all the Jews in an area and remove them from their homes to a ghetto. In Anne's case, her family were sent to a temporary camp and then to Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen where she, her sister and mother all died.

I’ve read widely around this subject and you’re absolutely correct ramblingrose about the Nazis using Jewish people to do much of the ‘dirty’ work. Initially they and their families were protected from deportation but eventually they found they were treated in exactly the same way as everyone else.