Thijs Bayens: If it's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police.
What was gonna make your investigation different than the ones before it? Jon Wertheim: This question of who betrayed Anne Frank, that had been investigated for years. And then I think humanity said, "This is who we are.īetraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but two police probes and a whole library of books dedicated to the Anne Frank case, yielded neither convictions nor definitive conclusions. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And, suddenly you find this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. Thijs Bayens: I think right after the war people were shown the concentration camps, the atrocities that took place, the horror. Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do you think this one resonates the way it does? And suddenly people start to betray on each other. And it's a very warm area with the butcher and the doctor and the policeman. The area where Anne Frank lived is very normal. Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really important to investigate what makes us- give up on each other. He was two years into a comfortable Florida retirement, when his phone rang in the spring of 2016. Vince Pankoke had turned in his badge and gun. And now, they believe they have an answer-one we'll share with you tonight-to a question that's bedeviled historians, and haunted Holland: who was responsible for the betrayal? Anne Frank
Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and technology to this cold case. Blinkering between hope and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager's life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave voice and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family's hiding place? Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusion. Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world.