Critical report presented on "The Betrayal of
Anne
Frank". German version unavailable. Historian hired
by German publisher
distances himself from the book. Who was the hired
Dutch historian? Mysterious
advertisement in "Het Parool". An investigation into
the recovery of
a 100,000 euro subsidy is still underway.
Statistical errors. Interviews with
the granddaughter of the notary.Book still in Canadian Book Top-10
Prior
to the article about this report, a look back at the
develop-ments since part
3-IV of this series.
Germany
Verlagsgruppe
HarperCollins, the publisher of the German
trans-lation, still
does not know when and if the German version - Der
Verrat an Anne Frank - will
be released, spokeswoman Anne-Marie Mamar told us
today.
Historian Dieter Pohl, professor of
modern history at the University of
Klagenfurt and specialised in the Nazi
administration in occupied Eastern
Europe and the Holocaust in Poland and the Ukraine,
who was named by the
publisher as a collaborating expert in the
pre-publication for the German
version, no longer wants his name to be associated
with it, according to
Christoph Gunkel in Der
Spiegel.
Pohl: "I found the whole cold-case
approach rather unappealing, but that's a matter of taste.
Nevertheless, the
publisher was
quite insistent and asked if they could use my name after all. In the end I
agreed. At
that moment, I didn't realise what a time bomb I was sitting on."
But
what exactly was Pohl's role? After all, he is not
specialised in the German
occupation of the Netherlands.
Der Spiegel: "According to Pohl,
he could not have checked the main theory
of the book, that the people in hiding in the Secret
Annex were betrayed by a
Jewish notary, because he was not familiar with all
the details. That's why he
had agreed with the publisher that he would only
examine the parts of the book
that generally dealt with the Nazi occupation and
the historical
background."
Really…
Although
there is only a press summary of the German version,
the affair has already
damaged his reputation, says Pohl. He will not
participate in a possible
revised version of the book, which was announced
earlier by the German
publisher. Pohl will not answer the question whether it is even possible to correct and rework the book. Historian Gerhard
Hirschfeld, who
specialises in the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands,
did so recently, in
Welt: he judged that the structure of the
book as a whole was
"unsalvageable".
The German publisher had named a second
historian as collaborator on the German
version: Matthias Michel. But neither Der
Spiegel nor Reporters
Online were able to find out exactly who he is
and what his merits are. And
that brings us to the Dutch version.
Proditione Media BV, the company behind the cold
case team and mentioned as
copyright holder on the title page of the book
alongside author Rosemary Sullivan, claimed on February 16: "The (Dutch)
publisher has had the
manuscript read internally by a historian."
Actually
nothing about that is mentioned in the book. So who is this
historian?
Proditione and publisher Ambo Anthos did not answer
Reporters Online's
question about this.
To top of page.
A mysterious advertisement in Het Parool
Although publisher Ambo Anthos had already announced
on 31 January that it
would not be printing new copies of the book Het
verraad van Anne Frank
(The Betrayal of Anne Frank), this
advertisement appeared in the bottom
right-hand corner of page 7 of the Amsterdam local
newspaper Het Parool on 24
February.
[Already the most talked about book of 2022.
Available in your bookstore]
Advertising a book that is not going to be reprinted? Strange. Reporters
Online
inquired at Ambo Anthos about the how and why of
this advert: no response.
We
then inquired at Proditione. That company receives
part of the royalties, so it
has an interest in further sales of the book. Again
no response.
"Ambo|Anthos
publishers is not responsible for the advertisement
of The Betrayal of Anne
Frank in Het Parool of 24 February.
Ambo|Anthos publishers does not place
advertisements for the book on any medium."
"Proditione
is not responsible for the advertisement of The Betrayal of Anne
Frank in Het
Parool of February 24. Proditione does not
place advertisements for the book on
any medium."
Who is responsible
So
we checked with the advertising department of Het
Parool. The woman who
processed the ad, which cost about 200 euros, said
that it had been delivered
by a regular customer, and that she therefore
accepted it without further ado.
That regular supplier was the advertising agency Auke
Smits in The Hague. A
spokesman confirms that it was arranged through
their company. He is not
allowed to say who the actual client is. He did say
that both the editors and
the advertising department of Het Parool
knew who the mysterious client
was, and that he therefore found it strange that we had been referred to Auke Smits, especially since he had had extensive contact with Parool
editor Hanneloes Pen about the ad. He gives us her
mobile number.
Hanneloes
Pen reacts with irritation when we ask her about the
controversial advert:
"We
put that right on Saturday. Just look in the
Saturday paper."
Now
Het Parool is a newspaper that is hardly
distributed outside Amsterdam.
We tell her that - as non-Amsterdam residents - we
have no access to the paper
version and that nothing about such a rectification
can be found online.
"I'll get back to you," she says, and she breaks off
the connection.
She doesn't come back to it.
Eventually,
one of our contacts from the illegal sector sends us
a scan of the
rectification. It reads:
“Correction
- In Thursday's edition of the newspaper, there was an
advertisement on page 7
for the book Het verraad van Anne Frank (The
Betrayal of Anne Frank).
This advertisement, which did not come from the
publisher or the cold case
team, should not have been published but due to an
internal error was
nevertheless included in the newspaper. We regret
this.”
This
"correction" does not answer the question of who actually commissioned
the
work. Moreover,
it fails to answer the question of why Het Parool, one of the two newspapers at the
forefront of
the uncritical promotional circus for the book, is
so anxious to protect the
identity of that person or company.
Casper
Albers, professor of statistics at the University of
Groningen, made an
important contribution to the discussion about the
book. In the Volkskrant
of 16 February, he pointed out recent legal
errors caused by incorrect
interpretations of probability calculations. The
best known example in the
Netherlands is the Lucia de Berk case: the nurse
who, on the basis of
statistical errors that were to have shown that she was responsible for several murders, was sentenced
to life
imprisonment in 2003. Only in 2010, after a review,
was she fully acquitted.
None of this prevented the Anne Frank
cold case team from using probability
calculations based on incomplete data to pin-point notary Arnold van den Bergh as the betrayer. And again:
nowhere in the
book is the "85% certainty" mentioned - in The
Betrayal of Anne
Frank the civil-law notary is designated as
the culprit with a probability bordering on
certainty.
The 100,000 euros from
Amsterdam taxpayers
In early
February,
Amsterdam alderman Touria Meliani stated that the
municipality of Amsterdam
would investigate whether the 100,000 euros that
had been made available to
Proditione Media (after their request for a
subsidy) could be reclaimed, because,
according to the alderman, the
investigation had been handled "carelessly and
negligently". A
spokesperson from the municipality of Amsterdam
told us on Friday March 18 that
this investigation is still ongoing. It is as yet
unknown when it will be
completed.
Interview
with granddaughter notary Arnold van den Bergh
In
both Trouw and Der Spiegel, interviews
appeared on March 18 with
Mirjam de Gorter, granddaughter of civil-law notary
Arnold van den Bergh, the
man designated as the betrayer in Anne Frank's
betrayal - on the basis of an
accumulation of unfounded assumptions and dubious
statements.
Trouw: "That her grandfather was one of the suspects was told to
her in
the second interview with the investigators. "But
the cold case team
always reassured me that there were several
scenarios." She was also not
prepared for a major media offensive. In short, she
feels 'cheated' by the
team."
In
the Spiegel interview, she says that she
and her husband also did
research on her grandfather. They found out that he
had been in hiding himself
since early 1944, months before the arrest of the
people in hiding in the
Secret Annex. And that he therefore had no motive
whatsoever for betraying
other people in hiding. They told this to the cold
case team - who simply
ignored this information.
The
granddaughter was only told a few days before the
presentation of the book that
her grandfather was the betrayer. According to cold
case team leader Pieter van
Twisk, this happened so late because the researchers
of the cold case team
"were bound to secrecy."
A
fallacy, because the main investigators of the cold
case team, by the way the
same people as the owners of Proditione Media BV,
had agreed among themselves
to keep all outsiders in the dark. Secrecy? Rather omertà.
Trouw: "De Gorter wants the American main publisher Harper
Collins to
take the book out of circulation immediately. The
publicity around her
grandfather has caused a lot of damage, she says.
"It really felt like a
war machine was coming over us, because the whole
world was repeating my
grandfather's name."
Meanwhile,
in Canada
Despite
all this, sales of the book continue. Last week,
the original English version
was still high on the Canadian bestseller list.
Unfortunately, no one could
tell us how many copies have been sold.
