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  March 25, 2022

The canard of

The Betrayal of Anne Frank (5)

Rumours in Germany


mysteries in Holland


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


By Bart FM Droog

[this page is part of the Betrayal of Anne Frank. A 21st Century Canard files]


On Tuesday 22 March, the bilingual report "Het verraad van Anne Frank: een weerlegging / The betrayal of Anne Frank: a refutation" was published. The report by subject specialists critically examines the investigation as done by the so-called "Anne Frank Cold Case Team".

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.

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A mysterious Dutch historian

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.

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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.

But on the site of Ambo Anthos as well as on that of the cold case team these statements appear:

"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.

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Statistical error

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.

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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.



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This article was co-facilitated by Steunfonds Freelance Journalisten.

This article is  a translation of 'Gerommel in Duitsland en mysterieus gedoe in Nederland. De canard van 'Het verraaad van Anne Frank'. De Tweede Wereldoorlog als industrie (3-V)', Reporters Online, Haarlem, March 21, 2022.
Translation: Droog Magazine, with special thanks to W.M. Groenewegen.

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