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February 7
2022, updated 30-03-2022 The note | Goal: maximum profit | Wry | Phase 2 | The "research" | Algorithms and swimming test | The writer | The publishing houses | European Jewish Congress | Legal action? | Holocaust survivors about The Betrayal | This was not an incident | Index page | other media about the scandal | the versions | Interview with Yves Kugelmann of Anne Frank Fonds | What else is wrong? |
All details of the quest and discovery are to be found in the book The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Canadian bestselling author Rosemary Sullivan. It was presented in a tightly directed publicity campaign. The kick-off took place on January 16 in the well-watched CBS TV program 60 minutes, followed in the Netherlands by NOS news and the newspapers NRC Handelsblad, De Volkskrant and Het Parool.
To top of page "The betrayal” 1: address lists at the Jewish Council The entire “proof” of the betrayal is based on the assumption that the board of the Jewish Council had access to directories of properties with Jewish people in hiding. There were rumors after the war that the Jewish Council would have had such lists, but no evidence for this has ever been found. Nor would it be logical that the Jewish Council, which had just called for people not to go into hiding, should have possessed such lists. The cold case team states that mail from Jews interned in Camp Westerbork (the transit camp from which Dutch Jews, Sinti and Roma were deported to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe) to people outside the camp was handled by the Jewish Council – but that too is nonsense: mail from Westerbork went directly to the addressees. In addition, mail to people in hiding was almost always sent to an intermediary who was not in hiding, who then delivered the letter, often via other intermediaries, to the correct recipient. It is conceivable that lists of hiding addresses existed. Lists held by the German Sichterheitsdienst (SD, Security Service), compiled on the basis of information gathered by notorious traitors such as Ans van Dijk, Johnny den Droog and Anton van der Waals – just to name a few. It is also conceivable that lists of addresses in hiding were used by members of the Landelijke Organisatie (National Organization)– the resistance organization that was responsible for the distribution of ration cards to people in hiding. But the cold case team does not even mention this, at least not in connection with the arrest of the people in hiding in the Secret Annex.
Jewish Councils were established by the Nazis in the occupied territories as a buffer between the occupying forces and the Jewish population. These were run by prominent Jews, who had to carry out Nazi ordinances. The Jews who joined these councils thought they would be able to mitigate the anti-Jewish measures — while they were essential for the occupying forces to keep the Jewish population calm and the deportations to go smoothly. Immediately after the war, the chief executives of the Amsterdam Jewish Council were therefore accused of collaboration, but were in the end not prosecuted. Right or wrong? In 2022 it makes no sense to pass a moral judgment on this – simply because we cannot imagine ourselves in the diabolical dilemma in which these men found themselves at the time, and about which Bart van der Boom recounts in his first reaction to the "unveiling".
The respected civil-law notary Arnold van den Bergh was one of the board members of the Dutch Jewish Council. He and his family survived the Shoah. According to the cold case team, it is no coincidence that he and his family managed to survive. As a board member of the Jewish Council, Van den Bergh is said to have possessed lists of hiding addresses. If he were arrested by the Nazis, those lists would guarantee his release. Because if he betrayed where Jews were hiding, he and his family would go free. This assumption is also completely out of the blue. Resistance people and Jews who were arrested and who revealed hiding places, whether or not after torture, were not usually exempt. They were usually either shot or sent to a prison, penal camp, concentration or extermination camp. In a few rare cases, they were spared and deployed as V-Mann or V-Frau (informers). But there is no indication at all, let alone evidence, that notary Van den Bergh acted in that way. To top of page "The betrayal” 3 – the anonymous note According to the cold case team, the proof
of the notary's betrayal is this note: It is a typed copy of an anonymous note that Otto Frank received in or before 1958. According to The Betrayal ofAnne Frank, Otto Frank would have received the original of this note shortly after his return from Auschwitz, i.e. in 1945. But the first time, as far as can be ascertained, the existence of the original is mentioned anywhere is in 1958, in a letter from Johannes Kleiman (one of the people who had helped the people in hiding in the Secret Annex) to Otto Frank. This is in line with the dating of the copy by the German typewriter specialist Bernard Haas– who stated that it must have been typed around 1957. Cold case team
members Vincent Pankoke and Pieter van Twisk
(on the team's
website,
February 3, 2022, ) state that in December
1945 Otto Frank confronted detective Gringhuis
(one of the Dutch police officers who was
involved in the arrest of Frank family) in a
prison with the contents of this letter. But
there is no evidence to support this claim.
All that can be said about the contents of
the note is that someone wanted to convince Otto
Frank that Arnold van den Bergh gave the SD a "whole
list" of hiding addresses. Everyone with an old Amsterdam address book (for Van den Bergh's address) and who read newspapers after the war, which reported that the "Aussenstelle für jüdische Auswanderung" had settled in the SD headquarters on the Euterpestraat had all the further information in this note. was, as in these two articles from 1952, in Het Parool and De Waarheid. So everything indicates that the original note was written years after the war. Most likely after the death of the notary in 1950, whose funeral was extensively reported at the time, possibly triggered by the worldwide success of the play The diary of Anne Frank (1955). Who wrote this note and why? We don't know and we will probably never know. What we do know is that this note, which has been labeled “paper thin evidence” by other media outlets, is even less than that. To top of page The goal of the cold case team: maximum profit From the foregoing, one thing becomes clear: the cold case team was determined from the outset to identify a perpetrator for the alleged betrayal. Why? The answer is simple: maximum profit through sensational news. Investigative journalists Rosanne Kropman and Henk Willem Smits of Follow the Money, who investigated the financial story behind The Betrayal of Anne Frank , summarize it clearly: “The Betrayal of Anne Frank was a hype even before there was a letter on paper. The plan: to search for the traitor of the residents of the Secret Annex with an investigation team led by a former FBI officer. Proditione Media bv, the production company behind the idea, brought in several hundred grand of advances from Ambo Anthos and HarperCollins by serving up humbug.” Several hundred grand? Certainly – according to informed sources 150,000 euros from Ambo Anthos and 400,000 from HarperCollins. In addition, the municipality of Amsterdam granted a subsidy of 100,000 euros. The book production was further co-financed by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, which in 2019 made its writer's residence in the heart of Amsterdam available for a month to Rosemary Sullivan, the author of the book. The fact that this
sleight of hand was successful is partly
because, according to the
daily newspaper Trouw,
in the subsidy
application – and possibly also the
negotiations with the publishers – numerous
names of real experts who knew nothing about
it were mentioned. A trick also performed in
the book, in which dozens of ignorant experts
are thanked.
Although an unprecedented storm of criticism erupted in the Netherlands, the book ends up in the top 10 of best-selling non-fiction books in the Netherlands at the end of January/beginning of February 2022. Ditto in the United States and Canada (where the storm is only now beginning to rise). So it is not just the cold case team and
the writer who have made a profit from this project.
Although the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos has since
announced that it will no longer supply the book to
bookshops and that it will waive a second printing,
sales in the Netherlands are still continuing. Just
like
in the United States, Great Britain and
Canada. HarperCollins has not yet given any
signal to withdraw the book because, as
Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1928: “Erst kommt das
Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” The behavior of Dutch booksellers in this area is particularly wry: in 1940 , after the German invasion, their predecessors took books by Jewish authors from the shop on their own initiative and returned them to the publishers, for fear of being left with unsaleable books. They also urged the German authorities to draw up a list of banned books so that they, the booksellers, would not make a loss by purchasing unsaleable books. But it's not just the publishers and
booksellers that benefit. The loose sales of
newspapers that had the "news" on the front page
pontifically on January 17 will have been
significantly higher than normal. The TV shows that
made the news had high viewing figures, and
therefore more advertising revenue. And all this is still peanuts. Because the book, which has already reached best-seller status, was not the goal but the means to reach Phase 2: a TV documentary series about the traitor's spectacular quest and sensational find! A documentary like the crazy, but
well-watched History Channel documentaries about the
search for the escaped Adolf Hitler in Argentina,
about Hitler's secret sex life, et cetera. Also in
these mockumentaries figure former FBI agents and
scientists with few integrity as experts to boost
credibility. It also presents 'newly discovered' old
documents that have been known for years. Around
which the documentary makers build the story and map
out the search in advance, and then supposedly
discover all kinds of things. The real money is in such documentary
series: the TV rights can run into the millions. The investigation of the cold case team led by the Dutch film producers Pieter van Twisk and Thijs Bayens – people without any investigative experience – and former FBI agent Vince Pankoke – a man without significant expertise in the cold case field, he stated in 60 Minutes that his oldest cold case was only case was five years old) is described in detail in The Betrayal of Anne Frank. So extensive that even things that are easy to find out via the internet are presented as exciting quests with sensational discoveries. According to the book, the cold case team consisted of no fewer than thirty-one people, supported by a team of twenty “consultants to the team”. It has since become clear that some team members gave nothing more than a one-off presentation to the core team, and that several (if not all) “consultants” were only consulted indirectly. Their names are only mentioned to pimp up their research and book. Exactly the same thing happens in the
bibliography: a long laundry list of books, but in
the explanatory notes (of the original English book)
most of those works remain unmentioned. There mainly
see works published in English are mentioned. That
is on the one hand strange, on the other very
understandable, because the writer, Rosemary
Sullivan, does not speak a word of Dutch.
And then it gets really crazy: the literature overview contains the book De bewakers van Westerbork (The guards of Westerbork), by Frank van Riet. However, the chapter on Westerbork does not refer to that book, but to a corrupted Volkskrant review of that book, written by the controversial “historian” Ad van Liempt, and apparently translated by someone for the writer. What the fuck? A referral to a review, rather than the actual book? But it can get even crazier: the very last note concerns a reference to… Wikipedia (not to a dated version, but to the general entry, which anyone can tinker with to their heart's content). For a scientifically sound historical work
these alone are two deadly sins.
Why should this work be scientifically sound? On February 3, 2022, Vince Pankoke and Pieter van Twisk stated on the website of the cold case team: “In mid-October 2017 we publicized that we would conduct a Cold Case with the central question: what led to the raid on the Secret Annex on August 4, 1944. It was immediately made clear that the investigation would be led by the pensioner FBI Detective Vince Pankoke. In doing so, we made it clear that we explicitly did not opt for a historical scientific approach, but an investigative approach. Investigation work involves a thorough and systematic investigation of something specific. The researcher's focus is to solve a specific case and not to contribute to science." Now it is precisely investigative work that needs to be scientifically justified. An investigative report is primarily intended for a prosecutor, who must present legal and convincing evidence to a judge to resolve a case. Now "scientifically sound" and "lawful and
convincing" are not exactly the same thing, but they
do match in the end. And besides, if the members of
the cold case team "explicitly did not opt for a
historical scientific approach", why do they put on
a whole battery of scientists? To disguise the fact
that their investigation is essentially little
different from investigation by means of a swimming test for witches? Because in the end the whole CCT research is nothing more than that. This is also apparent from these passages: “By midsummer 2019 the Cold Case Team had only four theories about the betrayal that still seemed viable. All others had been eliminated, either because the team found them improbable, or, for a few, because there was not enough information to investigate further.” (p. 272) The theory that there may have been a coincidence had already been dismissed on spurious grounds by then (you don't make an exciting TV documentary with such a theory, of course). And: “When
Vince
sat down with the scientists from Xomnia [a
software company], they suggested that because
the team was working on such an old case with
missing data, the puzzle of the August 4, 1944,
judgment would almost certainly never be
complete . Yet at some point the program's
algorithms would be able to predict what or who
was the likely suspect.” (p. 102) In other words – while all kinds of data are missing, such as the names of people who have never been suspected of treason, but could theoretically have done it – juggling with algorithms results in the most likely suspect. With exactly such algorithms and fallacies, the Dutch Tax Office helped recently tens of thousands of families to destruction, in what is known as the Benefits Affair. The former FBI agent will have missed that: after all, he does not speak Dutch. To top of page The writer, the Canadian Rosemary Sullivan, does not speak Dutch either. This is not insurmountable in itself, but it has contributed to the fact that the English version of the book, the original book from which all other versions are extracts, is teeming with misrepresented Dutch words. Those are minor flaws in themselves, though it's weird to constantly read “Uitgiverij” (a non existent word for publishing house)” or something like “heet gerechthof in Munchen” (hot (or horny) court in Munich).” What makes this ignorance problematic is that the author was only able to use books translated into English as a source because of it. A few individual Dutch articles were translated for her – but nothing more. So she worked with huge linguistic blinders on. Sullivan is also not particularly familiar with the map of the Netherlands: she talks about a rural region somewhere north of Amsterdam that was flooded in 1960 – by which she means Tuindorp-Oostzaan, a neighbourhood in Amsterdam-North. Camp Westerbork is situated in a swampy peat area – while it lies in the middle of the sandy soils of Drenthe. According to her, the city of Groningen is close to Amsterdam, but according to her, Arnhem is “the distant eastern city” compared to Amsterdam.
For those who, like Sullivan, are devoid of topographical knowledge of the Netherlands: the distance Amsterdam-Groningen in 1944 was at least 200 kilometers (nowadays, thanks to highways and polders reduced to 179 km), Amsterdam-Arnhem was then and is now about 100 kilometers. Her general knowledge of history is also surprising: according to Sullivan, German industrialists financed Hitler after his seizure of power – while they did so before. She also states that German companies such as Bayer, BMW, Krupp, Daimler, and IG Farben came out of the war richer than they were before – it has apparently escaped her notice that Germany was largely in ruins in 1945 and that said companies were by then virtually bankrupt. And that what remained of factories in the eastern part was towed to the Soviet Union. Sullivan also states that the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party, was banned in 1935. Nonsense, that only happened in 1944, by the Dutch government in exile. According to her, the NSB was also under the influence of Hermann Göring. That is also nonsense – in 1940 NSB leader Mussert donated a pompous ringing bell to Göring – who not even thanked him for it. And the railway strike, which was declared by the same government on September 17, 1944, at the start of Operation Market Garden (Battle of Arnhem), situates Sullivan before the arrest of the people in hiding in the Secret Annex, on August 4, 1944. If Sullivan was right , then Anne Frank, het family and the other people in hiding at Prinsengracht 263 would not have gotten any further than Westerbork. Unfortunately… Rosemary Sullivan did not respond to questions from us. However, in January, before the book was published, she gave an interview to the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, which gives a lot of insight into her working method (this interview was first published on February 5). About the compensation for her writing work, she reported that she was: “not getting paid very much”. Sure. To top of page The conclusion of the cold case team and Sullivan Although cold case team members claim in interviews that Arnold van den Bergh's betrayal is only 85 to 87% certain, the book states this: “The fact that a respected Dutch Jew had likely passed addresses to the SD, that someone not all that dissimilar from Otto Frank himself had been Otto's betrayer… it is shocking. But they could not remain silent. As Rabbi Sebbag had told Thijs at the beginning of the investigation, the most important thing, the only real loyalty any of us should have is to the truth.” This is not 85%, not 87%, but a very firm conviction. Vincent Pankoke and Pieter van Twisk did not respond to our questions.
“Because the world rights were bought by HarperCollins, they determined the content. At the moment, the conclusions of the study are being questioned by several researchers. We are very sorry that the content of an edition of our publisher provokes such a reaction. (…) We are waiting for answers from the research team to the questions that have arisen and are currently deferring the decision to print if necessary. We offer our sincere apologies to anyone who feels offended by the book.” In one of the three acknowledgments in The Betrayal of Anne Frank, Thijs Bayens, Pieter van Twisk and Luc Gerits, the three gentlemen who own thefilm production company Proditione Media and are members of the cold case team: “Our gratitude also extends to our publishers, managing director Tanja Hendriks and publisher Laurens Ubbink of Ambo |Anthos, who gave us valuable input during the writing process.” So how didn't Ambo | Anthos know anything about the content of the book? On Sunday, February 5, this publisher came up with a second statement: “There
has
been so much commotion surrounding the book The
Betrayal
of Anne Frank,
written by Rosemary Sullivan, that we as a
publisher, after consultation with the
researchers, have decided to temporarily suspend
delivery of the book. We are in consultation
with the parties involved on how extradition can
be resumed.” Contrary to what many news media have reported, Ambo Anthos has still not offered a public apology. Publishing house Ambo |Antos did not respond to our questions. The Letterenfonds,
which facilitated Rosemary Sullivan's stay in
the Netherlands (see 2019 Annual
Report,
page 70), also did not respond to our
questions.
The publication of
the German translation of the book is
announced on March 22, 2022. Jürgen Welte, the
publisher of the publishing group
Harper-Collins Germany, told Welt:
The relatively late release date of the
German-language edition shows that we are
handling this sensitive subject with the
utmost responsibility”.
The Canadian branch of HarperCollins told the Globe and Mail on Feb. 5, 2022: “At this time, HarperCollins and international affiliates will not be commenting on another Publisher's decision.” HarperCollins International The main responsible for the resulting
misery, publishing group HarperCollins, did not
respond to our questions. European Jewish Congress protest On February 1, 2022, the European Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of the Jewish communities in Europe, urged HarperCollins to withdraw the controversial book because it affects the memory of Anne Frank and the dignity of Holocaust survivors. Reuters: EJC asks publisher to pull Anne Frank book Neither HarperCollins nor Ambo | Anthos
responded to this request. On February 5, the
Dutch newspaper AD reported:
“Meanwhile, the
family of the reviled civil-law notary Arnold
van den Bergh is considering legal action,
relative Elise Tak says. According to her, a
granddaughter of Van den Bergh, who
participated in the cold case investigation,
did so because she thought it would be a
family portrait. “The approach turned out to
be very different. The family is in shock.
This cannot be rectified.”
Holocaust survivors about The
Betrayal of Anne Frank
This is not an incident: we've seen it all before Unfortunately,
what happened around The Betrayal of
Anne Frank
is not an incident. In
February 2016, a Dutch publisher released the
book Bloemen van het kwaad (Flowers
of
Evil),
which is said to contain poems by Adolf
Hitler. Then the media offensive started in
the newspaper Trouw.
Although we showed on the same day that at
least one of those poems was absolutely not
written by Hitler, Trouw refused
to rectify. A few days later, De Wereld Draait
Door,
the most watched TV talk show at the time,
opened with the same fake Hitler poem, which
was once again presented as authentic.
Subsequently, all the news media in the
Netherlands and Flanders went along with the
delusion, because the name Hitler sells, just
like Anne Frank´s. Only a year later, after Jaap van den Born
and the author of this article showed that all the
other so-called Hitler poems in that book were
forgeries, and that the work was largely composed of
plagiarism, the rectifications reluctantly followed.
The idiotic book, however, simply remained for sale.
Jack the Ripper was a Dutchman! In February 2018, the writer of this article co-authored an English-language study on the 19th-century Dutch serial killer Hendrik de Jong, who in 1893 had been referred to in the press as “the Dutch Jack the Ripper”. Not because people thought at the time that he really was Jack the Ripper, but to indicate what kind of murderous person Mr. De Jong was. English newspapers did not understand, and then claimed that Jack the Ripper was a Dutchman. Something for which there is not even a shred of evidence. When the article about De Jong was published, exactly the same happened again. Both the quality newspaper Times and the British tabloids roared that The Ripper would be a Dutchman. Dutch media naturally croaked after them. Jack the Ripper sells! This time the corrections in the Netherlands followed quickly – but the English media never did so.
Continued in part 2: The show must go on.
This article is a translation of 'De canard van 'Het verraad van Anne Frank'. De Tweede Wereldoorlog als industrie (3)', Reporters Online, Haarlem, February 7, 2022.
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