A car pulled up outside a narrow brick building in central Amsterdam, around 10 a.m. on August 4, 1944. High up in the Annex of 263 Prinsengracht, eight Jews had been hiding since 1942. Members of the Gestapo emerged from the car and made their way inside, where they arrested Anne Frank, her family and their four friends. Within a year, seven of these eight were dead. Someone must have tipped them off—but who?
Theories about the culprit have percolated for years: a new employee at Otto Frank’s business, for instance, or the wife of one of the employees who helped to hide the family. But a new book by the son of a member of the Dutch resistance claims to have evidence that may bring historians closer to answering the question.
According to Gerald Kremer’s The Backyard of the Secret Annex, the Guardian reports, the Franks were betrayed by Anna “Ans” van Dijk, a Jewish woman executed in 1948 for her collaboration in the capture of 145 people. Ans van Dijk has often been suggested as a leading suspect. But despite independent and police studies, the Anne Frank House museum and research center has not been able to prove or disprove the theory. Kremer’s book may add another piece of evidence to the pile.
Kremer’s father was an acquaintance of Van Dijk in Amsterdam during World War II, where he worked as a caretaker in an office building close to the Franks’ annex. During the Dutch occupation, two floors of the building were turned into a kind of Nazi office for German authorities and the Dutch Nazi organization the NSB. Kremer’s father, the book claims, remembers Van Dijk making frequent visits to the office, where she would make telephone calls.