Book identifying Jewish man who ‘betrayed Anne Frank’ withdrawn after outrage

The Dutch publisher of a book that claimed Anne Frank and her family were betrayed by a Jewish man has withdrawn the title and stopped printing new copies.

Ambo Anthos, which published The Betrayal of Anne Frank last month, apologised to “anyone felt offended”.

Rosemary Sullivan’s book claimed an Amsterdam notary named Arnold van den Bergh gave the Frank family up in order to save his own, even though he had a daughter that was Anne’s age.

Van den Bergh – who had one Jewish parent – was a member of the Jewish Council, the body set up by Nazi occupiers to organise the transportation of Jews to death camps.

The book was described as the culmination of a probe involving a team of historians, criminologists and a retired FBI agent.

The team said it was likely that Van den Bergh was fearing deportation because of his Jewish background.

He was becoming increasingly desperate because he had briefly succeeded in removing references to his Jewish heritage from his identity papers, only for the “J” mark to be reinstated following objections from a fellow civil law notary, who was angry with him.

He eventually survived the Second World War and died of throat cancer in 1950.

Since Sullivan’s book was published several academics have criticised the book’s central finding.

Bart van der Boom, a Leiden University historian who has written extensively about the Jewish Council, called the findings “libellous nonsense.”

Second World War historian David Barnouw said he had considered van den Bergh but dismissed him as a suspect and called the book’s allegation “lacking in evidence.”

The main piece of evidence in the investigation is an anonymous letter naming van den Bergh sent to Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only member of the nuclear family of four who survived the Holocaust.

Anne was discovered on August 4, 1944, after two years in hiding. Miep Gies, one of the family´s helpers, kept Anne´s diary safe until it was published by Anne´s father, Otto, in 1947, two years after Anne died in the Bergen Belsen camp aged 15.

The diary has captivated the imagination of millions of readers worldwide and been translated into 60 languages.