60 minutes overtime
this week on 60 minutes we reported on an investigation into a decades-old question
that's dogged many readers of anne frank's diary who betrayed the frank family and the
four others in hiding and led a nazi search team to their secret annex behind a bookcase
i think that people that are looking at this feel ah maybe we can learn
something if this case is solved and maybe to the holocaust survivors that are still out there
they understand that somebody still cares that these mysteries are solved
we spoke with vince pancoak a veteran fbi agent he recently led a team of expert investigators
equipped with modern crime solving techniques to try to crack the case among other things they used
artificial intelligence to sift through reams of data and original documents what specifically are
you looking for when you're considering suspects we're looking at did they have the knowledge we
look at their motive you know what would the motive be were they anti-semitic were they
trying to do this for money and then opportunity were they even in town we can't just forgive
anne frank's father otto frank was the only member of his family to survive the holocaust
for a period after the war he looked into this question of who might have tipped off the nazis
a biographer of otto frank suggested that the betrayer might be tony ollers a dutch
national socialist he was among the dozen or so suspects pancoque and his team looked into
but they ultimately ruled him out tony hours was a main suspect in carol ann lee's
book which was about otto frank and tony hours did a lot of suspicious things
there was a lot of information that pointed to tony hours
as being a potential suspect however after otto frank went into hiding tony ollers was out doing
other things in different parts of the city and it was clear that tony owers had no knowledge
that otto frank and the others were hiding in the annex another book posited that the suspect might
be a jewish woman ons von dyke for collaborating with the nazis and betraying numerous fellow jews
van dyke was executed after the war she was a prime suspect and many people whenever we first
started the investigation said you need to look at hans van dijk because she betrayed so many people
and yet you eliminated her we did based on what well we found out a couple things number one that
during the time period of the betrayal she wasn't in town she was out of town working
not close to amsterdam the second thing was there was nothing that actually tied her to information
that would have led her to know that the people were in the annex one of the people that has been
most often considered as the potential betrayer is willem van marin he was a worker in the warehouse
building where the franks hid and frank even wrote about him in her diary he was prime suspect number
one after the war he's working downstairs in the warehouse he was very shifty suspicious
actually a thief face value you would think okay we found the guy but whenever you actually
dig into all the evidence you find out that he wasn't anti-semitic and probably wasn't capable
of betrayal because had he betrayed the annex he knew that he would end up losing his job so
that was the basis on which you exclude him as a suspect yeah we we didn't see any motivation there
for him to do it on the broadcast we reveal the person these investigators now believe betrayed
those in hiding in the annex arnold vandenberg he was a prominent jewish businessman with a wife and
kids in amsterdam pan coke says he was living an open life in the middle of nazi-occupied holland
at a time when jews were being deported to the concentration camps vince pancoak says to have
this level of protection he must have had some leverage with the nazis although the team's
evidence points to arnold vandenberg as the prime suspect these cold case investigators have no way
to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt but they believe that their evidence shows the franks
were betrayed that the nazi discovery in arrest wasn't merely a coincidence we took that theory
apart you know bit by bit this doesn't play out the way it does but for a specific tip exactly