A Dutch publisher has released a new book about Anne Frank and her family.
“The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation,” written by Rosemary Sullivan, details the findings of a team of investigators and the conclusions they came to about who betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis. The book sparked a backlash after its release in January after some historians criticized its findings as inconclusive.
Six Dutch historians and academics have now responded with a 69-page “refutation,” calling the investigative team’s conclusions a “shaky house of cards.” The book’s publisher, Ambo Anthos, which previously apologized for the book in February in response to criticism, announced Tuesday night that it would withdraw the book.
“Based on the conclusions of this report, we have decided that the book will no longer be available with immediate effect,” Ambo Anthos wrote on its website. “We will ask the bookstores to return their inventory.”
“The Betrayal of Anne Frank” claimed that the person who told the Nazis about the Frank family’s secret hiding place in an outbuilding in Amsterdam was probably a Jewish notary, Arnold Van den Bergh. Investigators allege that Van den Bergh disclosed the family’s whereabouts to save his own family from being sent to Nazi concentration camps.
The Dutch scholars responded by arguing that the inquiry team’s conclusions were unfounded because the book “shows a clear pattern in which assumptions are made by the CCT (Cold Case Team), a moment later held to be true, and then used as a building block for the next step in the train of logic.”
“This makes the whole book a shaky house of cards, because if any single step turns out to be wrong, the cards above it collapse,” the researchers write.
Cold case team leader Pieter van Twisk told Dutch broadcaster NOS that the researchers’ reasoning was “very detailed and extremely sound”, saying that “it gives us a number of things to think about, but For the time being, I don’t see Van den Bergh being definitively removed as a prime suspect,” the Associated Press reported.
Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens, who put together the cold case team, admitted to the AP that the team couldn’t be entirely sure Van den Bergh was the person who betrayed the Franks.
“There is no smoking gun because treason is awkward,” said Bayens.
US publisher HarperCollins released a statement in response to the researchers’ findings, saying it still plans to stand by the book.
“While we recognize that there have been some criticisms of the findings, the investigation was conducted with respect and the utmost care for an extremely sensitive subject,” the editor said, according to the AP.