The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation

In attempting to determine how Adolf Hitler had taken control, the US Office of Strategic Services commissioned a report in 1943 that explained his strategy: “Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.”8 Soon hyperbole, extremism, defamation, and slander become commonplace and acceptable vehicles of power.

How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.

While someone with the first person knowledge is still alive, while records are still available, while relatives of witnesses can come forward, the stories must be told.

After they were liberated at the end of the war, many survivors founded impossible to put what they'd experienced into words. It took the author Elie Wiesel ten years before he could right Night. He asked, "how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger-thirst-fear-transport-selection-fire-chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else." How could you write without usurping and profaning the appalling suffering in that "demented and glacial universe where to be inhuman was to be human, where disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill?

Fascism counts on people's credulity, on their craving to believe, on their fear that there is nothing to believe.

To those who encountered Otto at the time, he seems to be a man purged by fire, walking through Amsterdam as though in a strange dream, searching for news of his children. Finding out that he was his family's sole survivor must have sent him to a very dark place. Vince hypothesized that Otto's grief had eventually turned into a mission to find the people responsible for the Annex raid, although his motive was not vengeance; he was seeking accountability and justice.

The fact that Otto survived the horror of the concentration camps demonstrated his profound will to live.

The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door: It is a questions still worth asking today.

12 Excitement of the hunt! It’s an astonishing phrase. Coerced by fear for her life, then seduced by power. Is it possible that one thing we can learn from Ans van Dijk is that totalitarian regimes achieve their power not just through repression but through the seduction of insiderism, which turns people into craven sycophants?

What happens when people cannot trust the institutions that are supposed to protect them? What happens when the fundamental laws that constitute and protect decent behavior crumble? The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door. It is a question still worth asking today.

The death of her father was "the biggest disaster of her life. She didn't really care about the rest.

I still believe, in spite of everything that people are truly good at heart.

Hitler’s Bounty Hunters: The Betrayal of the Jews, Ad

When her friend Cor Suijk asked her directly if she knew the name of the betrayer, she asked, "Cor, can you keep a secret?" Very eagerly he answered, "Yes, Miep, I can!" And she smiled and said, "Me, too.

Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, "There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation-well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister's death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.

Anti-Semitism there was mild in comparison to that in many other European countries. Yet the Netherlands transported more Jews to their deaths in extermination camps in the east than any other country in Western Europe. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, 107,000 were deported and only 5,500 returned.