A retired G-man has begun a cold case investigation into who told the Nazis about Anne Frank’s Dutch hideout during World War II.
Former FBI agent Vince Pankoke will lead a team of 19 top forensic experts using investigative techniques developed in the past decade, including the crunching of big data to uncover leads, The Guardian reported Monday.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has opened its archives and supports the new probe, which will be shown online on video, as the historians, profilers and ex-detectives sort through the evidence, the paper reported.
Pankoke said that by scrutinizing recently declassified documents that had been shipped back to the US after the war he was able to come up with some new theories about what might have happened.
The German security services maintained all records of arrests but it had long been thought that all the documents pertaining to the Franks’ case were destroyed in a British bombing raid in 1944.
“But Pankoke has found a trace of the documents in Washington and we are now restoring damaged documents – water damaged, fire damaged – we are reconstructing them, and we believe they hold the secrets of the time,” Thijs Bayens, a filmmaker, told The Guardian.
Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House said that the identity of whoever informed the Gestapo of Frank’s whereabouts has been a mystery since she was captured in 1944.
“We are pleased that Cold Case Diary is also carrying out research into the arrest and following new leads, and we are interested to see the results.”
The team is focusing on the Joordan section of Amsterdam, where the famed diarist hid for two years in a secret space above a canal-side warehouse before being discovered with her father Otto, mother Edith, and sister Margot.
Frank was shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp and later moved to Bergen-Belsen, where she died from typhus in February 1945 at the age of 15.
Her diary details the time she spent in hiding between 1942 and 1944.
Ottos suspected one of the warehouse workers, Wilhelm van Maaren, of betraying the family’s hiding place.
But the Dutch police did not find enough evidence against van Maaren.
Bayens told the paper hopes the new investigation using modern forensic techniques will yield a better result.
Pankoke, 59, told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, “There is so much information available, from archives, old searches. For people it’s impossible to put it all in line, but with good computer programs it is possible. They can analyze and make connections.”
The team wants to release their findings on Aug. 4 2019, on the 75th anniversary of the arrest of the Frank family.
Since it was published in 1947, Miss Frank’s diary has been translated into 67 languages and over 30 million copies have been sold.