Tonny ahlers biography channel
Still, no conclusive evidence has ever come to light of van Maaren alerting authorities, the paper says. Such arrests were often reported to authorities, who frequently came across hiding Jews as they tried to sniff out people with phony ration cards. The research paper also highlights other circumstantial evidence that pokes holes in the betrayal theory.
The historian Gertjan Brock, as part of an Anne Frank House museum investigation, reached an entirely different conclusion in Brock suggested that there may have been no betrayal at all and that in fact the annex may have been uncovered due to the SS raiding the warehouse to investigate illegal wares and trades. Kremer states in the book that his father once heard van Dijk mention Prinsengracht where the warehouse and secret annex were in a Nazi office.
Later that week, Kremer writes, the raid took place. Van Dijk was executed in for aiding the Nazis in the capture of people. Utilising modern forensic techniques and AI tools to analyse the existing evidence, Pankoke and his team discovered a new suspect: Arnold van den Bergh. Van den Bergh was a Jewish notary who worked for the Jewish Council, an organisation set up by the Nazis to influence the Jewish population of occupied Holland.
The cold case team theorised that van den Bergh, given his role in the Jewish Council, had access to a list of addresses thought to be housing Jews. Pankoke and his team also raise an anonymous note, sent to Otto Frank, as evidence. And there is none. A new investigation followed after Silberbauer had been tracked down. It yielded new information but still no evidence against Van Maaren.
Tonny Ahlers was the traitor. Tonny Ahlers was a Dutch national socialist. When he found out that Otto Frank had expressed a negative opinion about the German war chances in a conversation in the street, Ahlers pressured Frank and extracted money from him. According to her, Ahlers played a role in the transactions because he had a hold over Frank and later betrayed the people in hiding in the Secret Annex to an SD detective.
However, the only verifiable delivery was very small in size and there is no indication that Ahlers knew about people in hiding in the Secret Annex. Lena Hartog was the traitor. Lena's husband Lammert did undeclared work in the warehouse at Prinsengracht He spoke with his wife about people hiding in the building. However, it was never clarified whether he did so before or after the arrests on 4 August.
If he did so after that day, that would hardly be surprising, for Lammert witnessed the raid. There is no indication that he had known of their presence before. Lena talked to a friend about the people in hiding. This woman was shocked. If this was after 4 August, that is understandable. She knew Kleiman, who had by then been interred, and rumours could compromise third parties around him.
However, there is no evidence to support this theory. Ans van Dijk was the traitor. Ans van Dijk was a Jewish woman who, after being arrested, was given the choice between deportation and helping the authorities track down other Jews. She opted for the latter and made a large number of victims. In his book Vogelvrij Outlawed , Journalist Sytze van der Zee described the possibility that Van Dijk knew the night guard who discovered the burglary in the building in The coincidence As the period of hiding went on for longer, the hiders became less careful.
Curtains were opened beyond just a crack, rooftop windows inadvertently stayed open, accidental noises became more frequent, and so on. All in all, the visible evidence mounted for the world outside that there were people in the building after office hours. People in the outside world may quite innocently have mentioned this in conversation, which could have been overheard by the wrong persons.
In this scenario, the name of the night watchman Martin Sleegers plays a prominent role. Following the report of a burglary in the premises in April , he and a police officer went to investigate. They actually fumbled with the bookcase that hid the entrance to the Secret Annex. Anne describes this burglary in her diary entry of April 11, There is no concrete evidence that Sleegers betrayed the hiders.
While it is a fact Sleegers knew the NSB member Gringhuis who was present at the arrest , this in itself does not constitute proof. In this conversation, Otto Frank had expressed negative views about the German occupier.
Tonny ahlers biography channel
Ahlers said that he worked as a courier for the SD Nazi security service and for the NSB, and said that he had intercepted the letter by chance. Subsequent investigations showed that he was indeed a frequent visitor at the Security Service, but that his role as courier was simply made up. It is known that Frank twice gave money to Ahlers, though probably not more than 50 guilders altogether.
It has not been established that Ahlers visited Frank regularly. Tonny Ahlers Ahlers was notoriously anti-Semitic, for which he was also convicted after the war, but also an inveterate liar and a braggart. This makes it difficult for researchers to distinguish fact from fiction. Can Ahlers have been the betrayer personally, or did he pass on information to the Nazi Security Service, for example?
The latter is possible. Ahlers started a business in the same kind of commodities as Otto Frank's business.