THE HAGUE: The Jewish family of Anne Frank hiding in Amsterdam during World War II was most likely betrayed by a notary in Amsterdam, says a new cold case investigation. The results were summed up in the book entitled “The Betrayal of Anne Frank. A Cold Case Investigation”, written by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan. It was published on Monday, reports Xinhua news agency. The investigative team that had analysed the betrayal of Anne Frank and her family for years came to the conclusion that Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh had given away their hiding place to the Nazi German occupiers in the Netherlands along with the addresses of others in hiding to save his own family.

No definitive proof was found, but according to the team Anne Frank’s father Otto Frank, the only family member who survived the war, himself seemed to have taken the theory seriously. Anne Frank, born on June 12, 1929, is one the most famous Jewish victims of the Holocaust during World War II. Her diary has been published in several languages and adapted for stage and screen alike. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945, Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1942 to escape persecution.

Two years later, the Franks were betrayed and Anne along with her elder sister Margot were transported first to Auschwitz and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus probably in February or March 1945. The exact date of their death remains unknown. Despite the extensive attention paid to Anne Frank’s life since the first publications of her diary, up to now it was not clear how the Nazis discovered the Frank family’s hiding place in a secret annex on the Prinsengracht in the centre of Amsterdam. In 2016, Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens came up with the idea to study one of the best-known mysteries of World War II with the help of modern police techniques and investigative tools.