A new investigation into the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the place where Anne Frank was hiding in Amsterdam, when occupied by the Nazis during World War II, which would eventually lead to her death, has just been launched by a retired FBI agent.
Led by Vince Pankoke, who worked with the FBI to track down Colombian drug cartels, the investigation will use cold-case techniques and a computer-based data analysis program to unravel one of the greatest mysteries in history: who betrayed Anne Frank ?
The German teenager is best known for her diary, documenting her passage through the "secret annexe," a hiding place in the back of her father's old office, Otto Frank, at 263 Prinsengracht Street in the Dutch capital.
Frank was 13 when she and her family and another Jewish family began to hide in that dark and damp "secret annexe" to escape the German raids on the Jews in Holland in July 1942. She never left the house in two years and spent much of his time writing in his journal until they were all discovered and arrested by the Gestapo (German secret police) in August 1944, and sent to concentration camps.
Anna's diary, dubbed 'Kitten', made it possible to make a profound and poignant record of the growth of anti-Semitic laws in Nazi-occupied Holland as well as the torment of passing adolescence into captivity. She was survived by her father, who returned to Amsterdam to publish his diary in 1947.
After the war, Dutch police opened investigations into the betrayal of the Frank family at the insistence of Otto Frank, who suspected that a worker in his warehouse had revealed his location. However, the investigations were never conclusive.
Last year, an investigation by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam suggested that the location of the "secret annex" may have been discovered on causality by the Gestapo, rather than as part of a mission to search for and arrest residents based on data from an informant, as previously weighed.
This new investigation, however, will reconstruct the pre-discovery events and examine the 30 suspects who have since been accused of betraying the Frank family, hoping to solve the mystery that has so baffled historians.
Frank's journal information and available files from that period will be scanned by specialized software to reduce the number of suspects. The program was provided by Xomnia, a company based in Amsterdam, specializing in artificial intelligence.
The multidisciplinary team of 20 researchers includes detectives, data analysts, historian profilers and criminologists. Experts will also use actors to reconstruct statements from witnesses and suspects that were obtained in the past.
The Anne Frank House opened its doors and files to Cold Case Diary, as the FBI exaggerated project has been called, and will be filmed and dependent on a crowdfunding campaign to be funded.
"Every school-age child meets Anne Frank, and that happened to me. I remember once, in 2005, I was on a mission in Amsterdam and when we passed the Anne Frank House my Dutch colleague told me that this case had never been resolved. That surprised me, "Pankoke said in a statement delivered to CNN by Proditione Media, the production company behind the project.
Pankoke, who received a medal from the Colombian government for his success in tracking drug cartels, will detail the progress of his research online. And he hopes to be able to reveal the mystery for the 75th anniversary of the discovery and arrest of the Frank family, to be fulfilled on August 4, 2019.