Modern whodunit

Exploring the historical mystery of who turned in Anne Frank and her family

When publisher HarperCollins asked Rosemary Sullivan in 2018 if she’d like to write a book about Anne Frank— specifically, about who betrayed the Frank family, and why—her answer was “Yes!”

More than 30 million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal Anne Frank kept while hiding with her family and four other people in an Amsterdam attic during World War II. But no one has ever conclusively determined how they managed to live undetected for more than two years—and who finally brought the Nazis to their door.

In 2016, a Dutch filmmaker and journalist undertook research to try to answer that question. They brought in Vincent Pankoke, a retired FBI agent. Together with a team of investigators, Pankoke pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents, some never before seen, and interviewed scores of people. The team applied the FBI strategy of cold case investigation: Who knew about the people in hiding? Who stood to gain by betraying them? Who would have been able to do it? Using new artificial intelligence technology, in addition to old-fashioned detecting, the team identified 12 possible suspects.

“Then they realized they needed a writer,” Sullivan says. “Of course, I was eager to take on this important story. I read everything I could, traveled to Amsterdam and pored over archives, and worked closely with the research team.”

In The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, Sullivan introduces readers to the investigators and profiles both the captives and the suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam.

“My goal was to create both the interior life of the subjects and to show the political context in which their lives unfolded,” says Sullivan from her home in Toronto.

Certainly, she was well positioned to take on this historical mystery. Sullivan, an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the author of numerous biographies, including of Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Smart. Her book Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille portrays refugee artists trapped in Vichy, France, and received the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History.

When asked what surprised her most in researching and writing The Betrayal of Anne Frank, Sullivan answers, “How attached I became to Otto Frank! Anne’s father was the only family member to survive. After the war, he devoted himself to Anne’s story but could never bring himself to watch the film about her. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone else speaking his dead daughter’s words.”

Sullivan hopes that The Betrayal of Anne Frank not only unravels the wartime mystery but also exposes the dangers of misinformation and terror in our contemporary world. She concludes, “This historical moment is so crucial for us to understand—for then and now.”

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