![[Anton 'Tonny' Ahlers]](gifs/tonnyahlers.jpg)
One suspect was Anton Ahlers, a business associate of Otto Frank, Anne's father, who was the only member of the family to survive the Nazi concentration camps.
From an expired Yahoo AP news article from 25 April 2003.
Betrayer of Anne Frank Remains Unknown
Fri Apr 25, 6:55 AM ET
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The betrayer of Jewish teenager Anne Frank remains unknown after Dutch historians Friday rejected two new theories about who revealed her hiding place to the Nazis, saying they are not substantiated.
The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation reopened the nearly 60-year-old mystery for the third time since World War II last July, responding to claims in books published in 1998 and 2002.
But nine months of research were unable to reveal who is to blame for the discovery by the German occupiers of the Frank family's attic hide-out at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam.
Anne Frank's diary describes 25 months locked in a warehouse annex with another family � eight people in all. Published after the war, it has been read by millions of people and made her a symbol of the Holocaust.
The institute said it was unable to identify who provided the information that led to the Frank's arrest and deportation on Aug. 4, 1944, but said the three best-known suspects are probably innocent.
"Our investigation has not led us to the culprit," the institute wrote in its report. "We do not consider any of the three suspects to be a likely candidate for the role of betrayer."
One suspect was Anton Ahlers, a business associate of Otto Frank, Anne's father, who was the only member of the family to survive the Nazi concentration camps.
But the report said English author Carol Ann Lee, who first raised suspicions about Ahlers last year, had based her book on speculation and that she "should have dealt more critically with her sources," including Ahlers's family.
Researchers also dismissed a second theory about Lena Hartog, who cleaned the warehouse below the annex. No new evidence was found showing she "knew there were Jews hiding in the annex," it said.
The institute said it had also hadn't uncovered additional details about a third long-time suspect, a warehouse worker named Willem van Maaren, who was the focus of two prior investigations.
For years after the war, Dutch police suspected Van Maaren had placed a phone call to German and Dutch security services revealing the family's whereabouts.
The institute said it would be possible to conduct a wider investigation, but that "it would not necessarily lead to a better result."
More than 100,000 Jews � 70 percent of the Dutch Jewish community � were deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps in Germany. Most died in gas chambers, and were among the 6 million victims of Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in the spring of 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated.
Around 8,000-9,000 Dutch are believed to have been turned over to the Nazis by fellow countrymen working as bounty hunters.
De Zaak Frank
- Dutch television documentary about Lee's book - 12 March 2002
(Site has summary, in Dutch, and streaming video. The site in general is
a heavy loader. Someone recommended it and I'm sure it is good if you have DSL or
something like that: attempting the video crashed my modem-connected computer.)