Retired FBI agent aims to find out once and for all who betrayed Anne Frank

Photos of Anne Frank.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Using new data-mining techniques, a retired FBI agent is hoping to finally identify the person or people who told the Gestapo in 1944 about Anne Frank's hiding place in Amsterdam.

Vince Pankoke will lead a team of 19 forensic experts, including a historian and former detectives, as they comb through evidence and clues. The team will have access to the Anne Frank House's archives, and will look at witness statements and interviews. Pankoke is hopeful German records that were believed to be destroyed in a bombing are actually part of a declassified cache of documents in the U.S. National Archives, and might name the betrayer. "We are not trying to point fingers or prosecute," he told The Guardian. "I am just trying to solve the last case of my career. There is no statute of limitations on the truth."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.