Last month, we reported on a new hypothesis about who might have betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis in 1944, which ultimately led to the death of Anne and most of her family. The new suspect: a local Jewish leader named Arnold van den Bergh, who may have handed over lists of addresses where fellow Jews were hiding in order to protect his own family. The theory was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes and is described in detail in a new book by Rosemary Sullivan: The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.

The news caused a stir, given that the named suspect was also Jewish. It also raised the hackles of historians who expressed skepticism about the hypothesis. Now, Reuters is reporting that the book’s Dutch publisher, Ambo Anthos, has suspended printing for a second run of the book after questions were raised about the shoddiness of the research, per an internal email that the news service acquired.

The email was addressed to all of Ambo Anthos’ authors. The publisher wrote it should have taken a more “critical stance” on the new book. “We await the answers from the researchers to the questions that have emerged and are delaying the decision to print another run,” the email read. “We offer our sincere apologies to anyone who might feel offended by the book.”

On July 6, Anne Frank and her family began their lives in the Secret Annex attached to the office building at Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank had worked. The annex was only accessible via a door on the landing that was kept hidden by a bookcase. Anne chronicled their lives in the annex in her diary for the next two years and made her final entry on August 1, 1944. Just three days later, German police led by the SS stormed the annex, arresting the Franks and the Van Pels family. Anne Frank died (likely of typhoid fever) at age 15 a day after her older sister, Margot, at the Bergen-Belsen death camp between February and April 1945. Their mother, Edith, had died of starvation the year before. Only Otto Frank, Anne’s father, survived.

Suspects who have been proposed as possible betrayers over the ensuing decades include Lena Hartog, wife of the company’s assistant warehouse manager; Anton “Tonny” Ahlers, a member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands; stockroom manager Willem van Maaren; and Nelly Voskuijl, sister of Bep Voskuijl.

The Anne Frank House undertook its own investigation and arrived at a surprising new theory in 2017, thanks to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. It’s possible, Brock suggested, that there was no betrayal, and the SS raid was really part of ongoing attempts to track down purveyors of illegal goods. This theory holds that the officers just happened to stumble upon the Jewish families hiding in the attic.

When he decided to revisit the cold case, retired FBI Special Agent Vincent Pankoke assembled a team that included some 20 historians, criminologists, and data specialists. While admitting that the case is circumstantial and some reasonable doubt remains, Pankoke et al. concluded that van den Bergh was the most likely culprit. A crucial piece of new evidence was an anonymous note to Otto Frank that specifically named van den Bergh as the one who passed on the information about where Jews were hiding in Amsterdam. The original note was lost, but Otto Frank made a copy and preserved it, although he never spoke publicly about the allegation.

But University of Leiden historian Bart van der Boom dismissed the theory as “defamatory nonsense” to the BBC, while Amsterdam University’s Johannes Houwink insisted that, if lists of Jews in hiding had existed, they would have surfaced long before now. The Anne Frank House was more circumspect in its reaction, stating that the Pankoke team’s investigation was impressive and had “generated important new information and a fascinating hypothesis that merits further research.”

Others who have questioned the research include the foundation set up by Otto Frank, the Anne Frank Fund, which insisted Sullivan’s book was “full of errors.” Historian Erik Somers of the Dutch NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide studies praised the extensiveness of the investigation. But he thought the anonymous note was not quite the slam dunk Pankoke et al. thought it was and said the team had made certain assumptions about Jewish institutions in Amsterdam during World War II that were contradicted by other historical research.

One of the investigators on Pankoke’s team, Pieter van Twisk, told Reuters that he and the team were “completely surprised” by the email. “We had a meeting last week with the editors and talked about the criticism and why we felt it could be deflected and agreed we would come with a detailed reaction later,” he said. Per the BBC, van Twisk told Dutch public broadcaster NOS that the team had never claimed to have uncovered the complete truth. He estimated that their theory had a “probability percentage of at least 85 percent” and the hope was that their research would help fill some gaps in the existing research.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1830881

Former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke was looking forward to a relaxing retirement hanging out at the beach when he left the agency. Instead, he was drawn into solving a famous cold case: the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to their arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Only the father, Otto Frank, survived. To find his own answer to that question, Pankoke assembled his own crack team of dogged investigators. They spent five years poring over every bit of pertinent material, setting up an extensive online database, and developing an AI program to help them sift through it all and find new connections.

While admitting that the case is circumstantial and some reasonable doubt remains, Pankoke et al. believe the most likely culprit is a man named Arnold van den Bergh, a local Jewish leader who may have handed over lists of addresses where fellow Jews were hiding to the Nazis in order to protect his own family. The Pankoke team’s story was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this week (see video at end of post) and is covered in detail in a new book by Rosemary Sullivan, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.

Millions of people have read The Diary of Anne Frank since it was first published posthumously in 1947. It has been translated into 70 languages and inspired a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 film, featuring Millie Perkins in the title role. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but the family fled the country and settled in Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler came to power. They didn’t flee quite far enough: the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940 and eventually forced the Franks (and many other Jews) into hiding.

Anne received the famous diary on June 12, 1942, for her 13th birthday, around the time the Gestapo began deporting Jews in Amsterdam. On July 6, the Frank family began their lives in the Secret Annex attached to the office building at Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank had worked. It was only accessible via a door on the landing, kept hidden by a bookcase. Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew where the Franks (and later, the Van Pels family) were hiding. The four supplied the families with food and other necessities, knowing full well that they could be condemned to death by the Nazis for aiding Jews.

Anne chronicled their lives in the Annex in her diary for the next two years, making her final entry on August 1, 1944. Just three days later, German police led by SS officers stormed the Annex, arresting the Franks and the Van Pels family and transferring them to the Westerbork transit camp after interrogation. Kugler and Kleiman were also arrested and held at a penal camp for “enemies of the regime.”

Gies and Voskuijl were questioned, but not detained, and found the pages of Anne’s diary strewn around the floor when they returned to the Annex, preserving it for posterity. As the whole world now knows, 15-year-old Anne Frank died (likely of typhoid fever) at Bergen-Belsen between February and April 1945, the day after her older sister Margot. Their mother, Edith, had died of starvation the year before.

There were two separate official investigations into who may have betrayed the family: one in 1947-1948 and the second (conducted by the Dutch police) in 1963-1964. In both cases, the findings were inconclusive. Since then, there have been several independent investigations identifying different possible suspects.

For instance, Melissa Muller’s 1998 biography of Anne Frank concluded that a woman named Lena Hartog, wife of the company’s assistant warehouse manager, betrayed the family. In 2003, Carol Ann Lee came to a different conclusion in her biography of Otto Frank: the culprit was a man named Anton “Tonny” Ahlers, a member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands. Stockroom manager Willem van Maaren was another suspect, and since several possible culprits knew each other, there is also the possibility that more than one person betrayed the Frank family.

A 2015 biography of Bep Voskuijl (co-authored by her son Joop) suggested that one of Bep’s sisters, Nelly, may have snitched on the Franks. Nelly fell in love with a young Austrian Nazi, had worked for a year on a German air base, and had political leanings that had sufficiently estranged her from the family that she left their house. This theory holds that Nelly—who returned to Amsterdam in 1943 when her romance soured—may have been the anonymous female caller who (allegedly) tipped off the SS about the secret Annex, per the testimony of SS officer Karl Josef Silbauer, who made the arrests.

The Anne Frank House undertook its own investigation and arrived at a surprising new theory in 2017, thanks to the efforts of a historian named Gertjan Brock. It’s possible, Brock suggested, that there was no betrayal, and the SS raid was really part of ongoing attempts to track down purveyors of illegal goods. This theory holds that the officers just happened to stumble upon the Jewish families hiding in the attic.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1826737

Facebook today is, once again, theoretically ramping up enforcement against hate speech, this time with a new policy prohibiting Holocaust denial on the platform.

The change is due to a “well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally,” Facebook executive Monika Bickert wrote in a corporate blog post today.

The policy is a complete 180 for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in a 2018 interview specifically described Holocaust denial as the kind of “deeply offensive” speech he nonetheless felt should be permitted on the platform. The next day, amid blowback, he “clarified” his position:

Our goal with fake news is not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue—but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across our services. If something is spreading and is rated false by fact checkers, it would lose the vast majority of its distribution in News Feed. And of course if a post crossed line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post today that his own thinking “has evolved” amid the growth in anti-Semitic violence in recent years. “Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward,” he added, “but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”

The ban on Holocaust denial is just the latest in a huge suite of policy changes and proposals Facebook has made in the past two weeks explicitly related to hate speech, misinformation, or “influence operations.”

After all this time, why now?

Previous much-publicized efforts by Facebook to reduce hate speech and misinformation on the platform have not gone particularly well overall, and the world is still dealing with the effects of how quickly and widely misinformation can spread thanks to social media. A new study released today finds that the problem is getting rapidly worse, not better.

The digital project arm of the German Marshall Fund, a nonpartisan think tank, published a report today finding that Facebook has not only failed to limit the spread of false claims on its platform but instead has allowed disinformation to more than double since 2016.

The study ranks the number of interactions that come from what the GMF calls “deceptive sites,” which fall into two broad categories. The first category includes sites that “repeatedly published content that is provably false” and is conveniently called “false content producers.” The second, larger group of sites, called “manipulators,” technically doesn’t usually run wholly untrue stories but instead “egregiously distort[s] or misrepresent[s] information to make an argument.”

Facebook engagement with both kinds of deceptive sites has increased 242 percent since this time in 2016, GMF found, with the vast majority of that growth happening in the past year, since the third quarter of 2019. Interactions with outright false content have just about doubled, but interactions with “manipulator” sites have increased by close to 300 percent.

The study includes more than 720 sites under the “deceptive” umbrella, but GMF found that the top 10 sites alone account for a whopping 62 percent of all the interactions they tracked, with the remaining 711 sites all together accounting for the remaining 38 percent. All of the top 10 qualified as “manipulator” sites, including Breitbart and The Daily Wire. Although the top sites all skew conservative, GMF noted, the study includes both left-leaning and non-political deceptive sites as well.

The perennially popular Fox News, which garnered the most interactions of any of the sites included in the study, also qualified under the “manipulator” label. The research team finds that Fox has published “irresponsible and misleading claims,” particularly related to COVID-19. At the same time, Fox rated more highly than other outlets in the “manipulator” category because it follows journalistic practices such as correcting errors, avoiding deceptive headlines, labeling advertising, and disclosing ownership.

The misinformation spread by deceptive sites is a key part of what GMF calls the “disinformation supply chain,” which, as we learned in 2016, can have major real-world effects. Such articles are designed to push emotional hot buttons, and Facebook’s algorithms then amplify that content to more users, and the cycle goes on.

“Disinformation is infecting our democratic discourse at rates that threaten the long-term health of our democracy,” said Karen Kornbluh, the director of GMF Digital and head of the project. “A handful of sites masquerading as news outlets are spreading even more outright false and manipulative information than in the period around the 2016 election. This data underscores that de-amplifying—or adding friction to the spread of—content from a handful of the most dangerous sites could dramatically decrease disinformation online.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1713541