New book says SS man who arrested Anne Frank became intel officer in postwar West Germany

11.04.2011                      07.Nisan, 5771

Geschichte:

New book says SS man who arrested Anne Frank became intel officer in postwar West Germany

The fact that many BND officers were Nazi war criminals is well known, but this is the first revelation that one of them was the man who played a part in the death of the girl who became a symbol of the Holocaust.

The SS officer who captured Anne Frank and her family became a member of West Germany's intelligence service after World War II, a new book reveals. On August 4, 1944, Karl Josef Silberbauer, an SS-Oberscharfuehrer (senior squad leader ) of Austrian origin, led Dutch policemen into the old building on 263 Prinsengracht Street in Amsterdam, where the Frank family was hiding. He arrested the eight of them and took them to Gestapo headquarters, from which they were sent to concentration camps.
Anna's mother Edith died several months later. Anne and her sister were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died two months before the end of the war. The only survivor was Anne's father, Otto Frank. His daughter's diary, which he published soon after the war, became a worldwide bestseller….