Christine’s Reviews > The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation > Status Update

This sounds like an interesting book… I’m curious what you mean by “issues with research?”

I'm going to preface this with saying that Sullivan was hired by team to write the book, so I am not faulting her research per se because it seems like she was hired to write the story of what they did. So how is what she would write versus how they want her to tell the story is a question.

I have a big issue with the fact that at this point in the book when the team is described none of the people involved seems to be a historian who specializes or whose area of expertise is the Holocaust or WWII. The background of the historians seems to be in public history and only one of the historians seems to have an interest in Amsterdam in 40s. (and the phrase the 40s is telling as it is not Occupied Amsterdam in particular). The most experienced and acclaimed historian's area of interest is the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia. And he is the project manager.

In fact, the bulk of team seems to be former law enforcement, which okay, but is a strange way of bypassing the historical context. In the first part this lack of context clearly comes out when the Jewish Councils are mentioned. It's like why investigate a case during the Holocaust but not have as a member of your team a historian who has studied that period in depth?

Also, it was really strange that neither of the three team leaders seemed to be aware of the conflicts between the two different Anne Frank trusts. Any book about Anne Frank, outside of the diary itself, will mention this conflict, so do pretty much every newspaper article that reports on either trust or Frank in general. It's like they went to the interviews with the heads of the trusts without even doing the most basic of internet searches.

And there is this somewhat weird bit with one of the investigators, who is former army and worked with the Internation Crimnial Court where he goes to the Anne Frank House. The passage reads, "Brendan said that each time he visits a crime scene, he discovers new details. Standing in front of the building today, looking at its four floors, its front attic, the windows, he knows one thing for sure - a professional policeman would certainly have deduced the existence of the back Annex and it wouldn't have taken him long to find the secret entrance" (22).

All that might be true, but he is also looking at the house with the knowledge of what it is and that is important because that effects how we look at things, so the comment feels really strange. (And why point out that fact and not that hiding like the Franks did, so large a group, was very, very unusual).

It's weird especially that lack of a Holocaust or wartime historian on the team.