'Who betrayed Anne Frank?': Johnstown native, retired FBI agent leads investigation into 1944 arrest of Holocaust diary writer in Amsterdam

Feb. 4—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — A retired FBI agent with Johnstown roots has been on the global stage for leading an investigation into the arrest and death of Anne Frank, whose diary is one of the best-read accounts of the Holocaust.

Vincent Pankoke appeared on the Jan. 16 episode of the CBS news show "60 Minutes," in which he outlined efforts to uncover who was responsible for the raid that sent Anne Frank and others to a concentration camp in 1944.

Pankoke's law enforcement career began with Richland Township Police Department after the Johnstown native graduated from Richland High School and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

After more than 25 years with the FBI — including heading up the bureau's unit tracking drug cartels in Colombia — he retired in 2014.

Two years later, he got the call to guide a team of investigators in Amsterdam — tackling the coldest of cold cases, piecing together the story of Anne Frank and her family.

"People didn't truly understand the task that awaited my team," Pankoke said in a telephone interview from his Florida home.

He called the project "a search for the puzzle pieces" — but "there are still missing pieces, and we're continuing to fill them in."

'This was frozen'

Pankoke said he had worked many cold cases in his career, but "this was frozen."

He was interviewed for the CBS report, titled "The Betrayal," which unpacked the six-year investigation concerning the Frank family members, who were in hiding in an annex behind a warehouse owned by father Otto Frank in Amsterdam.

"Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusion," the network said in promoting the show, which can be watched online.

Pankoke's team was also the focus of a new book — "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" — by Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan, who reports: "Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team — led by an obsessed retired FBI agent — has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?"

For his investigation into the arrest more than 70 years later, Pankoke headed up what he called "a dream team" of 30 professionals, including specialists in artificial intelligence and advanced technology.

Pankoke said cold-case investigators typically attempt to contact the original team, but none of those individuals were still alive.

His team dug for answers to the "questions we would have asked them had they been alive. It was quite an undertaking."

They spent "countless hours" scanning newspaper archives, reading through city records, watching decades-old news video interviews and tracking other first-person accounts, meticulously pulling together "fragments" of the story, he said.

"With a normal cold case, you go to the police records room and pull out the folders from the case," Pankoke said.

Despite the challenges, Pankoke said, "I saw shortcomings in what had been done, and thought, 'I think we can do a better job.' "

Eventually, after eliminating some suspects and focusing on others — individuals who had access to information and possible motives — they believed they had their man.

Concentration camps

The now-famous Anne Frank case was not Vincent Pankoke's first connection to World War II and the Holocaust — nor his family's.

His father, Vince Pankoke Sr., was one of four brothers who served in World War II.

In April 1945, Vince Sr.'s division in Germany helped liberate a small concentration sub-camp in the town of Garmisch, more than 400 miles south of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne Frank reportedly died after being taken there from Auschwitz, Poland.

Pankoke is a descendant of German immigrants. He told of his great-grandfather settling in the Johnstown area in the mid-1800s and said his family spoke primarily German for two generations.

His grandfather, Henry Pankoke, was a fire captain with Johnstown Police Department.

Vince Pankoke Sr. was born Feb. 27, 1924, in Johnstown, and married Clara McKendree. He and three brothers served in World War II, including his experience with a concentration camp in southern Germany when he was 21 years old.

"My dad would talk to me about the war, but not about this particular camp story — until I had reached adulthood and we saw the movie 'Schindler's List' together," Vince Jr. said.

Clara Pankoke died in 2008, and Vince Sr. passed away three years later. Their obituaries in The Tribune-Democrat tracked much of the family history.

Johnstown native Mary Pat Pankoke, Vince Jr.'s wife, recounted another ironic moment during her husband's Anne Frank work.

"Vince was listening to an event being held at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where a survivor was speaking," she said. "It turned out that she was actually in the camp that was liberated by his father's division. He's not had the opportunity to speak with her, but hopes to have the chance to connect with her some day."

Michael Burgan, Richland Township's chief of police, said Pankoke Jr. was "one of the role models you looked up to" in the 1980s.

Donald Hess, former Upper Yoder Township police chief and now a law enforcement instructor at Westmoreland County Community College in Greensburg, who is unrelated to the current Upper Yoder Township police chief with the same name, said of Pankoke: "He was like a bigger fish in a smaller pond, that there was something bigger out there for him."

'FBI came to him'

Pankoke got his diploma from Richland High in 1975, then studied sociology at Pitt-Johnstown while taking criminology classes, and graduated in 1979.

He said an internship with the Richland police in 1978, after his junior year at UPJ, helped him visualize his future.

"I always had a law enforcement career on my mind," Pankoke said.

He joined the Richland force, where he spent eight years as a patrolman.

He was the department's crime prevention officer and liaison with the community's businesses and residents.

Burgan said Pankoke investigated fraud and counterfeit cases and also spoke at local schools, connecting with students to break down barriers between young people and the police.

"He had a great personality," Burgan said, "always had the ability to interact with people."

Burgan recalled that James Mock was Richland chief in those days, and Pankoke appeared to be next in line.

"Vince always seemed like he was on the fast track to succeed Chief Mock," Burgan said. "Then the FBI came to him. He took the opportunity and he excelled. He had that knack about him. I'm not surprised."

The FBI came calling in 1988.

Vince and Mary Pat Pankoke moved to Wisconsin — where winters were even colder than what they experienced in western Pennsylvania — before eventually settling in Florida in 1992.

Pankoke said he reconnected in Florida with former Richland police officer and paramedic Joe Vella, who was working for the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

From Fort Lauderdale, Pankoke led the FBI's Colombian drug squad targeting cartels, and shifted to counter-terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks due to his training in cellphone tracking and wiretaps — analyzing the hijackers' phone activity to connect them to terror cells in Europe and the Middle East.

"He's had a pretty adventurous life with the FBI," Burgan said, "and he's been involved with a lot of high-profile cases."

"Working at the Richland Police Department, who could ever have believed I would be working for the FBI?" Pankoke said.

Pankoke stepped away from FBI work in 2014, but couldn't pass up the opportunity in 2016 to work on the Anne Frank investigation in the Netherlands.

"When he first told me he would be doing this, he was very excited about the case," said Burgan, who called himself a World War II historian, "and he was optimistic that they would come to a conclusion."

'Beyond the moment'

Yes, they did.

The investigative team eventually decided that the Frank family had been turned in by Jewish businessman Arnold van den Bergh.

In 1940, Otto Frank and his family fled Germany for Amsterdam, where he set up a business. The family went into hiding two years later in an annex to his warehouse — accessed through a hidden passage behind a bookcase.

That annex is now part of the Anne Frank House museum — called by Pankoke the most visited crime scene in the world.

Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday, and kept track of activities — and her feelings — in hiding starting in 1942.

She and seven others were discovered and arrested in August 1944, taken by train to Auschwitz.

Anne Frank died a year later at Bergen-Belsen, likely of typhus and exposure, historians say.

Her writings found their way to her father, the lone Frank to survive the ordeal. He published the text in Dutch in 1947. The diary was translated to English in 1951 and published in that language in 1952 — and has since been read by millions in many languages, according to various accounts.

"The diary ends three days before the raid," Pankoke said. "When I first read the diary, I never really thought beyond the moment, that the reasons for the raid had never been told."

Clues that were run through computer models ultimately pointed to van den Bergh, an Amsterdam notary who served on the city's Jewish council.

In the "60 Minutes" interview, Pankoke said the team mapped individuals who had lived nearby and developed a list of ways the Frank family could have been compromised.

Were they seen in a window?

Did someone hear them from outside?

Did someone learn of their hiding spot and betray them?

"We were looking for those hidden connections," Pankoke said.

The conclusion was based on circumstantial evidence that was "pretty convincing," Pankoke said, but unlikely enough to get someone convicted. "There would be some reasonable doubt."

He said Otto Frank received an anonymous note that van den Bergh was the one who had notified authorities of his family's hiding place.

He added: "We've been fighting the narrative that we outed him ... but, oh no — his name was in the public record."

Pankoke said van den Bergh likely didn't know whom he was turning in — and would have been given the terrible choice of providing evidence about Jews in hiding or seeing his own family taken off to a concentration camp.

The Nazis "forced him to act in order to save his life," Pankoke said.

"The question we encountered here was: 'What would you do?' " he said. "There were some who chose not to cooperate and went to the camps themselves, never to return."

Pankoke said he is angered and saddened at people "trying to compare the Holocaust to being confined because of COVID."

During the Nazi period, an estimated 6 million Jews were killed, along with millions of others.

"I'm not Jewish. I'm human," Pankoke said. "This relates the work on a much grander scale."

He added: "We must not have done a very good job of educating the next generation. People are still claiming the Holocaust didn't happen.

"If we don't understand the mistakes of history, we are doomed — as the saying goes — to repeat those mistakes."

Cindy Blough, of Richland Township, who said she has been Mary Pat Pankoke's close friend since high school, called Vince Pankoke a "down-to-earth guy" doing incredible work.

"I knew he was doing the Anne Frank investigation, but had no idea how involved it was with such a large team, the AI system and numerous countries involved until I saw the '60 Minutes' segment," Blough said. "I was impressed with what he put together and accomplished, but I can't say I was surprised. Vince is self-motivated, goal-oriented and finishes well any job he starts.

"It was great to see these Johnstown attributes shine through on the '60 Minutes' segment. I was proud to see a local boy in the national limelight and that I could call him a friend."

Burgan sees the Amsterdam investigation as a full-circle experience for his friend — from Vince Sr.'s involvement in the liberation of a concentration camp in 1945 to Vince Jr.'s work to explain what happened to Anne Frank seven decades later.

"It's amazing the stuff our parents and that World War II generation went through," Burgan said. "This investigation was one way Vince paid homage to his father."