The Nazi officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank — one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of Adolf Hitler-driven Holocaust — spied for West Germany after World War II, says a new book.
Karl Josef Silberbauer was part of the Gestapo team that used a tip-off in 1944 to track down Anne Frank and her family who were hiding in an attic in Amsterdam. Frank died of typhus in the Belsen concentration camp, aged 15, in 1945. Her diary, which survived the war, became one of the most well known memoirs of the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. Now, 66 years on, Peter-Ferdinand Koch, a German journalist, found evidence in CIA and Nazi archives in Germany that after World War II Silberbauer worked as an informant and recruiter for Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, “the Local” website reported.