Karl Josef Silberbauer
Anne Frank
Anne Frank's hiding place
Photo: Shalom Bar Tal
BND career after arresting Anne Frank
US archives docs reveal SS officer responsible for detaining Jewish girl and family in 1944 became German foreign intelligence agent post war
The SS officer responsible for exposing and arresting Anne Frank
in 1944 later became an agent for the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the foreign intelligence agency of the Federal Republic of Germany post WWII, according to article published Saturday by German magazine Focus, based on official US military documents recently uncovered.
Secret Document
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According to the magazine, Karl Josef Silberbauer, who held the rank of SS-Oberscharführer during the war, was responsible for deporting the young Jewish girl from Amsterdam to Auschwitz.
She was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died from typhus in March 1945, at the age of 15.
Prior to the war, Silberbauer was recruited by the Organization Gehlen, a forerunner of the BND. According to US archive documents, after the war he worked as a confidential informant and recruiter for the BND.
The German magazine claimed Silberbauer was perceived as a terrifying interrogation specialist. He spent many years working as an informant for the foreign intelligence agency and died in 1972.
In 1942, Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in a building in Amsterdam where her father, Otto Frank, worked together with four other Jews. On August 4, 1994, SS officers raided their secret annex and arrested them all. The officers were operating on information provided by an unknown informer.
'Convicting' documents
Hamburg journalist and author Peter-Ferdinand Koch found the 'convicting' documents in US archives. His new book focuses on former SS officers who were employed by the BND after the war.
According to Koch's research published by The Local, an German based English news site, up to 200 former employees of Adolf Hitler's Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the main Reich security office, worked for the BND.
Koch claimed that among them were Nazis who were once in charge of running the concentration camps.
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