He had the suspicion that the informant could have been Willem van Maaren, an employee of the Opekta company and someone who the helpers and the Frank family began to distrust during their time in hiding. Frank began his own research into who could have tipped off the Nazi authorities. Frank (who survived being a prisoner at Auschwitz) began an investigation to find out who turned them into the SD. The helpers brought food and supplies and made sure to the best of their ability that nothing happened to the Frank family. Frank remained a silent partner in the business even after the Nazi regime took control, and the family was completely dependent on the 6 employees who were helping them to stay hidden. Little did he known that soon the Netherlands would become a Nazi-occupied country. Frank had been worried about the rise of the Nazi party even then and had thought he was moving his family to safer ground. The family patriarch, Otto Frank, had moved the family from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933 when he was offered a position running the Opekta spice and pectin company. In 1942 the Frank family, concerned with the ever growing violence towards Jews in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, went into hiding at a canal street building with a commercial space on the first floor. It begs the question: who betrayed Anne FrankвЂ™s family? Via: Anne Frank Photo Archive/ Flickr To this day, there are a number of theories about how the Nazis knew to look for the family in the well-hidden area of the building. On August 4th, 1944, the secret annex was raided by officers of the Sicherheitsdienst (or SD), an intelligence division of the Nazi regime, and the 8 people in hiding were sent to different concentration camps. Anne FrankвЂ™s diary, which she kept from 1942-44, eloquently told the story of the family and the 4 others who lived in the secret annex apartment during these years. Over the years there have been many accusations about who could have betrayed the Frank family hiding out at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam during World War II.

Willem van maaren