Case file of Anne Frank to be reopened

Dutch historians said yesterday they were reopening the case file on Anne Frank to determine who betrayed the hiding place of the Jewish teenager to the Nazis.

New theories have been raised by two biographers of Anne Frank, whose diary scrawled in notebooks during 25 months locked in a secret warehouse annexe made her a heroine of the Holocaust.

One theory alleges the betrayer was Anton Ahlers, a business associate of Anne's father, Otto Frank who was the only member of the family to survive the Nazi concentration camps. The second theory points to Lena Hartog, who cleaned the canal-side warehouse in central Amsterdam below the annexe where the Frank family was concealed with another family – eight people in all.

The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, which publishes the authoritative text of Anne's diary, said it would open an inquiry into the theories, re-examining police files and the national archives.

"So far they are not more than theories for me. There is no smoking gun," said David Barnouw, the institute's leading expert on Anne Frank, who investigated the betrayal mystery in the 1980s.

For years after the war, Dutch police suspected the betrayer was Willem Van Maaren, who worked at the warehouse. But the evidence against Van Maaren was inconclusive, and he died in 1971 professing his innocence.