WHO TURNED IN ANNE FRANK?

Found, oddly enough on the home page of
Wired News, under their “Ephemera…” column, with no link to any article for background material was this piece titled:

Judas Unmasked?
Who betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis? The question has lingered since the end of World War II and now a British author thinks she has found the answer. Carol Ann Lee believes that a business associate of Anne’s father Otto, Anton Ahlers, tipped off Dutch police to the whereabouts of the Frank family. German and Dutch security police raided the building alongside an Amsterdam canal and arrested the Frank family, including Anne. Only Otto survived the ordeal; Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp only weeks before the end of the war.

The title leaves me with a definite sense of moral queasiness, and a vague reminder of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s essay on “Defining Deviancy Down“. Judas of course, “turned in” Christ. But Nazi Germany, and its conquered nations, were teeming with “Judases” , ready to turn in their fellow neighbors at a moment’s notice.

What do you call Judas when he’s but one of millions?

NOTE: For a variety of Anne Frank links, as well as a review of her diary, visit this Brothers Judd page.