Sullivan writes with absolute dedication and precision, bringing a previously obscure suspect to the fore ... Shaped like a procedural or a whodunit, The Betrayal of Anne Frank nonetheless hums with living history, human warmth and indignation. It agilely shifts the idea of 'collaboration' over eight decades and nearly 400 pages, from dark and insidious crime to noble quest with algorithmic transparency ... The banality of evil that Hannah Arendt provocatively located in the form of Adolf Eichmann is superseded in these pages by the bureaucracy of evil, which is so often also 'the bureaucracy of the absurd,' as Sullivan notes: an alphabet soup of agencies that helped render the vilest crimes against humanity pseudolegal and systematic. Names and terms accumulate and the mind can blur. But the facts of Frank’s devastatingly curtailed life command attention. Here, her famous diary is not literary work to be plundered at will, but Exhibit A in a mountain of damning evidence.

... intermittently gripping ... meticulous ... Sullivan describes the Cold Case Team’s interdisciplinary methods, from criminal profiling, historical research and crowdsourcing to a Microsoft artificial intelligence program that found connections within a blizzard of archival documents. But the book is most engrossing as a portrait of wartime Amsterdam, a city of conflicting and cross-cutting loyalties, where personal peril could erase the line between heroism and villainy ... Then she painstakingly escorts us down various blind alleys that the investigative team pursued, as it whittled 30 theories down to a dozen possible scenarios. Sullivan details and debunks some of these at length ... How much readers care about these dead-ends will depend on both their investment in the Anne Frank saga and their patience. Sullivan’s meandering narrative can be tedious when it focuses on the mystery’s many red herrings ... Sullivan’s dissection of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam’s labyrinthine ethical byways—and how genocidal war produced moral rot—may be a greater contribution than the true-crime story that inspired the project.

... a deep dive into life in the Netherlands in the grotesque and difficult year that was 1944. It describes the lives of occupiers and occupied, of perpetrators and victims, of collaborators and those who looked away. For this alone, Sullivan has made a significant contribution, even if the narrative only begins to draw the reader in late in the game, after a long haul through much introductory material, many characters who turn out to be insignificant, and a raft of theories that are raised, then knocked down ... What might have been a page-turner doesn’t begin to seize until Chapter 35 (out of 43), a few hundred pages in ... I read the pages with an eye honed by decades spent seeking to prove facts about long-ago crimes in a variety of courts. I may not be a typical reader, but I feel bound to share that the conclusion reached would have zero prospect of being endorsed by any court, or anyone with any modicum of legal training ... Ultimately, The Betrayal of Anne Frank induces a feeling of discomfort ... If Van den Bergh had any role or responsibility for what happened at Prinsengracht 263, the evidence is not to be found in this book.

Whatever the eventual verdict, it’s clear that Sullivan’s book struggles to find a form and style that serves her material. In particular she seems uncertain about how much prior knowledge she can assume in her readers, which means that two thirds of this book are spent rehashing the story of the Franks’ murder, and the postwar publication of Anne’s diary. Only once Sullivan moves on to actual 'persons of interest' does the narrative begin to pick up, even though here again much of this information has long been in the public domain ... what Sullivan does manage to do is assemble a compelling picture of what it was like to live in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation: here is a collection of increasingly isolated individuals, hungry, terrified and daily faced with impossible choices about whether to save themselves, their loved ones, or the nice family that lives next door. And it is this moral vacuum that follows in the wake of antisemitism, rather than any particular 'perp', that betrayed Anne Frank.

... badly organized and facilely written; it takes a strikingly uncritical tone toward Pankoke and his team and seems to track every tedious dead end in the investigation. Worse, it offers little historical analysis of life in Amsterdam during the war years, particularly regarding the role of the Jewish Council, whose members made the fatal but understandable gamble of cooperating with the Nazi authorities, hoping that by doing so they could mitigate the worst of the persecution and buy extra time for the Jewish population. My own reading turned up poor annotation and sloppy factual errors, including mischaracterizations of the circumstances around the writing and editing of Anne’s diary ... But the problems with this project are bigger than either the book or the investigation it purports to cover. The goal of the search, according to Bayens, was to “begin a public conversation” about tolerance and distrust as a bulwark against 'incipient fascism' in Europe and elsewhere, while at the same time seeking justice for the Franks. That conversation has not happened. To the contrary: by focusing police-procedural style on the identification of a single culprit—a Jewish one, at that—the search for the betrayer of Prinsengracht 263 obscures the larger political realities of the Holocaust, in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

An extraordinary tale of modern science and old-fashioned gumshoe work applied to a world-renowned crime 80 years after the fact ... Sullivan’s narrative, full of twists and turns and dead-end leads, commands attention at every page, dramatic without being sensational. She writes, memorably, of Otto’s work after the death of their Judas ... Every reader of Anne Frank’s Diary will want to have this superbly rendered tale of scholarly detection at hand.