SS man who arrested Anne Frank worked for BND after the war

The magazine said Karl Josef Silberbauer worked as a confidential informant and recruiter for the BND, according to evidence found by Hamburg journalist and author Peter-Ferdinand Koch in US archives.

Silberbauer was a feared interrogation specialist who spent years working as an informant for the foreign intelligence agency. Earlier, he worked for the Organisation Gehlen, a forerunner of the BND. During the war, he held the rank of SS-Oberscharführer.

Anne Frank and her family went into hiding with four other Jews starting in 1942. Operating on a tip-off, SS officers raided their secret annex in August 1944.

Anne Frank was sent to Auschwitz before her transfer to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She died of typhus, aged 15, in March 1945, shortly before the war ended.

The strong network of former SS officers in Germany’s foreign intelligence agency is the subject of a new book by Koch, titled “Enttarnt.”

According to his research, up to 200 former employees of Adolf Hitler’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the main Reich security office, worked for the BND, based near Munich in Pullach, at one time or another.

Members of the SS Totenkopfverbände, the units charged with running the Nazi concentration camps, also reportedly worked for the foreign intelligence agency.

The Local/arp