The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(11)

Otto had spent time in Amsterdam in 1923 setting up a subsidiary branch of his father’s bank, Michael Frank & Sons. Unfortunately, the project failed within a year as the family faced bankruptcy, and Otto was forced to return to Germany. But he had liked the city, and the Dutch were known for their tolerance. Hadn’t they remained neutral in the First World War? In early August 1933, Otto Frank became a refugee. Packing his country in his suitcase with his shoes, he and his wife and daughters left Germany forever.

Luck was not on Otto’s side. To speak of fate implies that some external or superior force was controlling things. Rather, it was chance that would now send Otto and his family this way and that as his capacity for controlling his life was gradually stolen from him.

Otto could not have anticipated it, but by the end of World War II, the Netherlands would have the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: 73 percent of Jews in the Netherlands died. In Belgium, 40 percent of Jews were killed; in France, 25 percent; in Denmark, .6 percent. In Fascist Italy, only 8 percent of Jews were killed.5 The estimate of Jews in hiding in the Netherlands varies between twenty-five thousand and twenty-seven thousand. One-third were betrayed due in part to the Nazis’ sophisticated system of financial rewards to tempt police officers and civilians into betraying hidden Jews.

That was one of the issues that had drawn Pieter van Twisk to the cold case investigation in the first place; he wanted to understand why that had happened in such large numbers in the Netherlands. One long-held theory was that the structure of Dutch society, namely, its separation into groups by religion and associated political ideas, had worked against the protection of the Jewish population. The Dutch called this “pillarization.” There were four main pillars: Catholics, Protestants, socialists, and liberals. Each pillar (the Dutch word is verzuiling) had its own trade unions, banks, hospitals, schools, universities, sports clubs, newspapers, and so on. Such segregation meant that people were tightly knit within their own group and had little or no personal contact with members from other pillars. Yet Pieter said that was too easy an explanation. Pillarization is too vague and generalized a notion to explain the Netherlands’ actions during the war, he said.

The historians Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller have a more complex explanation. They point out that the Dutch method of civil registration helped the Nazis. Municipal registration cards listed name; birth date; place of birth; nationality; religion; names and birth dates of spouses and children; date of marriage; date a person died; addresses within the municipality where people lived from start date to end date; whether a person had a passport or ID. Officially, religion was listed since religious groups received government funding based on their membership. Jews were identified by the initials NI: Netherlands Israelite. Thus, when the Nazis’ roundups began in the summer of 1942, Dutch Jews were easy targets. Given the country’s geography, flight was not an option. To the east was the long border with Germany; to the south, Belgium was occupied; and to the west and north, the sea was closed to shipping. There was virtually nowhere to go.6

It is also true that the experience of the Netherlands during the war was different from that of other countries. The Netherlands was, in effect, a police state. Whereas, for example, Belgium and occupied France were ruled by the Wehrmacht, and Denmark came under the control of the German Navy, the Netherlands was initially under a civilian government led by the Austrian lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart, whom Hitler had appointed Reich Commissioner. A power struggle ensued between Seyss-Inquart and the Dutch Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), which was under the influence of Hermann G?ring, the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, on the one hand, and Police Commander Hanns Albin Rauter, the highest-ranking SS leader, who reported directly to SS Commander Heinrich Himmler, on the other. As G?ring’s power waned and Himmler’s was in the ascendant, Rauter’s influence increased. He oversaw the deportations of 107,000 Jews, the repression of the resistance, and retaliation for assaults on Nazis. Initially the death of one Nazi called for the execution of several Dutchmen; the ratio increased over the course of the occupation.

In addition, the Dutch endured brutal repression after any dissent from the Nazi dogma. A national strike organized by the Communist Party in Amsterdam on February 25, 1941, in response to the Razzias, or roundups, of Jews is considered to be the first public protest against the Nazis in occupied Europe and the only mass protest against the deportation of Jews to be organized by non-Jews. At least three hundred thousand workers in and around Amsterdam took part.7 German repression was immediate and brutal. The strike organizers were rounded up and executed. It took a long time for the resistance to recover. “Only in the spring of 1943 did another strike take place, but . . . the protest came much too late for the vast majority of Jews who had already been deported” to the death camps.8

Still, there were many different groups and individuals who worked on behalf of the Jews. There were four networks dedicated to the rescue of Jewish children. Henri?tte “Hetty” Vo?te, a young biology student, joined one group calling itself the Utrecht Children’s Committee. It set about finding hiding places for several hundred young Jewish children who’d been separated from their parents. Hetty cycled around the countryside, literally knocking on doors.9

It is impossible to estimate the exact number of people who helped Jews hide, but an approximate number would be at least twenty-eight thousand and probably more—an extraordinary figure, given these people were putting their own and possibly their family’s lives on the line, often for strangers.