The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(13)

Miep was hired by Otto in 1933, when she was twenty-four. She once described Otto as a man of few words, with high principles and an ironic sense of humor.5 Her soon-to-be husband, Jan Gies, worked for the Social Services Authority and, beginning in 1943, was active in the National Support Fund (Nationaal Steun Fonds; NSF), the resistance organization in charge of providing funds to all the other branches of the resistance, with much of the money coming from the Dutch government in exile in London.6 It was dangerous work. She said, “More than twenty thousand Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough.”7 Miep and her husband became close friends of the Franks, dining with them most weeks.

Elisabeth “Bep” Voskuijl was eighteen when she was hired by Opekta in the early summer of 1937. Ten years younger than Miep, she seemed painfully shy, but she had extraordinary courage. She spoke eloquently of her boss: Otto was “affectionate, unsparing with himself and keenly sensitive . . . a soft word always made far more impression than any shouting.”8 Her father, Johannes, joined the company as warehouse manager. A committed anti-Nazi, it was he who built the bookcase that camouflaged the entrance to the secret Annex.

Those five people would hide Otto’s family, save his life, and share his tragedies. They were not only employees but friends who had the same clear-eyed perception of the Nazi menace as he had. When he looked back at Amsterdam after the war, Otto would say that it had been an ambiguous place for him. He identified it with friendship unto death. He also identified it with betrayal.

By 1938, Otto’s sense of security began to fracture, particularly after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Were the Netherlands really safe? If Austria could be invaded and declared part of Greater Germany, why not the Netherlands? According to Nazi ideology, the Dutch were a Germanic people who spoke a form of High German. That spring Otto traveled to the US Consulate in Rotterdam to apply for a visa to emigrate to the United States. He was not alone. By the beginning of 1939, US consulates in Europe had received a total of three hundred thousand visa applications. The annual quota of visas for German and Austrian citizens was twenty-seven thousand.9

If he thought of joining his mother and sister in Switzerland, he soon gave up the idea. Even before the war began, the Swiss had refused to accept Jewish refugees or Jewish immigrants. They did not want to offend Hitler or compromise their neutrality. The only Jews allowed into the country were people such as Palestinian Jews who could prove they were in legal transit to another country. Otto knew that if he tried to cross the border into Switzerland, he and his family would almost certainly be turned back and then would be arrested. Jews were not allowed to leave the Netherlands without visas.

Otto held on to the hope that Germany would respect Dutch neutrality as it had during the First World War. But mostly, he was putting on a brave front. He understood that he and his family were again at risk. His cousin Milly Stanfield in London recalled her correspondence with Otto in the spring of 1940. “I got a letter from him saying how terribly unhappy he was because he was sure Germany was going to attack.”10 He said he could hardly think about what would happen to the children. Milly suggested he send the girls to London; they might be safer there. Otto wrote back that he and Edith couldn’t imagine being separated from them, even though Milly was the one person he would have been able to entrust with his daughters’ lives.

Likely that was one of the decisions Otto would regret bitterly, but this is mere hindsight. Hitler had attacked Holland; why not England next? And what guaranteed that England would hold out? His children might have been alone in an occupied London, for which he could never have forgiven himself.

In March 1939, Edith’s mother, Rosa, arrived from Aachen to take up residence at 37 Merwedeplein. Then, in the summer of 1940, Edith’s brothers, Walter and Julius, were finally able to emigrate to the United States and promised to obtain visas for them all. There was again hope of a route to freedom.





7


The Onslaught


It was Friday, May 10, 1940. Miep remembered everyone being crowded around the radio in Otto’s office. The mood was one of desolation and shock. The announcer reported that German troops and planes had swooped across the Dutch border at dawn. Some of the troops were said to be dressed in Dutch uniforms, as ambulance crews, or riding bicycles. Was this true? Was it rumor? But when Queen Wilhelmina spoke that morning, urging calm, it was clear that the German invasion was in progress. Three days later the queen fled to England; four days later the Germans bombed and virtually destroyed the core of the port city of Rotterdam, killing an estimated six hundred to nine hundred people, even as the terms of surrender were being negotiated. Adolf Hitler blamed faulty radio communications for not calling off the bombing in time. However, the day after the bombing of Rotterdam, he threatened to bomb Utrecht if the Dutch did not surrender. The Netherlands capitulated on the fifteenth. The whole “war” lasted five days. Expecting the Germans to honor their neutrality, the Dutch had been spectacularly unprepared.

At first the German occupation seemed nearly benign. The Nazis treated the Dutch like their lesser cousins and anticipated that they would be easy converts to the tenets of National Socialism. German orders for Dutch goods created something of an economic boom, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s velvet-glove approach even meant that some Dutch welcomed the occupation.