The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(16)
8
Prinsengracht 263
On December 1, 1940, seven months after the German invasion, Otto Frank moved his business to new premises at Prinsengracht 263. Opekta and Pectacon were stabilizing, and sales were satisfactory. He’d chosen a seventeenth-century house facing the canal and around the corner from the Westerkerk, the imposing church where Rembrandt van Rijn is buried. The street was occupied by small businesses, warehouses, and modest commercial factories, sometimes with apartments above.
Number 263 was a typical Amsterdam structure with a warehouse area on the ground floor and offices and storerooms in the three stories above. Like many of the period buildings, it had a four-story annex attached at the rear. The warehouse floor ran the entire length of the building, including under the Annex, with double-door street access to Prinsengracht and courtyard access at the rear. This meant that the Annex, though invisible from the front of the building, could be seen from the back, which abutted on a very large interior courtyard. Dozens of neighbors on the other three sides of the courtyard had a view of the Annex.
About five weeks before the move to the new premises, on October 22, 1940, the Germans passed a law that all industrial and commercial firms owned in whole or in part by Jews had to be registered with the Economic Inspection Agency (Wirtschaftsprüfstelle). Failure to report meant a large fine and five years in prison. Otto knew that it was the first step in the “de-Judification” and expropriation of his companies. He subverted the Germans by having Victor Kugler and Miep’s husband, Jan, become managing director and supervisory director of the renamed Pectacon, which was Aryanized as Gies & Co., a thoroughly Dutch name. Had the company remained Jewish, it would have been liquidated under the directive of a German trust company and the money deposited with the Lippmann-Rosenthal bank. But Otto’s company was never plundered. It had become Dutch.
The Nazis were ingenious at using subterfuge to maintain the pretense of legality. To gain the trust of Jews, in early 1941 they took over the long-established Jewish bank Lippmann-Rosenthal and turned it into a loot bank. Jews were forced to hand over their assets and all objects of value. They could keep “wedding rings, silver wristwatches and pocket watches, one set of silverware consisting of a knife, a fork, a soupspoon and a dessertspoon.”1 Statements were issued to clients and in some cases interest was paid, but it was a pseudobank. Jewish capital was actually being accumulated to pay for the eventual deportations and the maintenance of forced labor and concentration camps.
The deportations began in the summer of 1942. When selected for deportation, Jews were told to hand over their house keys to the Dutch police, along with a list of house contents. Everything was taken, from furniture to valuable art. The Nazis were good at euphemisms. When art was looted, the official term was Sicherstellung (safekeeping).2
After the first deportations, a Dutch protest leaflet was circulated by the resistance that explained things clearly:
All prior German measures had aimed at isolating the Jews from the rest of the Dutch, to make contact impossible, and to kill our sentiments concerning living side by side and in solidarity. They have succeeded much better than we know ourselves or are probably willing to admit. The Jews have to be killed in secrecy and we, the witnesses, must remain deaf, blind, and silent. . . . God and history will condemn us and hold us partly responsible for this mass murder if we now remain silent and simply look on.3
None of these developments went unnoticed by Otto Frank. In the beginning, the restrictions seemed eccentric and temporary. Walking to and from work each day, he would find himself not being allowed to take the tram or not even being allowed to sit down at an outdoor café to rest his feet. He would tamp down his anger. But when the BBC reported in June 1942 that seven hundred thousand Jews had perished in Germany and the occupied territories,4 he understood that what was at stake was not simply segregation but rather impending annihilation. There would be no obtaining visas for his family. He knew that the next step must be to go into hiding.
9
The Hiding
There are two versions of the Frank family’s finding refuge in the Annex. According to the German author and radio personality Ernst Schnabel in his 1958 book The Footsteps of Anne Frank, Kleiman and Kugler approached Otto and said it was time to think of going into hiding, proposing the Annex behind Prinsengracht 263.1 Melissa Müller, in her biography of Anne Frank, concurred that Kleiman, as early as the summer of 1941, proposed the empty rooms in the Annex as an ingenious hiding place because no one would ever think of Frank hiding on his own business premises.2 Bep’s son Joop had been told by his mother that Kleiman had suggested the Annex and then Kugler had been included in the plan.3 But Otto had been thinking of going into hiding as early as December 1940, and it may be that he rented Prinsengracht 263 with hiding in mind.4
Otto would later say that it was he who had approached his employees with the plan of going into hiding: first Kleiman, then Kugler, then Miep, then Bep. Miep confirmed this:
The initiative to go into hiding, to find a hiding place, to organize everything for it, came from Otto Frank. He thought it all out . . . and he had already divided certain different tasks for his staff members when he asked them to help him and his family in hiding.5
Whoever was the source of the idea, it created a painful situation for Otto. What an incredible question he was forced to ask: Will you help save me, save my family? The Germans had threatened to imprison any Dutch citizen who helped Jews. It would have been typical of Otto to ask each person himself and to stress that they understood what it would mean if they said yes. How hard to place his employees in such a position! And equally hard to find in himself such complete trust that he could put the fate of his family entirely into their hands.