The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(27)
Meanwhile, the Dutch government in exile directed much of its attention to collaborators. Because it expected acts of vengeance against those known to have conspired with the Nazis, it set about identifying the collaborators so they could be prosecuted legally. In 1943, it drew up the Special Justice Act (Besluit Buitengewone Rechtspleging), and then, starting in May 1945, it established a series of tribunals and special courts throughout the country. In the newly liberated Netherlands, the Political Investigation Service (POD) looked into hundreds of thousands of cases.*
Over 150 police departments were set up to collect evidence—letters, photos, witness statements, membership cards—on collaborators. The death penalty, which had been abolished in the Netherlands in 1870, was reinstated.
Dossiers were compiled and were eventually filed in the Central Archives of Extraordinary Justice (CABR) in The Hague. Housed in the National Archives, they stretch for more than two and a half miles and contain more than 450,000 dossiers. Protected by privacy laws, the files include information on convicted collaborators, people who were wrongly accused, people who were acquitted, victims, and those who acted as witnesses. There can be dozens of files on one person since that individual might have been under investigation by multiple police departments and been prosecuted for multiple crimes. The files contain photographs, NSB membership certificates, psychological reports, bank statements, transcripts of trials, witness statements by fellow collaborators and surviving Jews, and more. Two hundred thousand of the dossiers were sent to the Office of the Public Prosecutor. It was chaos, of course, and, though the numbers are somewhat sketchy, it is estimated that 150,000 Dutch people were arrested. (A small number of German officials were also tried and imprisoned in the Netherlands.) Of the Dutch prisoners, 90,000 were released and placed “conditionally outside prosecution.” In all, 14,000 sentences were passed, 145 people were sentenced to death, and in the end 42 were executed.6
Some of the most aggressive collaborators among the “Jew hunters” were a group of Dutch Nazis working in the investigative division of the Household Inventory Agency (Abteilung Hausraterfassung), which was charged with tracking down and expropriating Jewish goods and property. One of the four subdivisions, or Kolonnen, of the agency was called the Colonne Henneicke, named after its leader, Wim Henneicke. A ruthless man, he’d been an underworld figure who’d previously run an illegal taxi service and exploited his contacts with that world in the service of the column.7 In October 1942, the Henneicke Column began the work of tracking down Jews in hiding. By the time it was disbanded in October 1943, it had delivered eight thousand to nine thousand Jews to the Nazis.8
In his remarkable book Hitler’s Bounty Hunters: The Betrayal of the Jews, Ad van Liempt provided exhaustive proof of the Kopgeld, or head bounty, allotted to the Jew hunters for each person they turned in. Among other evidence, he quoted the testimony of Karel Weeling, a Dutch police officer who’d been assigned to the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung in 1943. In a police investigation report in 1948, Weeling stated, “It was common knowledge that the staff of the Colonne Henneicke received a bonus for every Jewish person they brought to the Zentralstelle.” Weeling had been present several times when Henneicke had paid his men, always at the end of the month. At least initially, the bounty for a single Jew was 7.50 guilders ($47.50 USD today). Weeling stated, “I saw that the personnel then had to sign a number of receipts. I believe there were three in total. . . . I also saw Henneicke paying out sums varying from 300 to 450 guilders per person. In my opinion these sums were much higher than their salaries.”9
A member of the column could receive a bonus of between $1,850 and $2,790 (in today’s money), which probably explains the “unremitting zeal” of those Dutchmen as they hunted their prey. Each captured Jew meant bounty money. Even more sinister, the money to pay the abductors came from confiscated Jewish property. On December 8, 1944, the Dutch resistance assassinated Henneicke.
16
They Aren’t Coming Back
That moment in July 1945 when Otto Frank stood in Miep’s office, a letter from a nurse in Rotterdam in his hand, was one that Miep would never escape. In a voice that was “toneless, totally crushed,” Otto said, “Miep. Margot and Anne are not coming back.”
We stayed there like that, both struck by lightning, burnt thoroughly through our hearts, our eyes fixed on each other’s. Then Mr. Frank walked towards his office and said in that defeated voice, “I’ll be in my office.”1
Miep went to her desk and opened the drawer containing the small checkered diary and the notebooks and loose sheets that she’d been saving for Anne’s return. She carried them into Otto’s office and held them out to him. Recognizing the diary, he touched it with the tips of his fingers. She pressed everything into his hands and left.
When Miep and Jan invited Otto to live with them, he said he preferred staying with them because he could talk about his family. In fact, in the early days he rarely spoke of his family. Miep understood that words were not necessary. “He could talk about his family if he wanted to. And if he didn’t want to, in silence we all shared the same sorrow and memories.”2
But then, slowly, he began to break his silence. He started to translate into German snippets of Anne’s diary, which he included in letters to his mother in Basel. Some evenings he would come out of his room, diary in hand, and say, “Miep, you should hear this description that Anne wrote here! Who’d have imagined how vivid her imagination was all the while?”3