The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(3)

Suddenly it looked as though the war would be over in a matter of weeks, or maybe a few months. Everyone was making plans for what they would do after the war. Margot and Anne began to talk about going back to school.

And then the unimaginable happened. As Otto stated in an interview almost two decades later, “When the Gestapo came in with their guns, that was the end of everything.”1

As the sole survivor among the eight, we have only Otto’s record of what happened from the perspective of the Annex residents. He recalled the arrest in such vivid detail that it was clearly seared in his mind.

It was, he said, around ten thirty. He was upstairs giving Peter van Pels an English grammar lesson. In taking dictation, Peter had misspelled the word “double” using two b’s. He was pointing this out to the boy when he heard someone’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. This was disturbing because at that hour all the residents were very quiet lest they be heard in the offices below. The door opened. A man stood there pointing a gun at them. He was not wearing a police uniform. They raised their hands. They were marched downstairs at gunpoint.2

In his recounting of the raid, we get a sense of Otto’s profound shock. During trauma, time slows and stretches out, and some details are strangely emphasized. Otto remembers a spelling error; a grammar lesson; a creaking stair; a pointed gun.

He remembers he was teaching Peter. He remembers the word that Peter stumbled on—“double”—with only one b. That’s the rule. Otto believes in rules, in order, but a dark force is sweeping up his stairs with the intent to kill him and all he holds most precious. Why? Power, hatred, or simply because it can? Even in retrospect, Otto keeps the overwhelming horror at bay, maintaining his self-control because others depend on him. As he looks at the gun in the plainclothes policeman’s hand, he thinks: The Allies are advancing. Luck, chance, fate, may save them all. But he is wrong. He and his family will be transported in freight cars on the last train to Auschwitz. It is unthinkable, but he also knows the unthinkable can happen.

When Otto and Peter reached the main floor of the Annex, they found everyone else standing with their hands up in the air. There were no hysterics, no weeping, only silence. Everyone is numbed by the shock of what was happening—now, so close to the end.

In the middle of the room Otto noted a man he assumed was from the Grüne Polizei, as the Dutch called the German local police force because of their green uniforms. This, of course, was Silberbauer (who was technically not a member of the Grüne Polizei but an SD officer), who later claimed that neither he nor the plainclothes policemen with him drew their weapons. But Otto’s is the more trustworthy account. Like that of most SS members after the war, Silberbauer’s testimony was designed only to exonerate himself.

The hiders’ quiet composure seemed to anger the Nazi. When he ordered them to collect their things for the trip to Gestapo headquarters on Euterpestraat, Anne picked up her father’s briefcase, which held her diary. Otto Frank reported that Silberbauer grabbed the briefcase from Anne, threw her diary with the checkered cover and some loose sheets onto the floor, and filled the briefcase with the last valuables and money that Otto and the others had managed to hold on to, including Fritz Pfeffer’s little packet of dental gold. The Germans were losing the war. By now, much of the stolen booty collected for the Reich by the Jew-hunting units was ending up in someone’s private pocket.

Ironically, it was Silberbauer’s greed that saved Anne Frank’s diary. Had Anne held on to the briefcase and been allowed to keep it when they were arrested, her diary would certainly have been taken from her at SD headquarters and destroyed or lost forever.

According to Otto, it was at this moment that Silberbauer noted a gray footlocker with metal stripes beneath the window. The lid displayed the words “Leutnant d. Res. Otto Frank” (Reserve Lieutenant Otto Frank). “Where did you get this chest?” Silberbauer demanded. When Otto told him that he’d served as an officer in World War I, Silberbauer seemed shocked. As Otto reported:


The man became exceedingly confused. He stared at me, and finally said:

“Then why didn’t you report your status?”

I bit my lips.

“Why man you would have been treated decently! You would have been sent to Theresienstadt.”

I said nothing. Apparently he thought Theresienstadt a rest camp, so I said nothing. I merely looked at him. But he suddenly evaded my eyes, and all at once the perception came to me: Now he is standing at attention. Inwardly, this police sergeant had snapped to attention; if he dared, he might very well raise his hand to his cap in salute.

Then he abruptly turned on his heel and raced upstairs. A moment later he came running down, and then he ran up again, and so he went, up and down, up and down, calling out: “Take your time!”

He shouted these same words to us and to his agents.3



In Otto’s account it is the Nazi who loses his composure, running up and down like the Mad Hatter, while he and the others retain theirs. Otto has caught the German military cult of obedience in Silberbauer’s instinctive response to his officer status, but he may have underestimated Silberbauer’s automatic, reflexive racism. Years later, he would say, “Perhaps he [Silberbauer] might have spared us if he’d been alone.”4

This is doubtful. After he’d delivered the prisoners to the truck waiting to transport them to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, Silberbauer returned to the building to confront one of the office workers, Miep Gies. Perhaps he’d spared her from arrest because she, like him, was Austrian, but not before lecturing her, “And weren’t you ashamed to help that Jewish trash?”5