The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(36)
In 1946, Jansen was convicted of assisting the enemy in wartime. One of the charges against him was the denunciation of Otto Frank. Tried for collaboration, his self-defense was creative. He claimed to have joined the NSB in 1940 in order to be able to help his Jewish wife. He said that he’d become a beneficiary member of the SS in the Netherlands in order to be able to do something for his sons, who’d been captured by the Germans.9 His lies were easily contradicted, and he was sentenced to a term of four years and six months. Since he’d spent time in preinternment beginning March 31, 1945, his incarceration terminated on September 30, 1949.
Was there anything more to the story of Job Jansen? The team tracked down a grandson living in Australia. After obtaining a telephone number, Vince attempted to speak with him about his family’s memories of Job. After the grandson listened intently to Vince’s explanation of what the team was attempting to do, he refused to speak about Job, claiming that he was doing his own investigation. It was clear from the grandson’s tone that the family was still embarrassed by the patriarch’s affiliation with the Nazis.
This scenario, like many others the team investigated, was ultimately eliminated. But it was particularly interesting because it intersected with another theory under consideration. That theory involved a man to whom Otto Frank was initially grateful, a man whose story was ignored for more than sixty years, until he was named by the British author Carol Ann Lee in her book The Hidden Life of Otto Frank. That man had boldly walked into Otto’s office with Jansen’s letter of denunciation. That man was Anton “Tonny” Ahlers.
21
The Blackmailer
“The stranger said: ‘You can keep the letter. Or perhaps you’ll do better to tear it up. I took it out of the file of incoming reports.’”1
So said Ahlers as he handed an envelope to Otto Frank in his Opekta office on April 18, 1941. The first published account of this incident is found in Ernst Schnabel’s book The Footsteps of Anne Frank. Otto described to Schnabel a moment when “danger came very close.” He referred to Job Jansen simply as an “acquaintance” who stopped him in the street and to Tonny Ahlers as a “stranger” who had come to his office. He did not name either man. It’s a poignant moment because Otto told Schnabel that he had escaped danger that time and had then survived the camps, the only one in his family to do so. “But I do not like to speak of a guardian angel. How could any angel have had the heart to save a man alone, without his family?”2
Vince contacted Carol Ann Lee, who had first identified Tonny Ahlers as the courier for the NSB, and on November 8, 2018, flew to England to interview her at her home in Yorkshire. One of his first questions was how she’d come to write a biography of Otto Frank. She explained that she was intrigued by his life and wanted to know who he was independent of his daughter’s diary. Eventually Vince asked her how she’d happened upon Tonny Ahlers. “It’s a long story,” she replied. It had begun when she had contacted Otto’s nephew Buddy Elias, the chairman of the Anne Frank Fonds and the person who had taken over Otto’s house in Basel after Otto’s and Fritzi’s deaths. Lee had told Elias that she was writing a biography of Otto Frank, and he had invited her to visit.
It turned out that Otto had left behind a massive collection of documents. The attic and basement of the house contained stacks of photos and papers, including letters Otto had written and received over the years. It seemed to Lee that Elias had no real idea of their significance.
At one point, Elias directed her to a wooden bureau full of stacks of papers. As she was looking through them, she came across a letter Otto had written that referred to an A. C. Ahlers. It was addressed to the Dutch authorities, notifying them that A. C. Ahlers had come to Otto’s office and given him the denunciation letter penned by J. Jansen that Ahlers had intercepted. Otto wrote that the man had saved his life. Lee recognized the story Otto had told Schnabel even though names had not been used. Since Tonny Ahlers had not been mentioned in past investigations, Lee decided to probe further.
Based on her investigation into the encounter between Otto Frank and Tonny Ahlers in 1941, she developed one of the more complex theories about who betrayed Anne Frank. She argued that after that first encounter, Ahlers saw the opportunity to continue to blackmail Otto.
Vince enumerated for me the assumptions that Lee had made. First, Ahlers had to have been aware that Otto Frank and his family were hiding in the Annex. Lee claimed he had known this because the annex of Prinsengracht 263 was similar to the one attached to his mother’s nearby residence at Prinsengracht 253, where he’d lived for some time in 1937.3 Second, Ahlers had kept the information about the hiders to himself until, in the summer of 1944, his business was floundering and he needed money. The bounty he could receive for reporting Jews proved too tempting.4 Tipped off by Ahlers on August 4, 1944, a team of SD agents stormed into the Opekta office, demanding to know where the Jews were hiding. Neither the blackmail nor the betrayal came out after the war because Ahlers continued to have the power to blackmail Otto Frank. Ahlers’s leverage, according to Lee, was the knowledge that Otto Frank’s company had delivered goods to the Wehrmacht during the war.5
The Cold Case Team found Lee’s deductions intriguing, but they would have to be proved. Monique set up the evidence board in the office and assigned each of her researchers a stage in Lee’s deductions. The first question was: What would Ahlers’s motive in taking the Jansen letter to Otto have been? Was it blackmail? Ahlers did pay a second visit to Prinsengracht 263, at which point Otto gave him another few guilders. But if it was blackmail, even Otto suggested that far more could have been extorted. It’s clear from Otto’s postwar account in his letter to the Bureau of National Security (Bureau Nationale Veiliheid; BNV) that his and Ahlers’s paths did not cross again before Otto and his family went into hiding.6 Otto said that he felt grateful and indebted to Ahlers for saving his life. That was of course absurd: Ahlers was an unscrupulous Dutch Nazi and a petty thief. But Otto did not know that.