The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(38)
On August 21, 1945, Otto wrote to the Bureau of National Security (BNV) to say he’d heard that it had Tonny Ahlers in custody.15 He wanted to testify to the fact that the man had saved his life. However, when he finally went to the bureau that December, the personnel there were able to set him straight. As he explained cryptically, “I went to the Committee and said: ‘That man once saved my life.’ But they showed me the documents on him, and I saw that I was the only person he saved. He had betrayed a great many others.”16 The BNV showed Otto an illegal underground publication from 1944 called Signalementenblad (Description Booklet), produced by the resistance to warn citizens of the presence of provocateurs and betrayers. Tonny Ahlers’s name was listed among the dozens of the most dangerous individuals.17
As Vince explained, the question confronting the Cold Case Team was whether Lee’s accusations stood up. She claimed that Ahlers continued to extort money from Otto even after he and his family went into in hiding.
However, that would have meant that the office staff would have witnessed Ahlers’s visits and might even have been responsible for paying him. That seemed an unreasonable hypothesis. If the office staff had any inkling that Ahlers had been blackmailing Otto, they wouldn’t have hesitated to report him to the postwar authorities.
Lee suggested that Ahlers’s failing business had left him with no other option than to betray Otto Frank for the Kopgeld. Like Lee, the team first thought that a person could earn a tidy bonus by passing a quiet tip about Jewish hiders to a Dutch SD policeman. However, Vince’s discovery of the Kopgeld receipts in the National Archives in Maryland made it clear that a reward was paid not to the informant but to the Dutch detectives who made the arrest. At their own discretion, the detectives might share a small portion of the reward with the informant. Tips from regular citizens were likely to come from someone who ran afoul of the law for theft or minor infractions such as forgetting to put up air-raid blackout curtains at night.
In any case, would Ahlers have known that Otto and the others were hiding in the Annex? The Cold Case Team could find no proof of it. About a month after Ahlers delivered the Jansen letter, the Nazi law forbidding Jews to own businesses came into effect and the name on the building at Prinsengracht 263 was changed from Opekta to the Aryanized Gies & Co. The change of name would have signaled to anyone who did not know otherwise that Otto was gone. Keeping in mind that Ahlers first visited in 1941 and the arrest was almost forty months later, if he knew that there were Jews in hiding, he did not seem like someone who would keep the information to himself for such a long time.
In her book, Lee noted that according to Ahlers’s family members, he liked to boast that he himself was the betrayer of the by then famous hiders in the Annex.18 It is a peculiar, though perhaps sadly not uncommon, psychosis to want to claim fame as a villain. Even Ahlers’s family didn’t really believe him.
To complete their due diligence, Vince had the Cold Case Team review Lee’s claim that Ahlers continued to extort Otto after the war over his alleged business dealings with Germany. With the Anne Frank House providing extraordinary access to its archives, the team was able to dig into the Opekta and Gies & Co. order books and found out that Opekta did receive pectin from the parent company in Frankfurt and ultimately did supply the Germans, but so did many other Dutch companies.
The order book for 1940 indicated that pepper and nutmeg were supplied to the Wehrmacht in The Hague. But the Gies & Co. profit-and-loss books for 1942, 1943, and 1944 do not indicate any direct deliveries to the Wehrmacht. After the war the Netherlands Administrative Institute (Nederlandse Beheersinstituut; NBI), which monitored wartime trade with the enemy, indicated that it was not concerned about small businesses, as long as they did not actively seek German orders. If Otto’s firm had ever worked with the Germans, it was on a very small scale and surely not worthy of blackmail. Otto Frank was not a war profiteer.19
Vince, it turns out, is something of a bulldog. Once he finds the scent, he proceeds in a straight line and is relentless. “During my investigations in the FBI,” he said, “I never allowed anything to get in my way. In fact, when I was teaching new agents how to approach major case investigations, I told them if they ran into administrative roadblocks my advice was ‘If you can’t go around them, go through them.’” You have to admire his intensity.
In this case the team revealed another aspect of Dutch society under the occupation. Tonny Ahlers and Job Jansen were grudging opportunists who viewed the Nazis’ rampage as a neutral system to benefit themselves. They had no moral qualms about the murder of Jews, of Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies” in the parlance of the day),* of hostages, of resistance fighters. If they thought of them at all, those people were enemies who deserved their fate. Though prone to violence, they themselves didn’t commit murder. But they condoned it.
22
The Neighborhood
Prinsengracht 263 is on the edge of the Jordaan district of old Amsterdam where the houses lean against each other and face the canal. During wartime, the neighborhood was relatively poor. People were crowded together into small apartments and often spilled out onto the streets, adults walking to the shops and gathering along the canal, children playing. Neighbors knew one another.
In his book The Phenomenon of Anne Frank, former NIOD researcher David Barnouw suggested that the betrayer might have lived in the neighborhood because neighbors living cheek by jowl would probably have known if there were Jews hiding nearby. He further suggested that not only is there a sea of windows in homes on the adjacent streets Keizersgracht and Westermarkt that are visible from the Annex but also that the Annex can be seen from the windows in the rear of the houses that share the courtyard.