The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(44)
The helpers gave generous credit to all their food suppliers, and there is no reason to assume that they would not have acknowledged Gerardus Sr., who would have been putting his life at risk to supply them. But the team found nothing to corroborate Kremer’s claim that his father supplied the Annex with food. This doesn’t mean that Kremer’s father was not assisting the resistance by supplying food to other people in hiding. Similarly, if Dr. Lam was providing medical services to those in the Annex, as Kremer insisted in one of his frequent phone calls, Anne would likely have mentioned it in her diary or Otto Frank and the helpers would have said so. Dr. Lam may well have been treating people in hiding, just not those in the Annex.
To follow up on the other parts of Kremer’s claim, Pieter and Christine Hoste set out to determine whether it was possible to hear voices coming from the Annex. Westermarkt 2 has changed little since the war. It is a six-story brown brick building with its front side entirely dominated by large windows. The ornate lobby is still period correct, making it easy for Pieter and Christine to imagine what it was like during the war. Speaking with various tenants, they learned that the building had a very large cellar area, just as Kremer described it, where confiscated goods could have been stored.
Inspection of the building’s rear outer wall made it clear that there was no window, nor, as period photos showed, had there ever been one; people working in offices there could not have had a direct view of the Annex. Even with the side windows open, it would have been very hard to hear, let alone pinpoint the location of, voices emanating from the Annex. As for Gerardus Sr.’s account of seeing the girls playing in the courtyard—he may well have seen children, but certainly not the Frank daughters. Anne made it clear in her diary that none of the residents left the Annex for more than two years.
Vince and the team rejected Kremer’s theory about the raid on the grounds that it was hearsay, based on the deathbed testimony of Gerardus Sr. to his daughter-in-law, who later told her husband with intervals of years between. There are simply no corroborating statements or documents.
25
The “Jew Hunters”
Who were the men (and occasionally women) who hunted down Jews for a living? Who, for the magnificent bounty of 7.5 guilders ($47 today), would turn in a Jew simply for the “crime” of being Jewish? (If the Jew had actually committed what the Nazis considered a real crime—owning a radio, for example—an extra 15 guilders was added to the bounty.) As the Cold Case Team began investigating the CABR files, they found that some of the Jew hunters were members of the Referat IV B4, headed by Adolf Eichmann in Berlin. Standardized in every occupied territory, that subdepartment of the Reich Security head office oversaw the categorization of Jews, anti-Jewish legislation, and eventually the mass deportations to extermination camps. The IV B4 unit in Amsterdam, including the Dutch policemen who joined it, was under the German Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD).
By the end of 1941, the Nazi noose tightened around the necks of the Netherlands’ Jewish population. Day by day, the regulations became stricter. On December 5, all non-Dutch Jews were ordered to report to the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration), usually referred to simply as the Zentralstelle, to register for “voluntary emigration.” The Nazis already had the registration files of all Dutch Jews. The next call was for forty thousand Dutch and non-Dutch Jews to report for Arbeitseinsatz, mandatory work duty in Germany; that began on July 5, 1942, the day Margot Frank received her summons. By 1943, the well-oiled machine was well on its way to reaching its “emigration” goals. The Nazis simply totaled up the number of Jews in the Netherlands and subtracted those who had already been processed or were exempted by working for the Jewish Council. It didn’t take a statistician to calculate that there were a significant number of Jews unaccounted for, roughly twenty-five thousand, most of whom were assumed to be in hiding.
To reach their goal of making the Netherlands a judenfrei (Jew-free) nation, the Nazis ordered that those twenty-five thousand people be found. In a postwar interrogation, Willy Lages, the head of the SD in Amsterdam, admitted to having been present at a meeting in the SD headquarters in The Hague at which a decision was made to incentivize the search for the missing Jews by offering a bounty. The bounties were to be paid to Dutch policemen, mainly men from the Amsterdam police, Bureau of Jewish Affairs. The actual investigative squad within the Zentralstelle, known as the Henneicke Column (Colonne Henneicke), was made up of civilian contract employees.1
Staffed almost entirely by Dutchmen with NSB affiliation, the members of the Henneicke Column were an eclectic bunch coming from a number of different professions: 20 percent were traveling salesmen, 20 percent office clerks, 15 percent from the auto industry, and 8 percent small-business owners. Some of the notables, such as Henneicke and Joop den Ouden, were mechanics. Den Ouden had worked for Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. and was notorious for his ruthlessness in stealing Jewish property. Eduard Moesbergen, a wireless radio operator by profession, was a skilled bookkeeper and was responsible for the efficient management of the Henneicke group.
After the group was disbanded on October 1, 1943, the hunt for Jews fell to men with police powers, namely the SD Jewish Affairs squad known as unit IV B4. The chain of command started with the German-born SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann at the top with fellow German Otto Kempin directly under him in charge of the Dutch SD detectives. Those two were in place from 1942, but the Cold Case Team discovered that Kempin was transferred just days before the Annex raid. His absence is probably the reason that the phone call regarding the Annex went upstairs to Dettmann. As a German SD officer, Karl Silberbauer, who conducted the raid, would have reported to Kempin, but since Kempin was no longer there, Silberbauer was taking his orders directly from the top.