The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(48)
In the early evening of April 8, 1944, the day before Easter, Ans van Dijk, Branca Simons, and her husband, Wim Houthuijs, were strolling through the Prinsengracht neighborhood, where De Groot’s parents were hiding. Van Dijk recognized Israel de Groot, Louis’s uncle, walking alone on the street. She approached him, mentioning that she could arrange safe passage to Spain. Israel told her that he didn’t need her help and kept walking.
Van Dijk, Simons, and Houthuijs followed Israel and watched him enter the building at Prinsengracht 825. From a nearby bar, Van Dijk made a phone call to the Zentralstelle and relayed the tip to SS Lieutenant Otto Kempin, who ordered Grootendorst and several other Dutch SD detectives to the address. The V-people waited nearby and pointed out the location to the raid team.
Israel de Groot had left the Prinsengracht address just prior to the arrival of the Dutch SD men. Sadly, Louis’s sister Rachel was at that moment visiting her parents, and all three were taken away. While still in hiding, Louis was told that his parents and sister had been captured, but only after the war was over did he learn that they had all perished in the camps. His uncle Israel, who was working with the resistance, was never captured and survived the war.
Louis discovered that his mother, Sophia, and his sister were sent to a jail in The Hague. Though it cannot be proven, he suspects that after the arrest of his family, Van Dijk was put into the cell with his sister to gain information on other Jews in hiding. His father was taken to a jail in Amsterdam where, by chance, his jailer was known to him, and he was able to convince the man to allow him to write a note to his brother Israel recounting the details of the arrest. The jailer passed on the note, which was how Louis eventually learned who was involved in the arrest and betrayal of his family. From the note he also learned that his father, Meijer, knew the arresting officer, Grootendorst; they had played marbles together when they were children.
As it was becoming evident by the fall of 1944 that the Allies had won the war, Van Dijk turned to Otto Kempin and asked for help to get a visa to travel to Germany. Kempin refused. However loyally she may have worked as a V-Frau, she was not to be rewarded.11 She then moved with her lover, Mies de Regt, to The Hague, where she made her living from black-market trade.
After the liberation, Van Dijk was arrested and tried by the Special Court of Justice. She was convicted of twenty-three cases of betrayal involving sixty-eight people and sentenced to death. Her CABR file is massive and suggests a much higher number, probably closer to two hundred betrayals, but many cases simply couldn’t be proven because so few witnesses had survived.
Launching an appeal, Van Dijk’s lawyer asked for a psychological investigation, claiming that both her parents had died while suffering from mental illnesses; his attempt to suggest that her behavior was a result of some inherited condition did not impress the judges. On January 14, 1948, Ans van Dijk was executed at Fort Bijlmer after having been baptized a Catholic the previous day.
Van Dijk had the distinction of being the only woman sentenced to death and actually executed in the Netherlands. The other women she had worked closely with, Miep Braams and Branca Simons, were also sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life in prison. It has been argued that part of the reason Van Dijk was executed was that she was an outspoken and openly homosexual woman.
If it had not been for the Nazis, it is unlikely that Van Dijk’s life would have been exceptional. In 1940, she was a thirty-five-year-old clerk in a hat shop with a female lover. As a lesbian she would have been an outsider, which clearly angered her, though there is no suggestion that she acted on her anger. Perhaps, initially, that fact even gave her courage. In the early days of the occupation, she refused to cower before the Nazis’ rules and supposedly helped some fellow Jews find safe hiding places. However, in the last two years of the war, from April 1943 to April 1945, she turned into a grotesque monster capable of betraying several hundred people. Fear for her life may have led her to become a V-Frau, but what happened after that, according to her handler Pieter Schaap, was that she took to the work; she became one of his most effective informants.
Her lover Mies de Regt testified that she believed that Van Dijk had been seduced by the “irresistible excitement of the hunt.”12 Excitement of the hunt! It’s an astonishing phrase. Coerced by fear for her life, then seduced by power. Is it possible that one thing we can learn from Ans van Dijk is that totalitarian regimes achieve their power not just through repression but through the seduction of insiderism, which turns people into craven sycophants? They believe that they are among the elite until, like Van Dijk, the power turns on them and spits them out.
For a time Van Dijk seemed to be a likely suspect in the raid on Prinsengracht 263. In the Arrest Tracking Project, her name came up again and again. Clearly, working as a V-Frau, she had a motive. Did she have knowledge? The Prinsengracht area was part of her regular turf, and, at least according to Gerard Kremer, she was often seen there. Could she have overheard something about the hiders in the Annex? Could she have become suspicious and staked out the building, watching the stream of suppliers who provided what seemed an excess of food? And did she have opportunity? Where was she in the days preceding August 4, and who was she in contact with? Those were the questions the Cold Case Team had yet to answer.
27
No Substantial Proof, Part I
From the beginning of their work, the Cold Case Team collected a wealth of material related to the original 1947–48 police investigation into the raid on the Annex. It included multiple CABR files, personal and official correspondence, court documents, and the nine-page Amsterdam police report. Vince said that one thing was clear: by today’s standards, the quality and thoroughness of the investigation were subpar. One reason for this was that just after the war, the Dutch police force was purged of collaborators. That led to 2,500 people losing their jobs and many others being demoted. Sixteen percent of the force was suspended and investigated. As a result, inexperienced and understaffed investigators had to deal with an overwhelming backlog of cases of collaboration, war crimes, and betrayal.