The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(49)
It was also clear that the investigation might not have occurred at all except for pressure from Otto and his employees at Opekta/Gies & Co. Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler took the initiative to push the postwar authorities to take up the case. They, along with Miep and Bep, concluded that Opekta’s warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, was the most likely betrayer. Kleiman wrote the Amsterdam Political Investigation Service (Politieke Opsporingsdienst; POD) in the summer of 1945, demanding an investigation of Van Maaren. Nothing happened.1
On November 11, 1945, Otto wrote a letter to his mother saying that he, together with Kleiman and Kugler, had gone to the Bureau of National Security (Bureau Nationale Veiligheid; BNV) to check police files for photographs of the Dutch policemen who’d arrested them. He said they’d been able to identify two men—murderers who had been responsible for the death of his family. He was hoping that the men might be able to identify the traitor who had betrayed them to the SD in the first place, though he wasn’t optimistic since such men always said that they had just been following orders.2 (In a letter dated May 2, 1958, Kugler recalled that he and Kleiman had accompanied Otto to the BNV in 1945.) Among the mug shots the police showed them, they recognized Willem Grootendorst and Gezinus Gringhuis, the Dutch policemen attached to the IV B4 unit who were currently serving sentences for collaboration in Amstelveenseweg prison.
Later that November, Otto, Kleiman, and Kugler made a visit to the prison to interview Grootendorst and Gringhuis. Both men admitted to having taken part in the raid at Prinsengracht 263, though later, under official interrogation, they would conveniently forget having done so.3 Both said that Sergeant Abraham Kaper of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs had summoned them. They claimed, probably truthfully, to have no information about an anonymous morning phone call to Julius Dettmann reporting Jews in hiding. Dettmann could not be questioned; he’d hanged himself in his jail cell on July 25, though it was rumored that he’d been helped.
Otto then made a second visit to the prison to interview Gezinus Gringhuis. He made a notation to that effect in his agenda on December 6, 1945, along with the name Ab. That likely refers to Otto’s close friend Abraham “Ab” Cauvern, whose wife, Isa, worked as Otto’s secretary.
Otto was clearly hoping to have his case taken up quickly by the POD, but in 1945 he was just one of 5,500 survivors returning from the camps. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until June 11, 1947, almost two years later, that he next visited the Bureau of National Security in person. Again nothing. Then, after a conversation with Otto, on July 16 Kleiman sent another letter to the Political Investigation Department (Politieke Recherche Afdeling; PRA) (the POD had been renamed in March 1946 after the Allied military forces had handed power over to the civil administration). He asked, on behalf of Otto and himself, that the case be “addressed again.”4
On January 12, 1948, three and a half years after the raid on the Annex, Police Brigadier Jacob Meeboer opened an investigation into the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, the only person ever officially investigated as the betrayer. Brigadier Meeboer interviewed fourteen people, among them the helpers Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Viktor Kugler but not Bep Voskuijl;* the Dutch detectives Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst; Johannes Petrus van Erp and Dr. Petrus Hendrikus Bangert, both of whom knew Van Maaren; the other warehouse worker, Lammert Hartog, and his wife, Lena; and finally, Van Maaren himself. Despite Kleiman’s expression of shock in his July letter that Karl Silberbauer had never been brought over to the Netherlands for questioning, seeing that he had “played an important role in the apprehension of ‘Jewish and other absconders,’”5 Silberbauer was not called to testify. Nor was Otto Frank, probably because he’d already told the police that he and his family had been in hiding in the Annex well before Van Maaren was hired and he did not know the man.
Brigadier Meeboer’s official report begins with Kleiman’s testimony, in which he gives a detailed account of the raid and also outlines Van Maaren’s questions and suspicious behavior. Shortly after he was hired, Van Maaren asked the staff about someone being in the stockroom after hours. He’d found a wallet on a table in the stockroom, where Van Pels must have forgotten it during one of his nightly ventures into the warehouse. Van Maaren presented the wallet to Kugler and asked if it was his. Kugler reacted quickly, saying that, yes, it was his and he’d forgotten it the night before. The contents of the wallet were intact, except for a missing ten-guilder note.
Kleiman explained that Van Maaren certainly knew of the existence of the Annex. He’d seen it when Kugler had sent him to fix a leak in the roof, and in any case, a back annex was a feature of many of the narrow buildings in the area. There was also a door at the back of the warehouse opening onto the courtyard. A man as curious as Van Maaren would likely have gone outside; from there, he could see the entire Annex attached to the building. It would have been only normal for him to wonder why the large “appendage” was never mentioned by anyone or used for business purposes. And he would have asked himself where the access to the Annex was located, since there was no clear indication of an entryway. Absent an obvious entrance, he would likely have suspected a concealed door.
Kleiman explained to Detective Meeboer that they would come across pencils balanced on the edges of desks and flour strewn onto the floor, clearly placed there by Van Maaren to confirm his suspicion that people were in the building after hours. Van Maaren once asked Kleiman whether a Mr. Frank had worked in the building, implying that he was conducting his own investigation. Everything suggested that Van Maaren surmised there were people living in the Annex.