The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(50)
Kleiman reported that after the raid on August 4, Opekta’s accountant, Johannes van Erp, visited Dr. Petrus Bangert, a homeopathic doctor, and mentioned that the Jews hiding at Prinsengracht had been arrested. The doctor asked if the address was 263. He said he’d known for about a year that there were Jews in hiding at that address. When Van Erp told that to Kleiman, apparently Kleiman responded that Van Maaren must have been the source of the information since he was a patient of the doctor.
When Dr. Bangert was interrogated, however, he insisted that Opekta’s accountant was mistaken. He’d never said any such thing, he said, and after he checked his patient records, he claimed that Van Maaren had become his patient only on August 25, 1944, three weeks after the arrest. Was that accurate or simply an evasion? It was 1948, three years after the war ended. Everyone wanted to wash their hands of the catastrophe and get on with the peace.
The most revealing part of Brigadier Meeboer’s investigation was his interrogation of Van Maaren himself as to what he had known about Jews hiding in the Annex. Van Maaren testified that he had not known for certain that there was anyone in hiding, though he’d had his suspicions. He explained the pencils on the edges of desks and the flour on the floor as his strategy to trap thieves he believed were stealing from Opekta. As for his asking about a Mr. Frank, he said he’d heard office talk about “Papa Frank” and had been told by Miep Gies and Kleiman that the former owners, Frank and Van Pels, had fled, supposedly to the United States.6
More damning was the fact that his assistant, Lammert Hartog, swore that Van Maaren had told him fourteen days before the raid that there were Jews in hiding at Prinsengracht. Van Maaren emphatically denied that he’d said any such thing.
Though Van Maaren did eventually admit to stealing from Opekta/Gies & Co., he also accused Miep and Bep of theft. He accused both women of heading up to the Annex after the arrest and, before an inventory could be made by the Germans, grabbing “clothes and papers and a lot of other things to keep for themselves.”7 Van Maaren was a bitter man and turned the accusations against him back onto his accusers.
The investigation was dropped on May 22, 1948. The report concluded that there was no proof of the warehouse manager’s culpability.8 Van Maaren was given a conditional discharge, put under surveillance by the Political Delinquents Surveillance Department for three years, and stripped of his right to vote for ten years.
Van Maaren was outraged at receiving a conditional discharge and appealed. During the hearing, his lawyer argued that the appeal itself was proof of Van Maaren’s innocence. “If the accused had felt even the smallest amount of guilt, he would not have appealed against his conditional discharge, since the restrictions imposed are so slight.”9 On August 13, 1949, a district court dismissed all charges.
Van Maaren likely thought that that was the end of his ordeal, but fifteen years later the matter of who betrayed the people in hiding at Prinsengracht 263 would resurface and he would again find himself the prime suspect. Everyone on the Cold Case Team thought that the first investigation of Van Maaren had been perfunctory; the official report was only nine pages long. At that point, they began to collect all information relevant to the second investigation in 1963–1964, hoping that it might have had a broader focus and delved more deeply into what had precipitated the raid.
28
“Just Go to Your Jews!”
The Cold Case Team found no conclusive evidence that the betrayer of Anne Frank was someone in the neighborhood, but their investigation turned up disconcerting evidence with regard to a closer circle, the helpers. The team had become emotionally attached to the helpers, but, as Vince put it, it was necessary to remain objective to protect the integrity of the investigation. Through the Mapping Project, they learned that the next-door neighbor of Johannes Kleiman was not only a fervent NSB member but also an employee at the SD office on Euterpestraat. Both Kleiman’s wife and his brother knew about the hiders, and it seems that their daughter, Corrie, also deduced from a casual remark by her father that the Franks were still in Amsterdam, though she probably didn’t know they were hiding in the Annex.1 The team also discovered that the adoptive brother of Miep, as well as Kugler’s brother-in-law, had been accused of collaboration. Could an unintentional remark by any of them have given the hiders away?
The team began by researching the collaboration file of Kugler’s brother-in-law and discovered that his “collaboration” amounted to operating a movie theater that had played pro-German films during the occupation. As for Miep, any doubts about her were easy to dismiss. She was hugely self-disciplined and able to compartmentalize; as she herself said, during the war she had lost the habit of speech. Regardless, the Cold Case Team found documents indicating that her adoptive brother, Laurens Nieuwenburg, Jr., went to Germany in November 1943 and reregistered at his parents’ address in August 1945; it appears that he was in Germany at the time of the Annex arrests. Finally, Kleiman’s neighbor, too, was a very unlikely suspect; if he was the one to give up the Prinsengracht 263 address, he would not have phoned SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann with the information. As an employee of the SD, he would have known that the person to call with tips about hiders was Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs. Kaper was in charge of the Jew-hunting unit and could be nasty when others went around him, poached on his territory, or tried to claim the Kopgeld rewards.