The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(52)

At this point in the investigation of Nelly as a suspect, the Cold Case Team came across an anomaly. In The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, edited under the supervision of Otto Frank and published in 1947 all over the world, no mention is made of Nelly Voskuijl. Of course, this could have been simply a matter of producing a readable book of 335 pages; much had to be cut. When NIOD published The Diary of Anne Frank: Critical Edition in 1986, many deleted passages were restored.

In one mysterious entry, dated May 6, 1944, Anne records that M.K. was in northern France, which had recently come under allied bombardment. M.K. was terrified and desperate to return to Amsterdam. She was also asking forgiveness for the trials she had put her father through.

The Cold Case Team knew that Nelly had worked as a secretary to the commander of a German airbase in Laon in northern France. Obviously, her name had been replaced by initials. There was also a curious footnote in the Critical Edition.

The editors explained that, at the request of an unidentified person, they had disguised the name of the person Anne was referring to, selecting the initials M.K. at random to replace it. They also indicate that, at the request of this same person, twenty-four words had been deleted from the May 6 entry. Three other passages in the May 11 and May 19 diary entries were also excised, for a total of ninety-two words.

Clearly, it was imperative for the Cold Case Team to find out who had made this request and what text had been removed. When they contacted David Barnouw, one of the editors of the Critical Edition, he told the team that it was Nelly herself who’d made the request. She had obviously gotten word of the pending publication of the Critical Edition and contacted NIOD, requesting that the passages regarding her be deleted. NIOD said it would keep the passages but remove her name.

What was in the deleted passages that was so damning that Nelly needed to remove them? Did they give any hint that she might have been the betrayer of the secret Annex?

The Cold Case Team contacted Jeroen de Bruyn, Joop Voskuijl’s coauthor of The Untold Story. He was generous enough to send the team an extensive collection of documents and notes that he’d accumulated in his own research. One was a document with four entries from Anne’s diary, which identified the missing words that Nelly had asked the editors to delete.

Bep must have talked freely with Anne Frank about the battles between Nelly and their father over her dalliances with Germans, since this is the subject in most of Anne’s entries regarding Nelly.10

It turns out that the first excision, of twenty-eight words, refers to Anne’s comment that Nelly could plead her father’s illness as a reason to return to the Netherlands, but Anne adds that this would work only if her father died.* The next deletion, of four words, refers to the fact that Nelly is desperately anxious to see her father.11

The third deletion, of twenty-eight words, is equally harmless. Nelly must have asked for permission to leave. The commander of the base made it clear that he was annoyed to be disturbed before supper. Anne reports Nelly responding that if her father died before she could see him, she would never forgive the Germans. Finally, in the last redaction, Anne refers to Nelly’s father’s sadness. He was dying of cancer, and his daughter, who was back home, was making him even more wretched by consorting again with Germans.12

The entries on May 6 and May 19 make it clear that Nelly had returned from France and was carrying on an affair with a German pilot. It’s possible that she wanted the words deleted because she felt guilt at her father’s suffering, to which she’d contributed, though of course at the time of the book’s publication, he was long dead. It’s more likely that in 1986, even forty years after the end of the war, to be identified as a collaborator working with the Nazi occupiers still evoked contempt and outrage. And Anne’s diary would clearly have identified Nelly as such. In any case, the deleted words were innocuous. They provided the Cold Case Team no further insight into the possibility that Nelly was the betrayer.

The most direct accusation that Nelly might have known about Jews hiding in the Annex came from Bep’s boyfriend, Bertus Hulsman.13 In an interview with Dineke Stam of the Anne Frank Stichting in 2007, he remembered an argument at the family table when Nelly’s sisters “bullied [her] because she had dealing with krauts. And one time—I’ll never forget it—she shouted at the table, ‘Just go to your Jews!’ I don’t remember when exactly this was.”14

The interview took more than two hours, and the exchange between Nelly and her family was referred to in different ways. In one instance, Hulsman clarified Nelly’s exclamation: “That family relationship, there was always a field of tension. You know, all those girls. . . . And then she said, ‘You go to your Jews.’”15

At another point, Hulsman added that the remark should be taken as a more general utterance: “A sneer was made at her, and then she sneered back, ‘Go and see your Jews.’”16

He then reflected on his own uncertainty about the source of the information: “But how do I come up with that, ‘Go to your Jews,’ that happened sixty years ago? I will doubt that myself, you know [ . . . ] I hope I am wrong, that my suggestions are wrong.”17

Was Nelly’s statement, which at first appears to refer to the people in the Annex, a retort rather than a specific accusation? “Just go to your Jews!” could have been her response to her sisters or father yelling that she should go to her “krauts.” Was Nelly making it clear that she knew something? Or was she simply responding to the sympathy her father and sister Bep no doubt expressed for Jews in the occupied Netherlands?