The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(53)
Shortly after the liberation in May 1945, Nelly moved to the city of Groningen, not far from Amsterdam. According to Melissa Müller, she was arrested on October 26. She spent several years in custody and was not able to pick up her life again until 1953.
The Cold Case Team searched for Nelly’s CABR file. A file on every postwar conviction for political offenses is kept in the National Archives. But there was no file on Nelly Voskuijl. Vince contacted Müller to ask her for the source of her information about Nelly’s arrest and conviction. She recommended that he talk to her researcher.18
The researcher did not recall the source, either.19 During two interviews with the team, he did, however, explain his theory. According to him, Nelly Voskuijl was first held in a theater in Groningen with other young women who were suspected of collaboration. Later, according to the researcher, she was transported to a prison for about a year. The team searched the Groningen Archives but did not find any documentation or proof to back that up. According to the researcher, Nelly’s records would have been destroyed because, as a minor at the time, she would have been judged in juvenile court. Corroborating the story of Nelly being arrested is the statement by her sister Willy that she remembered being interrogated just after the war, possibly about Nelly, though she did not recall the details.20
At that time in 1945, Nelly was actually over twenty-one and would have been judged in adult court; therefore, there should have been records. To find proof of this theory or any other information on the whereabouts of Nelly during the period 1945–1953, the Cold Case Team conducted a search into postwar camps, specifically looking for young female prisoners in Groningen, and read the files on political prisoners held by the Groningen authorities.21 No direct leads pointed toward Nelly Voskuijl. The absence of a CABR file led the team to suspect that Nelly was never arrested.
One day the Cold Case Team’s researcher Circe de Bruin returned to the office in a state of high excitement. She had discovered a document indicating that Nelly Voskuijl had registered in the municipality of Groningen on October 26, 1945, the same day Müller claimed she had been arrested.22 Müller’s researcher seems to have mistakenly assumed that the registration document was the record of Nelly’s arrest.* Vince said that the roller-coaster ride from excitement to letdown is a normal part of any investigation, but he was somewhat disappointed. Had Nelly been arrested, her CABR file would have provided a narrative of her activities and her German contacts during the war. Whether or not she took part in the Annex betrayal might have become clearer.
By fleeing Amsterdam, Nelly passed under the radar and evaded conviction for whatever crimes of collaboration she might have committed. At the very least, she escaped the fate of women who had had sexual relationships with Germans. Dragged from their houses, their heads shaved, they were drawn in carts through the city streets as bystanders shouted abuse.
After decades of silence, Joop van Wijk renewed contact with his aunt Nelly in 1996. She was living in the small village of Koudum in the province of Friesland in the northern Netherlands and was still in close contact with her sisters, particularly Diny and Willy. Joop recalled, “I was always welcome, but this changed when I brought up the subject of the war and her behavior in the Voskuijl family.”23 Nelly understood that he was writing a book about his mother, but she said that it was difficult to speak about those times; she greatly regretted that period of her life.
Then rather startingly, Joop recounted that “One of the last times I visited her and mentioned Anne Frank and the raid on the Annex, she had a serious fainting spell.”24 He offered to take her to the hospital, but she refused and told him that her fainting was probably a result of the blows her father had given her. Joop was suspicious, believing his aunt was not above using a dramatic performance to obscure her culpability. However, he told the Cold Case Team that, fearing for her health, he stopped asking about the war.
Of course, the most surprising aspect of Joop’s account is that it seems that all he had to do was mention the Annex and Nelly fainted. Could that have been a ruse, Nelly’s way of getting out of having to respond? But he also recounted that he’d actually seen her faint on three earlier occasions, which suggests that she might have had some kind of chronic condition. In his book Anne Frank: The Untold Story: The Hidden Truth About Eli Vossen, the Youngest Helper of the Secret Annex he also mentioned the fainting incident but said that it was occasioned by his mentioning the war and not the raid on the Annex. The Cold Case Team was left wondering: Was Nelly hiding things with her fainting spells and her refusal to speak?25 Or did Joop, already convinced that his aunt was guilty, have tunnel vision? After Joop’s last visit, Nelly moved to an assisted living residence, where she died in 2001. Joop received a final postcard from her with the short text “An embrace, Nel.”
Calling on his twenty-seven years of experience as an FBI undercover agent, Vince said he’d learned to read people—for his own safety. He liked Joop very much, but he felt he was somehow obsessed with proving his aunt Nelly’s guilt. Vince told him not to worry about the betrayal; he should focus on celebrating his mother and grandfather, which had been his motive for writing Anne Frank: The Untold Story.
As expected, Vince went about his investigation coolly, applying the law enforcement axiom “knowledge, motive, and opportunity” to the Nelly Voskuijl scenario. Did Nelly have a motive? Joop visited his aunt fifty years after the war ended, at which point Nelly seemed ashamed of her younger self, but back then, she was rebellious, thoughtless, combative, flirting with the enemy. Could she, in a moment of rage—after a fight with her father, for example—have told the wrong person about the secret her father and sister were keeping? And did that person, possibly one of her German friends, then pass the information on to the SD?