The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(54)

Did she have knowledge? Though her father and sister were very discreet, it’s possible that she overheard them talking about the bookcase. Perhaps she grew suspicious of the goods Bep always seemed to be collecting, sometimes with the help of her siblings. But even Bep’s mother didn’t know about the hiders in the Annex. When she found out after they were arrested, she was furious that her husband and daughter had put their family into such jeopardy.

Nelly had opportunity, having returned to Amsterdam in May 1944. Her father complained that she was still meeting her German friends.

But the team was skeptical that Nelly might have been lashing out at her father, Johannes, when they discovered that the details she’d requested be redacted from Anne’s diary were affectionate toward him. More likely, by 1986 she did not want her past as a German sympathizer known, which could have been damaging not only to herself but also to her father’s memory and to that of her sister Bep, both of whom were now celebrated as helpers in the Anne Frank story.

It seemed that there was no substantial proof that Nelly, however inadvertently, betrayed the residents in the secret Annex. But the Cold Case Team was not yet ready to set that scenario aside.





29


Probing Memory


Vince reminded me that anyone relying on eyewitness statements as an accurate record of a historical moment will quickly learn that memory is fluid. People claim things with great certainty that either are contradictory or simply cannot be true. They are not lying; rather, their memory has been polluted by experiences they have gone through later. The same moment filtered through different emotions can also change the so-called objective record. Vince said that every time the Cold Case Team recorded a scenario, they had to take that fact into account. One of the most compelling cases was that of Victor Kugler.

In one of his accounts of the raid, Kugler recalled that as he was working in the office that morning, he suddenly heard footsteps and saw shadows running past the window in his office door. He opened the door and saw a Gestapo officer climbing the stairs with gun drawn, followed by others.1 The raid team spread to the office, where Kleiman, Bep, and Miep were working. Leaving behind one policeman to guard the helpers, Silberbauer ordered Kugler to precede him up the stairs to the next level of the building. Kugler was alone with the Nazi. As he climbed the stairs, Silberbauer shouted, “Where are the Jews?”2 Kugler led him to the bookcase.

In an article in Life magazine in 1958, Kugler’s version of events was somewhat different. He described the raid team taking him to the front storeroom and looking around until eventually they pulled their guns and led him to the bookcase.3 His account in Ernst Schnabel’s 1958 book The Footsteps of Anne Frank repeated that version. During the 1963–64 investigation, he explained to Detective Arend Jacobus van Helden that, hoping the Nazis were just looking for weapons or illegal IDs, he first showed Silberbauer his office, opening the cabinets and bookcases. He then led him to the back of the building and showed him Kleiman’s office, the washroom, and the little kitchen. Silberbauer had then ordered him up to the next floor. They went first to the stockroom in the front part of the building and then to the Annex corridor in the back. As they came to the bookcase, Kugler noticed that another nearby bookcase and boxes had already been searched, presumably by the Dutch policemen. He saw them trying to move the swinging bookcase. At first, they could not budge it, but then they figured out that the hook had to be unfastened and swung it open.4

Who would expect Kugler’s account nineteen years after the raid to be the same? But it seems that a kind of emotional revisionism was at work.


In the first version, Kugler revealed the location of the secret bookcase almost immediately under mortal threat from Silberbauer, who demanded, “Where are the Jews?”


In later versions, the raid team searched the building; they determined that the bookcase concealed something, confirmed by the marks of the moving wheels on the wooden floor beneath it. The bookcase yielded, and the secret door was exposed. Kugler added that he then understood that the Green Policeman “knew everything.”5



The most likely scenario is number one. Vince remarked that Silberbauer’s aggressive question was a familiar tactic he recognized from FBI raids: you let a suspect think you’re already in the know. From everything else about the raid, it’s clear that Silberbauer did know that there were Jews in the building but probably not where. With a gun to his back, terrified, Kugler led the raid team to the bookcase entrance to the secret Annex. That must have been painful for a man of Kugler’s integrity. He had hidden eight people faithfully despite enormous stresses over two years, and now he carried in his mind the responsibility for exposing them. He must have felt terribly vulnerable and filled with an irrational guilt, irrational because there was nothing he could have done to save them. It’s not surprising, then, that his account of the tragic event morphed somewhat over the years; he becomes more wily, more devious in misleading Silberbauer, more composed.

It might have assuaged Kugler’s guilt to have realized that Detective Van Helden had reported Otto as saying in December 1963 that “if Silberbauer claimed that one of those present pointed the door [hidden behind the bookcase] out to him, then he [Otto] understood that you couldn’t remain silent for long in the case of an armed SD raid.” There was no blame. Otto knew that as soon as Silberbauer and the Dutch policemen entered the building, those in hiding were bound to be found.6