The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(57)

That was an enormous letdown, to say the least.





30


“The Man Who Arrested Frank Family Discovered in Vienna”


In 1957, at the Austrian premiere of The Diary of Anne Frank in the city of Linz, a group of young demonstrators rushed into the theater interrupting the play and shouting that it was a fraud. This incident came to the attention of Simon Wiesenthal, already well known for tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals. In his book The Murderers Among Us, Wiesenthal described what happened:


At half-past nine one night in October 195[7],* a friend called me in great excitement in my apartment in Linz. Could I come at once to the Landestheater?

A performance of The Diary of Anne Frank had just been interrupted by anti-Semitic demonstrations. Groups of young people, most of them between fifteen and seventeen, had shouted, “Traitors! Toadies! Swindle.” Others booed and hissed. The lights went on. From the gallery the youthful demonstrators showered leaflets upon the people in the orchestra. Those who picked them up read:

“This play is a fraud. Anne Frank never existed. The Jews have invented the whole story because they want to extort more restitution money. Don’t believe a word of it! It’s a fake!”

. . . Here in Linz, where Hitler had gone to school and Eichmann had grown up, [young people] were told to believe in lies and hatred, prejudice and nihilism.1



Two nights later, Wiesenthal was having coffee with a friend in a Linz coffeehouse. Everyone was talking about the demonstration. His friend called over a young man he knew and asked him what he thought about it all. The young man said it was exciting: “The diary may be a clever forgery. Certainly, it doesn’t prove that Anne Frank existed.” “She’s buried in a mass grave in Bergen-Belsen,” Wiesenthal replied. The boy gave a shrug. “There’s no proof,” he said. If he could prove that Anne Frank existed, if he could come up with the Gestapo officer who arrested her, would that be proof? Wiesenthal asked. “Yes,” the young man said. “If the man admitted it himself.”2

That exchange was the impetus for Wiesenthal’s quest to track down the SD man who led the Annex raid. The main clue that Wiesenthal had to go on was the last name of the SD officer, which he thought was Silbernagel. He also remembered that Miep said she’d recognized the SD officer’s Viennese accent, but that really wasn’t very helpful since more than 950,000 Austrians had fought on the German side in World War II. Through various sources, Wiesenthal was able to locate eight men with the name Silbernagel who’d been Nazi Party members. However, none of them had been stationed in Amsterdam in the service of the SD. Surely something was off.

In his memoir, Wiesenthal admitted to not having contacted Otto Frank to confirm the name of the SD man. A Holocaust survivor himself, Wiesenthal said he had not wished to upset Otto by forcing him to search his memory of that fateful day. He also worried that, like many other survivors he’d approached, Otto might not wish the SD man to be found. Wiesenthal had come across others who’d asked, “What’s the use? You cannot bring back the dead. You can only make the survivors suffer.”3 But Wiesenthal felt he was looking at the bigger picture: if he could locate the SD man and get him to admit to the arrest, he would have proven that Anne Frank did exist and her diary was real. More important, in the late 1950s, when Germans and Austrians were once again talking nostalgically about the “great past,” they would be confronted with proof of the Holocaust.

What appeared to the Cold Case Team to be crucial was that although Otto learned of Wiesenthal’s mission to identify and locate the SD man, he did not offer his help despite knowing Silberbauer’s real name. In a 1985 interview, Miep explained that Otto had asked her to change the name because he did not want the man’s family harassed and she’d come up with Silberthaler.4 According to Wiesenthal, Victor Kugler was the source of the name Silvernagl.5 Prior to Ernst Schnabel’s book The Footsteps of Anne Frank, there had been no public mention of the SD man who led the raid on the Annex. The ruse of using a false name for Silberbauer must have begun with the interviews Schnabel conducted with Miep, Otto, and the other helpers in 1957. Vince suddenly remembered how during his visit with Pieter and Thijs to the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, the president, John Goldsmith, had taken him aside and said, “You know that Otto lied to Wiesenthal about knowing the identity of Silberbauer. Why do you think he did this?” Vince now believed that answering Goldsmith’s question would be key to the investigation.

During a trip to Amsterdam in the spring of 1963, Dutch friends told Wiesenthal that he should not be searching for Silbernagel but rather for Silberthaler, the name Miep had invented. Then he had a fortuitous meeting with Ynze Taconis, the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department (Rijksrecherche) regarding his investigation. As Wiesenthal was about to leave, Taconis handed him what he called a little “travel literature.” It was a photostat copy of a 1943 directory of the SD in the Netherlands with about three hundred names in it. On the plane back to Vienna, Wiesenthal started flipping through the directory, looking for Silberthaler. He never found it, but running his finger down the list of forty or so IV B4 members’ names, he came to the common Austrian name “Silberbauer.” Elated, Wiesenthal finally had his man—or at least his last name, since the roster did not contain first names.6

It was now an astonishing six years since he had come up with the idea of tracking down the SD man. Known for his searches for Josef Mengele and his tracking down of Adolf Eichmann, he would have been the first to admit that Silberbauer was not a high-ranking Nazi. His goal was not so much to punish him as to get him to admit to the arrest of Anne Frank and her family. In early June 1963, he provided the information he’d gathered on Silberbauer to Dr. Josef Wiesinger, his contact at the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior responsible for war crimes investigations.