The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(58)

At that point it was not clear if Silberbauer had even survived the war. For the next five months, Wiesenthal regularly contacted Wiesinger to learn if there was any progress in identifying and locating the Silberbauer on the list. He was always met with the same response: “We are working on it.” The last such comment was in October 1963. What Wiesenthal didn’t know, and the Cold Case Team discovered in an Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior report dated August 21, 1963, was that the Austrian authorities had already identified, located, and interviewed Silberbauer. They just weren’t telling Wiesenthal.

The team learned from the report that Inspector Karl Josef Silberbauer, an employee of the Vienna police, was quietly summoned before a Ministry of the Interior inquiry panel. During the interview he admitted to having been assigned to the Amsterdam SD, stationed there from November 1943 until October 1944, when he was injured in a motorcycle accident. He confirmed having worked under Willy Lages and Julius Dettmann as well as receiving reward payments for the capture of Jews in hiding. He also admitted to never having mastered the Dutch language and needing a translator to conduct interviews. Most important, he confessed to having been present at the arrest of Anne Frank and her family.

In doing a background investigation on Silberbauer, the team learned that after the war, in April 1945, he returned to his native Austria, where he ended up serving a fourteen-month jail sentence for using excessive force against Communist prisoners prior to his assignment in Amsterdam. After his release he was recruited by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (the Bundesnachrichtendienst; BND) and, according to a Der Spiegel report, worked as an undercover operative. His past membership in the SS served to blind targeted neo-Nazis to his changed loyalties.7 After his time with the BND he was hired by the Vienna police, where he rose to the rank of inspector.

On November 11, 1963, nearly three months after Silberbauer provided his initial statement, Wiesenthal read the news in a headline of the Austrian newspaper Volksstimme: “The Man Who Betrayed Anne Frank.”8 It seemed that someone within the Vienna police department had leaked the story to the local newspaper. The world press descended on Vienna. They also immediately requested comments from Otto, Miep, Bep, Kugler, and even the formerly accused, Willem van Maaren. Many followers of Anne’s story and even its participants thought that finally, now that the SD man who led the Annex raid was located, he would reveal the name of the betrayer.

Probably feeling both outraged and hurt, Wiesenthal immediately penned a letter to Dr. Wiesinger, reminding him that he was the one who had provided the name “Silberbauer” and requested a photo that he could send to Otto Frank for identification purposes.9 To preserve their relationship, Wiesinger eventually told Wiesenthal that he’d been ordered by his superiors not to inform him that they’d found and interrogated Silberbauer.

Based on the text of his letter, Wiesenthal still had no idea that Otto and the other witnesses had known Silberbauer’s name all along. But one week after he sent the letter, he likely learned the truth. In one of his interviews after the news broke, Otto admitted to the Amsterdam newspaper Het Vrije Volk that he had known all along that Silberbauer was the man who led the raid. He further commented, “I have never had contact with Mr. Wiesenthal in Vienna. The reason why he wanted to have Silberbauer in particular is, therefore, a riddle to me.”10 In one of her interviews, Miep also confirmed that she had known Silberbauer’s name but had not revealed it because Otto had asked her to use a fake name.11

So Otto had asked those who knew Silberbauer’s real name to call the man something else? Why would he do that?

Cor Suijk, a past director of the Anne Frank House and Otto’s friend, speculated years later that Otto felt somewhat sympathetic toward Silberbauer because he showed him respect as a fellow German officer when arresting him. He said that Otto wanted to protect the family of Silberbauer from undue attention, though in fact Silberbauer had no children.12

This seems a sentimental—and pat—explanation. Otto was not a sentimentalist. Silberbauer was the man whose actions led to the horrific deaths of his wife and children. At the time of the raid, the Nazi had yelled at Miep—she remembered him “almost bent over with rage”—berating her for helping “Jewish garbage.”13 During their interrogation at SD headquarters, he’d greeted Kugler and Kleiman: “Mitgefangen, mitgehangen” (Caught together, hanged together).14 Silberbauer didn’t deserve any empathy, especially from Otto. There must have been some other reason for his deliberate obfuscation.

Miep, too, had concealed Silberbauer’s identity, and the unexpected announcement about locating the SD officer in Vienna presented somewhat of a problem. Out of the blue five months earlier, on May 3, 1963, she’d been contacted by a detective from the National Criminal Investigation Department regarding her knowledge of the Annex raid. In that interview she’d claimed not to know the name of the man who had led the raid team, even though she’d previously supplied it during the 1947–48 PRA investigation.15 She’d also suggested that they speak with Otto Frank, a hint that he might know more.

Meanwhile, perhaps as a rebuke to the Austrian authorities for failing to tell him that they’d identified Silberbauer, Wiesenthal quietly provided Silberbauer’s home address to a Dutch student journalist, Jules Huf. On November 20, 1963, the ambitious Huf went to Silberbauer’s home without an appointment and knocked on his door, requesting an interview. At first Silberbauer’s wife dismissed the request, but from deep within the house Silberbauer shouted to let the reporter in. Huf spent several hours interviewing Silberbauer about his recollection of the Annex arrest. In a play for sympathy, Silberbauer complained that after he had recently been called in for questioning, he’d had to turn over his gun, badge, and tram pass. “I was suddenly forced to buy my own tram ticket. Imagine the way the conductor looked at me.” His wife occasionally chimed in, complaining that her husband’s overtime pay had been cut: “We had to buy our furniture on loans.” In the end, the bombshell headline that should have led every international newspaper was that Silberbauer claimed the raid was caused by a warehouse employee of Otto Frank making a call to the SD.16 But the heavily edited interview ran in the Austrian newspaper Kurier on November 22, and whether because of the paper’s limited circulation or the fact that the world was consumed by the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there was no marked public reaction.