The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(59)

However, the Austrian authorities clearly saw the story and were likely furious, since Silberbauer had been ordered to keep his mouth shut.17 Just three days after the Huf story broke, Silberbauer was summoned and reinterviewed. His new statement was quite different from the version in the Huf article:


I want to make clear that I was never made aware of whoever reported the family Frank. I was not made aware whether it had been a Dutch or German individual. So, I as the only German and the only police officer went together with the arrest team to the said house. In the storage area on the ground floor was a man standing around, but he did not seem to have been waiting for us. He was questioned by the Dutch arrest team, during which he pointed in an upstairs direction with his hand.18



The Cold Case Team could find no explanation for why Silberbauer changed the story he told Huf about the caller. What is consistent is that in the three official statements Silberbauer supplied to the Austrian authorities (in August 1963, November 1963, and March 1964), he never said that the call was placed by a warehouse employee. In fact, he asserted that he’d never been made aware of who had reported the Frank family, nor whether the caller had been Dutch or German, male or female. That stark contradiction of Huf’s article left the team in a bit of a quandary as to who was more believable, Huf or Silberbauer.

Could Huf’s version of what Silberbauer said be true? The authors Jeroen de Bruyn and Joop van Wijk made an excellent point: Silberbauer’s claim that the traitorous phone call occurred half an hour before the arrest eliminates the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren. The team’s analysis of all available data has the raid occurring at approximately 10:30 a.m. Van Maaren always arrived at work at 9:00 a.m. All public telephone kiosks in the streets had been eliminated on German orders years earlier. The only phone Van Maaren could have used was located in the front office, but Bep, Miep, and Kleiman had been there all morning.19 The only other possibility is that he used a phone in one of the neighboring businesses. The Cold Case Team were confident that if that had happened, given the notoriety of the case, someone from that business would have eventually come forward.

The complete Silberbauer interview did not become available to the public until twenty-three years later, when it ran in the Dutch weekly newspaper De Groene Amsterdammer in 1986.20 It was interesting, but it didn’t answer the most important questions: Had Silberbauer actually been told by his superior SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann who the caller was? Or had he just been grandstanding for the young reporter Huf in one last bid for notoriety?





31


What Miep Knew


Among the helpers, it is hard not to find Miep Gies the most compelling. She saved Anne’s diary, intending to give it back to her when she returned at the end of the war; Otto lived with her and her husband for seven years after his return from Auschwitz; she was the one who kept Otto’s secrets after the war. Following Otto’s death in 1980, she became the de facto spokesperson for the story of Anne Frank. The world press interviewed her on dozens of occasions, and she was invited to speak internationally.

Vince organized what he called the Statements Project: the Cold Case Team was to collect all statements made by the witnesses over the years in print, audio, or video with regard to the betrayal. They were placed on a timeline to identify contradictions or corroborations.

As part of the Statements Project, the Cold Case Team collected all available print, audio, and video material involving Miep.

One day in 2019, while he was reviewing a recording of one of her international speaking engagements, Vince stumbled upon something totally unexpected. In 1994, she gave a lecture at the University of Michigan and was accompanied onstage by Professor Rolf Wolfswinkel, who served as moderator and also assisted her when she occasionally struggled with an English word or phrase.1 Lying on his couch listening to the speech through headphones, Vince almost fell asleep. It was essentially the same speech he’d heard Miep give in most of the other recordings he’d reviewed. Then, at the conclusion of the speech, Wolfswinkel invited questions from the audience, and a young man posed the question “What gave the Franks away?” In the course of answering, Miep made the startling statement, “After fifteen years . . . we began again to search for the betrayer. But that was 1960, and by this time the betrayer had died.” She concluded by saying, “So we have to resign ourselves to the fact that we will never know who did it.” Vince sat up in shock. Both things couldn’t be true. If Miep had known the betrayer was dead by 1960, she must have known who the betrayer was.

Vince turned to the writings of University of Texas at Austin psychologist Art Markman to explain the discrepancy. In an article by Drake Baer for The Cut, “The Real Reason Keeping Secrets Is So Hard, According to a Psychologist,” Markman explained that the mind has a limited capacity to process information, and to keep track of what is privileged and what can be divulged is a multifaceted cognitive maneuver. Sometimes the temptation is to unburden oneself by letting slip a part of the secret.2 Vince believed that that was what happened to Miep: she admitted that she had known who the betrayer was and left a clue: that he or she was dead by 1960. What else did she know?

Though she clearly knew the name of the betrayer, she never disclosed it. When her friend Cor Suijk asked her directly if she knew the name of the betrayer, she asked, “Cor, can you keep a secret?” Very eagerly he answered, “Yes, Miep, I can!” And she smiled and said, “Me, too.”3