The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(74)
Van Hasselt was also very close to Otto Frank. He was the notary who established the Anne Frank Stichting, the foundation originally formed in May 1957 to protect Prinsengracht 263 from demolition. He served as a founding board member along with Otto, Johannes Kleiman, and several others. Van Hasselt also prepared the prenuptial agreement for Otto and his second wife, Fritzi, before their November 1953 marriage.2 He even supported Otto when people began questioning the authenticity of Anne’s diary; in 1954, he notarized a statement that he’d examined the diary and declared it to be authentic.3
Otto and Van Hasselt had something else in common: Van Hasselt also lost his two young daughters (ages six and nine) in the Holocaust. The callousness of what happened is shocking. To avoid paying a fine for violating the blackout curtains order, a woman reported an elderly Jewish woman in hiding who happened to be the grandmother of the two Van Hasselt girls. When the grandmother was taken, the arrest team found letters from her granddaughters with the return address of the place they were hiding on the envelope.4
The two men’s tragic loss bonded them in a way that no one but a person who’d experienced such loss could know. Otto and Van Hasselt must certainly have discussed the contents of the anonymous note, but they seemed unsure as to what to do with it. Otto clearly felt the note was important enough to copy it and give the original to his friend, presumably for safekeeping.5
The name Van Hasselt came up in many documents the Cold Case Team found through the Statements Project, including a March 1958 letter from Kleiman to Otto Frank. In the letter, Kleiman referred to the anonymous note, saying:
I have read the anonymous letter that was sent to me by notary van Hasselt. The latter knew notary van den Bergh, who lived nearby, but the latter has long since passed. He did not know any better than that the latter was “good” at that time. Dr. de Jong would inform the justice department, but both gentlemen found it better not to ascribe too much value to such anonymous notes. Question 1 arises immediately, why does such a person only now come forward with such an accusation? Dr. de Jong will report to me further when he finds out something.6
Kleiman’s letter verified two things: one, that the original note was given to Notary Van Hasselt (as Detective Van Helden’s handwritten notes on the Abschrift copy suggested) and two, that Van den Bergh and Van Hasselt knew each other and were colleagues. It also suggested that Kleiman was indeed confused (or misled?) about when the original note was sent, since he wrote, “Why does such a person only now come forward?” He seemed unaware that Otto had received the note shortly after the liberation, some thirteen years earlier. Kleiman was one of Otto’s most trusted friends. There is evidence that in the immediate years after the war, Miep, Bep, Kugler, and Kleiman often mulled over who had betrayed them, but on the basis of all the statements the Cold Case Team sifted through, it seems that among them, Van den Bergh’s name had never come up.
Kleiman’s letter to Otto made it clear that Notary Van Hasselt told him that Van den Bergh was dead, but the notary’s comment about Van den Bergh, “He did not know any better than that the man was ‘good’ at that time,” is a remarkably guarded statement. When Kleiman contacted Dr. Loe de Jong, a Dutch historian who was the director of RIOD (later renamed NIOD), asking him what to do with the note, De Jong first recommended informing the Justice Department, but then he and Van Hasselt decided that the note shouldn’t be given too much credence. There is no evidence that the note was ever passed on to the RIOD archives, nor was its existence ever reported to the Justice Department.
Contrary to what he told Detective Van Helden, Otto had indeed done some investigation into Van den Bergh. When he visited the Dutch policeman Gezinus Gringhuis in prison on December 6, 1945, he specifically asked him about Van den Bergh and the anonymous note. Gringhuis supposedly replied, “There was no reason to suspect the man’s integrity.”7 It’s hardly likely that Otto accepted Gringhuis’s word as to Van den Bergh’s character. But it is clear that only a few months after receiving the anonymous note on his return from Auschwitz, Otto was taking it seriously.
What is most interesting is that in his visit to the prison, Otto didn’t take either Kugler or Kleiman with him but rather (as his agenda indicated) “Ab.” Abraham “Ab” Cauvern was a close friend who eventually helped Otto edit Anne’s diary and in 1947 invited him, Miep, and Jan Gies to share his large apartment after the death of his wife. Though Cauvern obviously knew about the anonymous note, Kleiman and Kugler remained unaware of its existence. Why Otto kept the anonymous note secret from them and only in 1963 gave the copy he’d made to Detective Van Helden is a mystery at the center of the cold case investigation.
39
The Typist
Now the Cold Case Team turned their attention to the question of who sent the anonymous note. The most obvious suspect was J.W.A. Schepers, the pro-Nazi notary who took over Van den Bergh’s office. He loathed Van den Bergh and certainly was engaged in a vendetta against him. Even after the war, it’s unlikely that his anger would have cooled. So why not take the next step and slander the man by accusing him of betraying a fellow Jew?
But Schepers would not have had the opportunity to deliver the note, since he’d been sent to prison as a collaborator on June 2, 1945, one day before Otto returned from Auschwitz. Prisoners were permitted to send letters but only handwritten on prison letterhead. If the original note had been on prison letterhead, Otto would surely have mentioned it to Detective Van Helden or Kleiman would have commented on it in his letter to Otto—assuming, of course, that Schepers even knew who Otto Frank was, which was not necessarily the case. Besides, as the team learned from his letters about Van den Bergh before the war, Schepers had no scruples about signing his name to nasty accusations and sending them to the appropriate authorities.