The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(77)

This is Esther’s version of her mother’s story, and it closely matches the information the Cold Case Team uncovered in her grandfather’s file.4 In his testimony to the Dutch authorities, Van den Bergh said that his daughter was arrested in Rotterdam on her way to her hiding address. He said that she was imprisoned for nine days and was released because her identity papers did not carry the letter J. However, he did not mention that he had told his daughter to use the name Alois Miedl if she got into trouble.5 Perhaps he understood that in the postwar era, indicating that he’d had a strong relationship with a well-known Nazi would not reflect well on him.

When the Cold Case Team asked Esther if she knew more about Miedl, she recalled that he was an art collector and had a Jewish wife. Esther’s grandfather collected seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings by famous artists, and he and Miedl would go to art auctions together. She also recalled that Miedl was the person who purchased the Goudstikker art collection around the time of the German invasion. He then sold the collection to Hitler’s close henchman Hermann G?ring. Esther did remember once seeing a wartime photo on the internet of G?ring leaving Miedl’s office. However, she seemed unaware that her grandfather was the notary who officiated over G?ring’s purchase of the collection.

Esther used to visit her grandmother and aunts regularly. She remembered that when she opened the door to her grandmother’s house, it felt like walking into the Rijksmuseum. The walls were covered in paintings from the school of Jan Steen and others. After her grandmother died in 1968, Esther had the task of going through their Amsterdam home. She found many documents, but her grandfather’s collection of valuable paintings seemed to have disappeared (she is still trying to trace them). She told Thijs that there was a suitcase full of documents that had sat in her grandfather’s house for forty years. But as had happened in Abraham Kaper’s house, there was an accident and everything was destroyed in a house fire caused by a gas leak.

Esther was eventually invited to the Cold Case Team’s office in Amsterdam-Noord, where Vince and Brendan interviewed her.6 Finally, they showed her the anonymous note that identified her grandfather as the betrayer of the Frank family. She was visibly shocked. “What would motivate someone to send such a note?” she asked.

She told them that after the war there was a great deal of anger directed against the Jewish Council. She said that her grandmother rarely spoke about the war and there were never any accusations about her grandfather within the family. But she also said she’d personally received verbally abusive anonymous phone calls about the Jewish Council well after her grandfather’s death.

“Why would someone betray others like this?” she wondered aloud again. Her grandfather must have been forced to cooperate with the Germans, but she could not imagine him betraying Otto Frank. Reading the note carefully, she realized that it referred to lists, not specific people. Yes, she could imagine this. If indeed her grandfather gave up the Prinsengracht 263 address, it was probably just an address on an impersonal list; he didn’t know who was living there. If in fact he had done it, she said finally, she knew it could have been for only one reason: because he was forced, because he had to save his family’s lives.





41


The Goudstikker Affair


Esther’s comments about her grandfather’s connection to the Goudstikker affair, the most famous art collection “acquisition” in World War II, coincided with what the Cold Case Team had discovered. Her account also contributed to the growing sense that Van den Bergh might well have been involved in the Franks’ betrayal.1

Jacques Goudstikker was one of the wealthiest Dutch art dealers of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Old Masters in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. As he was a Jew, in the summer of 1940, he was forced to sell his famous collection, which included more than a thousand works of art, as well as real estate, at a greatly reduced price to Alois Miedl,2 a German-born naturalized Dutchman and art collector who’d moved to the Netherlands to work as a banker. What many people didn’t know was that Miedl also worked for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and was therefore very well connected within the circle of Nazi SD officers in the Netherlands, including Ferdinand aus der Fünten, the head of the Zentralstelle, and Willy Lages, the head of the SD in Amsterdam. In fact, Lages’s wife lived at Nijenrode Castle, one of the elegant properties Miedl acquired along with Goudstikker’s art assets. Miedl and his wife, who was Jewish, often hosted lavish parties attended by the who’s who of the SD, as well as highly placed German officials in the civil administration. Miedl had deep connections in Germany as well. He was a close friend of Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer.3 He was reported to have spent several days with Hitler at Berchtesgaden.4

The Goudstikker sale, set up almost immediately after the German invasion in 1940, was a shadow transaction on behalf of Field Marshal Hermann G?ring, the number two man in the German Reich. To keep their own hands clean, Hitler and G?ring used surrogates to locate collections and negotiate transactions to satisfy their taste for rare works of art, and it is clear that G?ring or his art agents had the notable Goudstikker collection on his wish list of acquisitions. One condition that Goudstikker demanded before he agreed to the forced sale to Miedl was that Miedl protect his elderly Jewish mother.

As the German forces approached Amsterdam on May 13, 1940, the Goudstikkers, who had missed their chance to leave Amsterdam for the United States, fled, without visas, for England, finding passage on the SS Bodegraven, in part because a soldier on guard recognized Goudstikker’s wife, a well-known opera singer. But Goudstikker never made it to England alive. During the overnight sailing, he mysteriously fell through an open hatch into the ship’s cargo hold, fatally breaking his neck.5