The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(80)
Henn said that he’d asked a Jewish woman how the Jewish Council was able to get hold of the addresses of hiders. She said that one way was through the mail. All mail from Camp Westerbork and the occasional mail from camps in the east went through the Jewish Council. Trusting the Jewish Council, people wrote to family and friends in hiding, using their hiding addresses.
Henn did stand trial after the war, since he’d worked as an interpreter for the German occupiers, but it’s hard to see how that particular statement could have helped him. What is interesting in his testimony is that he mentioned addresses and not names. He must have overheard the conversation before July 1943, when he moved on to another position. So the Cold Case Team had to ask if the information was at all relevant to Arnold Van den Bergh and the possibility of his giving lists of addresses to the SD.
As the team discovered, although the council was dissolved, some of its members were still at large—and many likely still had access to addresses. Rudolf Pollak, for example, was a member of the Jewish Council, and part of his role was to distribute food coupons to prisoners in Westerbork and the Dutch Theater (Hollandsche Schouwburg). He also kept a card catalog with addresses of Jewish hiding places.7 In March 1944, the SD arrested him, and under pressure, he immediately buckled. He gave up his card catalog and became a V-Man for the SD; he was eventually targeted and killed by the Dutch resistance in November or December 1944.
The team thought it highly probable that Van den Bergh had had a list of addresses for quite some time and kept it as insurance until he needed to use it. Until the summer of 1944, he had secured safety for his family by sending his children into hiding and also by applying for various exemptions. After his Calmeyer status was revoked he turned to his friend Alois Miedl and probably hid on Miedl’s property. But after Miedl fled to Spain, Van den Bergh might have figured he needed a different kind of protection. Whatever he did, it worked, since he and his immediate family survived the war. It is always possible that he and his wife went into hiding with the help of the resistance, as did his daughters in 1943, but the Cold Case Team never found a record of his either speaking of going into hiding or specifying a hiding place, though he had opportunities to do so during postwar interrogations of Jewish Council members. The team knew that he was also vague about his friendship with Miedl, a Nazi.8 Most people who survived in hiding celebrated the brave people who hid them. Even Van den Bergh’s granddaughter, when asked, said that her grandparents never spoke of hiding.9
After the war, the surviving Jewish community set up Jewish Honor Courts to call to account Jews who they believed had collaborated; the courts carried a moral rather than a legal authority. Having been board members of the Jewish Council, Van den Bergh and four other defendants were called to appear before the Honor Court in Amsterdam. All five chose not to participate.10 Trying the men in absentia, the court ruled in May 1948 that the five had assisted in a number of anti-Jewish measures, including distributing the Jewish star, unfairly determining the lists of exemptions, and participating in the selection of deportees.11 Any defense of Van den Bergh was mild—“No particularly ugly facts had arisen about him,” said one member—and when he refused to step down from the Jewish Coordination Committee (Joodse Co?rdinatie Commissie), which helped Jewish survivors returning from the camps, several members resigned. In the end, he lost his right to hold any Jewish office and access to honorary functions in the Jewish community for five years.12 But there was never any public accusation that he betrayed fellow Jews.
It was around that time that Otto told the Dutch journalist Friso Endt, who worked for Het Parool, “We were betrayed by Jews.”13 He used the plural, likely referring to Van den Bergh and the Jewish Council. Clearly the anonymous note identifying Van den Bergh as his betrayer must have been on Otto’s mind, but although he surely followed the proceedings, he never spoke up either for or against Van den Bergh, who, shortly after the verdict was handed down, was diagnosed with throat cancer.14 Van den Bergh traveled to London to seek treatment and died on October 28, 1950.15
Van den Bergh’s body was returned to the Netherlands for burial. Although his sentence of exclusion from Jewish society had not expired, it didn’t seem to matter; he was buried in a Jewish cemetery. The plane carrying his body was delayed by fog so that the funeral took place at an unusual hour, 7:00 p.m., in Muiderberg. A large procession of cars followed the hearse. Emergency lighting was installed at the grave site, and car headlights lit the path. Those who offered eulogies spoke of a good husband and father, a man who gave his time to the community, though one speaker offered apologies on behalf of his association with the deceased for having “come up short on respect and appreciation.” Van den Bergh’s friend the notary Eduard Spier, who was in the United States, sent word that those who penetrated his “outer closedness” recognized an exceptional colleague and friend.16
Perhaps Otto’s lack of interest in exposing his betrayer can be put down, in part, to Van den Bergh’s death. What would be the point in pursuing a dead man? Otto always said he didn’t want to harm the man’s children. He also may have concluded that Van den Bergh would become a convenient scapegoat for Jew haters. If it was a Jew and the Jewish Council who betrayed the Jews—not the Nazis and a passive German population; not the Dutch Nazis and an acquiescent Dutch population; not the Western governments, which turned their backs on Jewish refugees—wouldn’t he just be playing into the hands of the many anti-Semites who still roamed Europe?