The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(81)

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A Secret Well Kept


According to Vince, by midsummer of 2019, the Cold Case Team had only four theories about the betrayal that still seemed viable. All others had been eliminated, either because the team found them improbable or, for a few, because there was not enough information to investigate further.

The case against Ans van Dijk was still particularly strong. She was a prolific V-Frau, having betrayed an estimated two hundred people, and was known to work in the Jordaan neighborhood close to where the Annex was located. Although the team had discounted Gerard Kremer’s theory that Van Dijk had heard about the Annex from the Wehrmacht secretaries at Westermarkt 2, she was still a viable suspect.

However, after searching Van Dijk’s extensive CABR file, the Cold Case Team discovered that she and her crew of V-people (Branca Simons; her husband, Wim Houthuijs; and Mies de Regt) were not in Amsterdam in August 1944; they had moved to the town of Zeist, near Utrecht, at the end of July to infiltrate a large resistance network there.1 (When “Zeist” was typed into the AI database in relation to Van Dijk and her whereabouts that August, there were 705 hits, including handwritten notes and even video files attesting to her presence in that city.) On August 18, Van Dijk and her cohorts in Zeist turned over to the SD five of the resistance members they’d been stalking and six Jews in hiding.

There is another consideration: the Cold Case Team knew that Otto went out of his way to protect the identity of the betrayer. It doesn’t make sense that he would do so for Van Dijk, who was not only widely despised after the war but had also been indirectly responsible for the capture of his second wife, Fritzi, and her entire family. Why would he hesitate to name her?

The scenario involving Bep’s sister Nelly also seemed initially possible. Nelly was a known Nazi sympathizer and had worked for a year on a German air base in France. Her father and sister were among the helpers to the Jews in hiding and privy to the secret of the Annex. The various theories—that she was the anonymous female caller; that she betrayed the people in the Annex out of anger at her father’s mistreatment—were only speculation. However, after Bep’s son Joop van Wijk and his coauthor, Jeroen de Bruyn, published Anne Frank: The Untold Story, in which they advanced the theory that Nelly was the betrayer, the Cold Case Team had reason to pause. Joop said that when he had asked Nelly about the war for the purposes of the book, she had fainted. Did she conveniently faint to evade addressing his questions?

At the end of the book, Joop said that “claiming Nelly was the betrayer is taking it too far. We have no smoking gun.” He wrote eloquently of his mother, Bep:


She often lived in the past after the war and mulled over the split she found herself in: the loss of her Jewish loved ones from the Annex on the one hand, and her loyalty to her sister who had proven her services to the occupier on the other hand. An occupier that had brutally deported and killed those same loved ones.2





In his interview with the Cold Case Team, Joop made it clear that in his mind, his mother and his aunt were testimony to the brutal paradox of divided loyalties in wartime, reflected within a family. But he would not say, conclusively, that Nelly betrayed the Franks.

In fact, there are two other sources who rule out the possibility that Nelly was the betrayer: Miep and Otto. In a 1994 lecture at the University of Michigan, Miep “slipped” and told a young student that the betrayer had died before 1960—and Nelly was very much alive until 2001. In addition, Otto told a Dutch journalist in the late 1940s that they’d been betrayed by Jews and he did not wish to pursue the culprit because he did not wish to punish the family and children of the man who betrayed them, indicating, among other things, that the betrayer was a man who had children. Nelly was not Jewish and had no children. Even if some of those statements were subterfuges to keep the curious at bay, others were also clearly true, and all of them rule out Nelly.

A third scenario, the one involving the greengrocer, also had sticking power. Van Hoeve was arrested on May 25 for hiding a Jewish couple. Under duress, could he have provided information about the Annex? It’s possible, but had he done so, it’s unlikely that Dutch detectives would have waited nearly three months to initiate the Annex raid. In addition, Van Houve was sent away to a work camp after his arrest. Had he turned in eight Jews that day, he most likely would have been released.

As for Richard and Ruth Weisz, they may well have known that Van Hoeve was delivering food to the Annex. However, as with Van Hoeve, if they gave up that information upon their arrest, the SD would not have waited so long to act. Still, the fact that they arrived at Westerbork as penal cases and after a short period of time had their status changed continued to give the Cold Case Team pause. Had the Weiszes given up something of value—i.e., a list of Jews in hiding? But again, the timing was off; the Weiszes’ status was upgraded in Westerbork sometime in June 1944, well before the Annex was raided on August 4. The Nazis were not in the habit of rewarding informants before confirming that the information they gave was accurate.



With all of the other scenarios eliminated, only one was still viable: the Van den Bergh scenario, the only theory ever bolstered by a piece of physical evidence identifying the name of the betrayer. All of the theories proposed by the helpers, researchers, and authors were grounded in assumptions as to the identity of the betrayer, based on either their suspicious activity or their past actions. The piece of evidence that the Cold Case Team recovered, although not the original note, was an actual copy made by Otto Frank. Although that alone did not prove that the allegation in the note was true, it did provide inherent credibility since Otto clearly took it seriously.