The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(82)

Of course, the Cold Case Team had to consider that the note was sent anonymously by someone with a vendetta against Van den Bergh. But why send the note to Otto? If there was no list of addresses handed over by Van den Bergh, how and why would the sender have settled on the Annex address as opposed to other possible addresses in Amsterdam?

The wording of the note—“Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported at the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung”—would seem to suggest that the betrayer didn’t have the names of the onderduikers in the Annex but only knew that there were some. The probability that the sender directed the note to a random address, which just happened to be the site of the betrayal of Jews and also Otto Frank’s address, is minuscule.

The Cold Case Team also considered the possibility that whoever sent the note might have sent similar ones to other addresses on the list. If so, they have never been discovered—possibly because most of the Jews who were betrayed at those addresses did not survive the camps, besides which, most had been hiding at addresses other than their own homes or offices. Otto was the exception. He was hiding in his own building—and he survived the war.

If the letter had arrived ten years later—say in the mid-1950s—it could be argued that someone was just trying to use Otto’s fame to cast a negative light on Van den Bergh. But at the time the note was received in 1945, the diary was not yet published and Otto Frank was just one of 5,500 Jews returning to the Netherlands. In a sea of Dutch people coming back from the labor camps, hundreds of thousands of people coming out of hiding, and the returning Jews struggling to put their lives back together, he was an unknown figure.

In other words, if the accusation in the note was false, the sender would have to have been someone who:


Had a specific vendetta against Arnold van den Bergh yet inexplicably did not want to notify the postwar authorities, who were aggressively pursuing and locking up collaborators and betrayers within days of the liberation


Knew that Otto had been betrayed while in hiding—and had survived the camps


Knew that Otto had returned to his wartime address


Was aware that lists of Jews in hiding were passed by members of the Jewish Council to the SD



The odds of the sender knowing all of that are exceedingly slim. It can be assumed that the author of the anonymous note is now dead, but there is always the possibility that he or she informed family members who passed the story down. Vince believes that after the Van den Bergh theory is made public, the team may hear from them.

Through the Arrest Tracking Project, by which the arrests of all Jews in the Netherlands between 1943 and 1944 were analyzed, the Cold Case Team discovered that the raid on the Annex was somewhat different from other raids, specifically in that a German officer led the team. This was very unusual and suggests that it was not the Dutch desk officer, Sergeant Abraham Kaper, at the Zentralstelle who called in Silberbauer. Kaper would not have called a German officer to accompany Dutch policemen. The call must have come from higher up, which in fact Silberbauer always claimed when he said that SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann at Euterpestraat took the call and then ordered him to organize the raid. Furthermore, if an ordinary Dutch civilian was intent on betraying Jews, he or she would have called the JA; Kaper’s number was listed in the phone directory. Dettmann was too senior an officer to receive a random call. His number was not listed in the phone book, he did not operate V-persons, and he did not speak Dutch. If he received the call, it almost certainly came from within the German organization, either from another German department or from someone he knew. Among the suspects the Cold Case Team examined, only Van den Bergh had connections with high-ranking German officials, was in contact with important individuals such as Tietje, and would have been known to the German intelligence services.

For Vince, what made the Van den Bergh scenario convincing is that, unlike any of the other suspects, Van den Bergh met all of the criteria of the law enforcement axiom:

Knowledge: It’s almost certain that the Jewish Council had lists of addresses of Jews in hiding. Through his key position on the Jewish Council, Van den Bergh would have had access to those lists. He may also have had access to the lists of addresses collected by the Contact Committee at Camp Westerbork.3 Prinsengracht 263 could easily have been on a list in 1943 or 1944, placed there by a member of the resistance who’d been turned or by an informant and available for purchase if the money was sufficient.

Motive: Van den Bergh’s motive was to safeguard himself and his family from capture and deportation by making himself useful to the Nazi occupiers, some of whom were “friends” or business acquaintances. The fact that the note states that the list contained addresses and not names makes it more plausible that Van den Bergh used it to guard his own family. Addresses are less personal.

Opportunity: At a time when anyone could have had a motive for betrayal, Van den Bergh possessed something that most other Jews did not: freedom to move about and access to the SD. He was in regular contact with highly placed Nazis. He could have passed on the information he had at any time.


Even though the Van den Bergh theory was clearly the most likely, Vince said he had played the devil’s advocate with all of the key points over and over. Time and again, Van den Bergh emerged as the most likely perpetrator. In fact, it was the only theory that explained Otto’s behavior and the statements he and Miep had made over the years. But before officially concluding anything, Vince wanted to conduct one more test: he wanted to present all of the evidence in the form of a closing argument to Pieter in a manner similar to the way prosecutors present a case at the conclusion of a trial.