The Betrayal of Anne Frank

An Investigation

Rosemary Sullivan

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781443463058
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team—led by an obsessed retired FBI agent—has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?

Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal that teenaged Anne Frank kept during World War II. Anne, along with her family and four other people, lived in an attic in Amsterdam until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But although many works—journal articles, books, plays and novels—have been devoted to Anne's story, no one has yet conclusively explained how these eight people managed to hide, undetected, for over two years, and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.

With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents—some never-before seen—and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the cold case team painstakingly pieced together the months leading up to the infamous arrest and came to a shocking conclusion.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, is the riveting story of this mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behaviour of both the captives and their captors, and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam, a place where no matter how wealthy, educated or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.

Part I

The Background Story

1

The Raid and the Green Policeman

On August 4, 1944, a thirty-three-year-old German SS officer, Karl Josef Silberbauer, a sergeant in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Referat IV B4, known colloquially as the “Jew-hunting unit,” was sitting in his office on Euterpestraat in Amsterdam when the phone rang. He’d been about to go out for a bite to eat but answered anyway, something he’d later regret. It was his superior officer, Lieutenant Julius Dettmann, also a German, who said he’d just received a phone call claiming that there were Jews hiding in a warehouse complex at Prinsengracht 263 in central Amsterdam. Dettmann did not tell Silberbauer who’d placed the call, but it clearly was someone reliable and well known to the intelligence service of the SS. There had been too many instances of anonymous tips that had proved to be useless or outdated; by the time the Jew-hunting unit arrived, the Jews had moved on. That Dettmann acted directly after the call meant he trusted the source and knew the tip was well worth investigating.

Dettmann phoned Dutch Detective Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs and ordered him to send several of his men to the Prinsengracht address with Silberbauer. Kaper pulled two Dutch policemen, Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst of the IV B4 unit, into the hunt, along with a third detective.

There are many variations in the accounts of what happened before and after Silberbauer and his men arrived at Prinsengracht 263. The only thing that’s absolutely certain is that they found eight people in hiding: Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Anne and Margot; Frank’s colleague and friend Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter; and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. The Dutch had a term for hiding: onderduiken (diving under).^* They’d been diving under for two years and thirty days.

To be imprisoned, even unjustly, is one thing. But it is entirely another to be in hiding. How is it possible to cope for twenty-five months with total incarceration—not to be able to look out a window for fear of being seen; never to walk outside or breathe fresh air; having to remain silent for hours on end so that the workers in the warehouse below would not hear you? The fear had to be extreme to keep to that discipline. Most people would have gone mad.

During those long hours of each workday, whispering an occasional word and tiptoeing while the employees moved below them, what did they do? They studied; they wrote. Otto Frank read history and novels; his favorites were the novels of Charles Dickens. The children studied English, French, and mathematics. Both Anne and Margot kept diaries. They were preparing for life after the war. They still believed in civilization and the future, while outside the Nazis with their accomplices and informants were hunting them.

By the summer of 1944, optimism had spread through the secret Annex. On the wall Otto had pinned a map of Europe and was following the news on the BBC and the Radio Oranje reports of the Dutch government in exile in London. The Germans had confiscated all radios to prevent the Dutch population from listening to foreign news, but Otto had managed to salvage a radio when they had gone into hiding and was now tracking the progress of the Allied forces through the nightly broadcasts. Two months earlier, on June 4, the Allies had captured Rome, followed two days later by D-Day, the largest amphibious invasion in history. By the end of June, the Americans were bogged down in Normandy, but on July 25 they launched Operation Cobra and the German resistance in northwest France collapsed. In the east, the Russians were moving into Poland. On July 20, members of the high command in Berlin had attempted to assassinate Hitler, which brought jubilation to the people in the Annex.

Suddenly it looked as though the war would be over in a matter of weeks, or maybe a few months. Everyone was making plans for what they would do after the war. Margot and Anne began to talk about going back to school.

And then the unimaginable happened. As Otto stated in an interview almost two decades later, “When the Gestapo came in with their guns, that was the end of everything.”¹

As the sole survivor among the eight, we have only Otto’s record of what happened from the perspective of the Annex residents. He recalled the arrest in such vivid detail that it was clearly seared in his mind.

It was, he said, around ten thirty. He was upstairs giving Peter van Pels an English grammar lesson. In taking dictation, Peter had misspelled the word “double” using two b’s. He was pointing this out to the boy when he heard someone’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. This was disturbing because at that hour all the residents were very quiet lest they be heard in the offices below. The door opened. A man stood there pointing a gun at them. He was not wearing a police uniform. They raised their hands. They were marched downstairs at gunpoint.²

In his recounting of the raid, we get a sense of Otto’s profound shock. During trauma, time slows and stretches out, and some details are strangely emphasized. Otto remembers a spelling error; a grammar lesson; a creaking stair; a pointed gun.

He remembers he was teaching Peter. He remembers the word that Peter stumbled on—“double”—with only one b. That’s the rule. Otto believes in rules, in order, but a dark force is sweeping up his stairs with the intent to kill him and all he holds most precious. Why? Power, hatred, or simply because it can? Even in retrospect, Otto keeps the overwhelming horror at bay, maintaining his self-control because others depend on him. As he looks at the gun in the plainclothes policeman’s hand, he thinks: The Allies are advancing. Luck, chance, fate, may save them all. But he is wrong. He and his family will be transported in freight cars on the last train to Auschwitz. It is unthinkable, but he also knows the unthinkable can happen.

When Otto and Peter reached the main floor of the Annex, they found everyone else standing with their hands up in the air. There were no hysterics, no weeping, only silence. Everyone is numbed by the shock of what was happening—now, so close to the end.

In the middle of the room Otto noted a man he assumed was from the Grüne Polizei, as the Dutch called the German local police force because of their green uniforms. This, of course, was Silberbauer (who was technically not a member of the Grüne Polizei but an SD officer), who later claimed that neither he nor the plainclothes policemen with him drew their weapons. But Otto’s is the more trustworthy account. Like that of most SS members after the war, Silberbauer’s testimony was designed only to exonerate himself.

The hiders’ quiet composure seemed to anger the Nazi. When he ordered them to collect their things for the trip to Gestapo headquarters on Euterpestraat, Anne picked up her father’s briefcase, which held her diary. Otto Frank reported that Silberbauer grabbed the briefcase from Anne, threw her diary with the checkered cover and some loose sheets onto the floor, and filled the briefcase with the last valuables and money that Otto and the others had managed to hold on to, including Fritz Pfeffer’s little packet of dental gold. The Germans were losing the war. By now, much of the stolen booty collected for the Reich by the Jew-hunting units was ending up in someone’s private pocket.

Ironically, it was Silberbauer’s greed that saved Anne Frank’s diary. Had Anne held on to the briefcase and been allowed to keep it when they were arrested, her diary would certainly have been taken from her at SD headquarters and destroyed or lost forever.

According to Otto, it was at this moment that Silberbauer noted a gray footlocker with metal stripes beneath the window. The lid displayed the words “Leutnant d. Res. Otto Frank” (Reserve Lieutenant Otto Frank). “Where did you get this chest?” Silberbauer demanded. When Otto told him that he’d served as an officer in World War I, Silberbauer seemed shocked. As Otto reported:

The man became exceedingly confused. He stared at me, and finally said:

“Then why didn’t you report your status?”

I bit my lips.

“Why man you would have been treated decently! You would have been sent to Theresienstadt.”

I said nothing. Apparently he thought Theresienstadt a rest camp, so I said nothing. I merely looked at him. But he suddenly evaded my eyes, and all at once the perception came to me: Now he is standing at attention. Inwardly, this police sergeant had snapped to attention; if he dared, he might very well raise his hand to his cap in salute.

Then he abruptly turned on his heel and raced upstairs. A moment later he came running down, and then he ran up again, and so he went, up and down, up and down, calling out: “Take your time!”

He shouted these same words to us and to his agents.³

In Otto’s account it is the Nazi who loses his composure, running up and down like the Mad Hatter, while he and the others retain theirs. Otto has caught the German military cult of obedience in Silberbauer’s instinctive response to his officer status, but he may have underestimated Silberbauer’s automatic, reflexive racism. Years later, he would say, “Perhaps he [Silberbauer] might have spared us if he’d been alone.”⁴

This is doubtful. After he’d delivered the prisoners to the truck waiting to transport them to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, Silberbauer returned to the building to confront one of the office workers, Miep Gies. Perhaps he’d spared her from arrest because she, like him, was Austrian, but not before lecturing her, “And weren’t you ashamed to help that Jewish trash?”⁵

Karl Silberbauer would later claim that it was years before he learned, by reading it in a newspaper, that among the ten people he’d arrested that day was fifteen-year-old Anne Frank.

When tracked down by an investigative journalist in 1963, Silberbauer said:

The people I took from their hiding places, did not leave an impression on me. It would have been different if it had been a man such as general De Gaulle or some major resistance member or other. Such a thing you don’t forget. If I wasn’t on the clock at the moment my colleague got a call. . . . I would never have come in contact with that Anne Frank. I still remember that I was just about to go out to eat something. And because this whole case blew up after the war, I am the one dealing with the mess. . . . I wonder who is behind all this. Probably that Wiesenthal or someone at the ministry trying to gain the favor of the Jews.⁶

It is hard to imagine a more despicable, emotionally cauterized response. By now Silberbauer knew very well that “that Anne Frank,” whom he’d arrested on August 4, 1944, had died of starvation and typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was as if what mattered was not the dead child—she is incidental, not real, her suffering is insignificant—but that he is the victim. How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.

2

The Diary of Anne Frank

The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most harrowing books we will read if we read it for what it truly is: a thirteen-year-old girl’s daily account of life in hiding during the terrifying Nazi occupation of her city. Anne Frank catches every detail of the more than two years of claustrophobic life she spent with her family in the Annex attached to her father’s company.

She knows what is out there. Like the other seven people with whom she shares the space, she lives with constant fear, hunger, nightmares of abduction, and the imminent threat of discovery and death. She is not the first to experience this, but she may be one of the first to write about it as it is happening. The other masterpieces we have about the Holocaust—Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man—are all written in retrospect by people who survived. But Anne Frank will not survive.

And this is what makes reading her diary so harrowing. From the beginning, we know the ending, but Anne Frank does not.

Anne Frank received the diary as a gift for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942. Less than a month later, on July 6, her family went into hiding after her sixteen-year-old sister, Margot, was sent a summons to report for Arbeitseinsatz, compulsory work duty in Germany. Otto Frank already understood that “work duty” was a euphemism for slave labor.

Longing for an intimate companion, Anne Frank invented a friend named Kitty, to whom she writes with complete and utter candor. She writes in her diary about hope, about the mysteries of her female body, about her passionate adolescent crush on the seventeen-year-old boy whose family shared the Annex with the Franks. Anne is still a child: she cuts out images of movie stars and royals and pastes them onto her bedroom wall. Though she was born in Frankfurt, Germany, having arrived in the Netherlands at the age of four and a half, her primar...