After the liberation Otto visited Fritzi and Eva in their old apartment at Merwedeplein 46. On July 18, 1945, he learned that both his daughters had perished. On August 8, the Red Cross informed Fritzi that her husband, Erich, and her son, Heinz, had been killed.6
Between 1947 and 1949, Otto helped Fritzi through the arduous trials of the betrayers of her husband and son. The legal proceedings were devastating for her to attend. Otto was actively seeking the identity of his own family’s betrayer, and witnessing the pain and eventual frustration Fritzi went through at the trials, which essentially exonerated the culprits, must have been equally devastating for him.
The relationship between Otto Frank and Fritzi Geiringer provided consolation of an unimaginably tragic dimension, a profound comfort based on their mutual loss. Otto once said that because they both survived concentration camps and both lost spouses and children, they could understand each other. A relationship with someone who didn’t share such suffering would have been impossible.7
Fritzi’s daughter, Eva, gave a moving portrait of the man who became her stepfather:
Otto had been living in Merwedeplein with my mother for some time, but they were both haunted by all their memories. . . . Although he was completely driven to ensure Anne’s diary was published, and gained the recognition it deserved, the war and loss of his family had placed a terrible strain on Otto’s emotional and mental well-being.8
The truth was that Otto needed to be near his existing family. He and Fritzi began the next phase of their lives in Switzerland. In Basel, the couple settled into the home of Otto’s sister, Leni, her husband, Erich Elias, and their two sons. They stayed for almost seven years before moving into their own modest apartment in the Basel suburb of Birsfelden. Nothing, except perhaps Anne’s legacy, was now more important to Otto than his connection with his family. Over the years he became very close to Eva, her husband, and their three daughters in London; he and Fritzi visited them as often as they could. And he was close to his mother, who also lived in Basel.
On March 21, 1953, he and Fritzi were in London when his brother Robert phoned to say that their mother had died the previous night of a stroke. Two months later, Robert suffered a heart attack and died on May 23. At the same time, Otto was dealing with the owner of Prinsengracht 263, who wanted to sell the property. At a deep psychological level, losing the building felt as though his history was being effaced. He’d lost his mother, his brother, his past. He wanted to turn the building into something meaningful, a symbolic reminder of what must never happen again.
Working on the book and play of Anne’s diary gave him purpose, but at the same time, it must have been very painful for him to relive those years in hiding. He told friends he was feeling fragile and had to be careful of his nerves.9 In October 1954, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to hospital, though he soon recovered.10 He was lucky to have Fritzi’s devotion.
Even though it was almost fifteen years since the war had ended, anti-Semitic attacks continued. A German man wrote Otto in 1959, “I’m shocked that you as a father have published such a thing. But that is typical of the Jew. You’d still seek to fill your pockets with the stinking corpse of your daughter. A blessing to humanity that such creatures were extinguished by Hitler.”11 It took courage for Otto to expose himself to that kind of vile filth. In 1959, he and his publishers initiated the first of several lawsuits against those who challenged the authenticity of his daughter’s diary. His friend Father John Neiman said, “Stories about the diary being a fake cut [Otto] deeply, and though it cost him a lot personally and financially to fight these people, he did it on behalf of all victims of Nazism.”12 The slanders against the diary never abated in Otto’s lifetime. Perhaps it was some consolation that shortly before he died in 1980, the Supreme Court of West Germany ruled that insulting Jews by denying the Holocaust was a criminal offense.13
Part II
Cold Case Investigation
Courtesy of Shutterstock/Bardocz Peter
17
The Investigation
In April 2017, Vince Pankoke traveled to Amsterdam to meet the Cold Case Team; his only contact with them so far had been via Skype. Thijs Bayens wanted to launch the investigation with a pilot video to determine if there would be any media interest in the project. He proceeded to film Vince as the team created testimonial reconstructions of the investigation with Dutch actors.
Vince used his time with Thijs, Pieter van Twisk, and Jean Hellwig to tour the Amsterdam City Archives; the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and the Anne Frank House, which they’d been invited to visit alone in the early morning before the crowds arrived. For Vince, who was already so steeped in Anne’s story, contemplating what took place within those walls was a powerful experience. Also important at that stage was his meeting with the scientists at Xomnia, an Amsterdam-based data company that had offered to provide the foundation of the artificial intelligence (AI) program that Microsoft then agreed to develop for the team’s research. Everyone knew that AI would change the investigation into the raid; it would enable the team to marshal the millions of details surrounding the case and make connections among people and events that had been overlooked before.
When Vince committed to the endeavor in 2016, he realized that he’d taken on not just a cold case but the ultimate cold case. By their nature cold cases like this one remain unsolved due to a lack of evidence or because evidence was overlooked or misinterpreted. Therefore, the team had to develop a plan blending proven cold case methodology with a historical research model, since they would be working primarily with historical accounts of what had happened. Upon joining the team, Vince reached out to a colleague, the retired behavioral scientist Dr. Roger Depue, the legendary pioneer in the field and later chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Over numerous long lunches in Manassas, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, he and Vince discussed how to approach the investigation. Both men knew that Vince was going to get only one chance at solving this case, and he needed to do it right.
As the Cold Case Team was aware from the beginning, there had been only two official police investigations into the betrayal of Anne Frank. The first had been done in 1947–1948 by the PRA and the second in 1963–1964 by the Dutch police. No other official police investigation into the betrayal had ever been undertaken.
But speculation about and sometimes serious investigations into the arrest had never stopped. Over the past several decades, many people had come forward with theories, and to this day, according to an employee of the Anne Frank House, the question most asked by visitors is: Who betrayed Anne Frank?
In 1998, Melissa Müller published Anne Frank: A Biography. Based on her research, she decided that Lena Hartog, the wife of Lammert Hartog, the assistant of the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, was most likely the betrayer. Four years later, Carol Ann Lee published The Hidden Life of Otto Frank and offered the theory that a shady character named Anton “Tonny” Ahlers was the culprit. Of course, both theories could not be correct, and under the pressure of increased public attention, David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom of NIOD decided to investigate the case all over again. They limited their focus to three individuals (Willem van Maaren, Lena Hartog, and Tonny Ahlers) and touched on some other theories only superficially.