The Amsterdam City Archives became one of the most important sources for research and was like a second home to the full-time researchers. The main archivist, Peter Kroesen, had worked there for twenty-five years and was often approached by people asking for his help in finding the betrayer of their relatives. Every time Vince or Pieter visited, there might be a new story; they were immensely valuable to the team because they gave a sense of the texture of life during the war.
Sometimes Kroesen was able to solve cases in short order, such as the case of the man who walked in one day wanting to know who had betrayed his parents. The man knew the address of their hiding place, so Kroesen simply checked who the official resident was at the time. It was a woman who had lived there with her nephew since the 1930s. Two months after the betrayal of the man’s parents, she moved to a bigger house—the house that had belonged to the people she betrayed. Meanwhile, the nephew changed his official address every two months, which was typical of collaborators who feared being tracked down by the resistance. Kroesen soon found the work records of the nephew. He’d been a student at the secret German spy school in Antwerp and had then worked for the SD as well as for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ER), the Nazi organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property. It was not difficult for Kroesen to conclude that it must have been the nephew who betrayed the man’s parents, who had no idea that they were being hidden by the aunt of a dedicated Dutch Nazi.
Once the Cold Case Team’s office in the north of Amsterdam was set up, visitors started to come. Perhaps most important for Thijs was the visit of the Dutch military’s chief rabbi, Military Police Colonel Menachem Sebbag. Thijs had met him through the commander of the Royal Navy barracks when he had been searching for a new office. On that occasion they had established an immediate rapport.
Thijs wanted to know what it would mean if the team actually found the betrayer of Anne Frank. Did the rabbi worry that they would stir up emotions they’d be better off avoiding? What if the betrayer were Jewish? Should the matter be left alone?
Rabbi Sebbag was very clear. “Hardly anything is of greater importance than the truth,” he said. “If the betrayer turned out to be Jewish, so be it.” The rabbi reminded Thijs that the Nazis had tried to dehumanize the Jewish people. “The truth,” he said, “is that Jewish people are human at all levels. As humans can or will betray each other, then there will also be Jewish people among them.”
In the office, the Cold Case Team kept a thick binder containing copies of the Kopgeld receipts that Vince had found at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Each of the 956 notes is forensic proof of payment of head money for the betrayal of one or more people. With bureaucratic precision, each is furnished with stamps, signatures, an amount in guilders, and the name of the recipient. Sometimes the names of the betrayed are mentioned, but other times only the number of betrayed men, women, and children is noted.
Rabbi Sebbag knew of the existence of Kopgeld but had never seen the receipts. When Thijs showed him the binder, he did not touch it. He stiffened. So many men, women, and children sentenced to death. Their absence was palpable in the profound sadness that filled the room.
20
The First Betrayal
Over the course of the investigation, various researchers worked on different scenarios and new information came in all the time. Vince saw the investigation as less chronological and more of an arc, which began with a betrayal far earlier than the 1944 call to the SD.
By the end of 1934, business at Opekta was picking up, and Otto rented larger offices at Singel 400. As is often the case with fledgling businesses, he found himself performing many roles, including salesman visiting housewives and wholesalers across the country. Business again improved in 1935 after Otto convinced a number of small wholesalers to stock pectin. He was finally able to employ more staff and hired a secretary, Isadora “Isa” Monas, and at least two product demonstrators.
One was a woman named Jetje Jansen-Bremer, whose job it was to attend various trade shows and explain the use of pectin. At the same time, Otto gave part-time jobs to Jetje’s husband, Josephus Marinue “Job” Jansen, and their eldest son, Martinus. Job built the wooden display cases, and Martinus helped with packaging and dispatch duties at the warehouse.
After the war Job Jansen was accused of collaboration. The Cold Case Team was able to obtain his profile from the police investigative report on him included in his CABR files at NIOD. There was also material on him in the Dutch National Archives. It seems that the man had a fraught past. Brought up in a strictly Catholic household, he’d joined the seminary of the Brothers of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (Broeders van de Onbevlekte Ontvangenis van Maria), intending to become a priest. Having failed at that, he married at age twenty and worked in theater: in administration, in advertising, and occasionally onstage. After eight and a half years his marriage disintegrated, and his wife and two children left him. Unable to cope, he attempted suicide, shooting himself in the lung. During his recuperation he met Jetje Bremer, who worked at the Dutch Theater (Hollandsche Schouwburg); they married and had six children. By 1935, Jansen was no longer able to support his family through the theater, and Jetje opened a florist shop in Amsterdam and also went to work part-time for Otto.
It seems that Jetje’s financial independence galled her husband, and the marriage deteriorated. In his paranoia and sense of impotence, Jansen soon came to believe his wife was having an affair with her boss. (He would later apologize for “implicating” Mr. Frank in adultery and “tarnishing” his name.)1 The tension caused Otto to cut all ties with the Jansens.
When the Germans invaded, Jansen immediately rejoined the by then ruthlessly anti-Semitic Dutch Nazi Party, to which he had belonged in the mid-thirties. That made life unendurable for his wife, who was Jewish. Eventually Job left Jetje to live with a widow who was a like-minded NSB sympathizer.
Job Jansen was almost a blueprint of a rank-and-file member of the NSB. When Vince asked Dr. Roger Depue, the forensic behavioral scientist who often advised the Cold Case Team, to look at the biographical material they’d collected on Jansen, he said it was clear that belonging to the National Socialist Movement gave Jansen a sense of authority and access to power. In truth he was only a common bully, taking out his frustrations on his fellow citizens, especially the group that was deemed the scapegoat.
An anecdote in Jansen’s file makes this clear. At the funeral procession for the NSB member Hendrik Koot, who’d died in the violent confrontation between Dutch Nazis and young Jews in February 1941, Jansen and a fellow NSB member, Martinus J. Martinus, accosted a Jewish man for passing through the parade barriers and crossing the street. They marched Isidore Rudelsheim into a nearby police station, saying that the Jew had been disrespecting the procession, even though the procession had not yet begun, and demanding that he be locked up.
In March 1941, Jansen and Otto bumped into each other on the Rokin, a busy street in downtown Amsterdam. Though he did not like the man, as a courtesy Otto stopped for a short conversation. With leering condescension, Jansen asked if, being a Jew, Otto was still able to get goods from Germany. Otto replied that he had no difficulty doing so. Jansen then said, “The war will be over soon.” Otto replied that he wasn’t convinced and said that the Germans were still having a tough time of it. Such a comment, implying that the Germans could lose the war, at that time and place was treasonous.