In describing the raid on the Annex, Kremer maintained that in early August 1944, his father overheard snippets of a phone call Ans van Dijk made to the SD reporting that she’d heard children’s voices coming from a house on Prinsengracht. Supposedly that phone call resulted in the raid.
Gerard Jr.’s wife obtained that remarkable account from Gerardus Sr. just before his passing in 1978 as a kind of deathbed confession. Oddly enough, she did not inform her husband of that statement until years later. Gerard Jr. held on to the revelation for several years before deciding to publish the account in his 2018 book.2
Kremer’s father was arrested over a month after the Annex raid. According to Gerard Jr., his father believed he was betrayed by Ans van Dijk, though that was never proven. The family assumed that his arrest was related to his assisting Jews in hiding. He was taken to the SD headquarters on Euterpestraat and tortured. Dr. Lam was also arrested but was released a short time later. Gerardus Sr. ended up in the notorious Nazi prison the Weteringschans, but luckily a German officer who lived in the same building as the Kremer family at Westermarkt 2 put in a good word for him. Gerardus Sr. was released on October 23, 1944, the same day that an SD officer, Herbert Oelschl?gel, was murdered by the resistance. The very next morning, twenty-nine men were selected from the prison Gerardus Sr. had been held in, transported to the south of the city, and executed as a reprisal for the killing.
After Pieter ended what would be the first of many and sometimes irate phone calls with Kremer, the team began to dissect this new information. It certainly met the elements of NIOD researcher David Barnouw’s theory that someone from the neighborhood saw or heard something and notified the SD. It also involved an infamous V-Frau who was already on the team’s radar because she was known to work that area of Amsterdam.
The first investigative step was to attempt to confirm some of the information that Kremer provided about his father, Dr. Lam, and the location of the Wehrmacht office. Through the Residents Project, a few keystrokes on the computer showed that Kremer and his parents indeed lived at that address during the war and his father was employed as a caretaker of the building. It also confirmed that Dr. Lam had his office and residence in the adjacent building just around the corner at Keizersgracht 196. He had moved there with his wife in March 1942, just four months prior to the Franks entering the Annex. However, establishing that the Wehrmacht occupied two floors of the building proved to be more difficult. The only government-type office listed in the archive records showed offices of the Department of Social Affairs, Public Health Department. But it was wartime; the Wehrmacht most likely seized the two floors of the building and nothing was ever recorded in the city registry.
The team then turned their attention to Kremer’s claim that his father was providing food to the Annex. In her book, Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies described in great detail obtaining vegetables from a friendly greengrocer, Hendrik van Hoeve, whose store was on the Leliegracht, a few hundred yards from the Annex.3 A friend of Kleiman, W. J. Siemons, who owned a chain of bakeries, delivered bread to the office two or three times a week. There was also Piet Scholte’s butcher shop, where Hermann van Pels had arranged with the owner to supply the Annex’s meat. (Anne mentioned the shop in the menu she drafted for Miep and Jan’s anniversary dinner at the Annex.) Bep Voskuijl shared the food collection duties with Miep, often bicycling at great risk to farms outside the city or traveling to Halfweg, a town west of Amsterdam, for milk.4
The helpers gave generous credit to all their food suppliers, and there is no reason to assume that they would not have acknowledged Gerardus Sr., who would have been putting his life at risk to supply them. But the team found nothing to corroborate Kremer’s claim that his father supplied the Annex with food. This doesn’t mean that Kremer’s father was not assisting the resistance by supplying food to other people in hiding. Similarly, if Dr. Lam was providing medical services to those in the Annex, as Kremer insisted in one of his frequent phone calls, Anne would likely have mentioned it in her diary or Otto Frank and the helpers would have said so. Dr. Lam may well have been treating people in hiding, just not those in the Annex.
To follow up on the other parts of Kremer’s claim, Pieter and Christine Hoste set out to determine whether it was possible to hear voices coming from the Annex. Westermarkt 2 has changed little since the war. It is a six-story brown brick building with its front side entirely dominated by large windows. The ornate lobby is still period correct, making it easy for Pieter and Christine to imagine what it was like during the war. Speaking with various tenants, they learned that the building had a very large cellar area, just as Kremer described it, where confiscated goods could have been stored.
Inspection of the building’s rear outer wall made it clear that there was no window, nor, as period photos showed, had there ever been one; people working in offices there could not have had a direct view of the Annex. Even with the side windows open, it would have been very hard to hear, let alone pinpoint the location of, voices emanating from the Annex. As for Gerardus Sr.’s account of seeing the girls playing in the courtyard—he may well have seen children, but certainly not the Frank daughters. Anne made it clear in her diary that none of the residents left the Annex for more than two years.
Vince and the team rejected Kremer’s theory about the raid on the grounds that it was hearsay, based on the deathbed testimony of Gerardus Sr. to his daughter-in-law, who later told her husband with intervals of years between. There are simply no corroborating statements or documents.
25
The “Jew Hunters”
Who were the men (and occasionally women) who hunted down Jews for a living? Who, for the magnificent bounty of 7.5 guilders ($47 today), would turn in a Jew simply for the “crime” of being Jewish? (If the Jew had actually committed what the Nazis considered a real crime—owning a radio, for example—an extra 15 guilders was added to the bounty.) As the Cold Case Team began investigating the CABR files, they found that some of the Jew hunters were members of the Referat IV B4, headed by Adolf Eichmann in Berlin. Standardized in every occupied territory, that subdepartment of the Reich Security head office oversaw the categorization of Jews, anti-Jewish legislation, and eventually the mass deportations to extermination camps. The IV B4 unit in Amsterdam, including the Dutch policemen who joined it, was under the German Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD).