By the end of 1941, the Nazi noose tightened around the necks of the Netherlands’ Jewish population. Day by day, the regulations became stricter. On December 5, all non-Dutch Jews were ordered to report to the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration), usually referred to simply as the Zentralstelle, to register for “voluntary emigration.” The Nazis already had the registration files of all Dutch Jews. The next call was for forty thousand Dutch and non-Dutch Jews to report for Arbeitseinsatz, mandatory work duty in Germany; that began on July 5, 1942, the day Margot Frank received her summons. By 1943, the well-oiled machine was well on its way to reaching its “emigration” goals. The Nazis simply totaled up the number of Jews in the Netherlands and subtracted those who had already been processed or were exempted by working for the Jewish Council. It didn’t take a statistician to calculate that there were a significant number of Jews unaccounted for, roughly twenty-five thousand, most of whom were assumed to be in hiding.
To reach their goal of making the Netherlands a judenfrei (Jew-free) nation, the Nazis ordered that those twenty-five thousand people be found. In a postwar interrogation, Willy Lages, the head of the SD in Amsterdam, admitted to having been present at a meeting in the SD headquarters in The Hague at which a decision was made to incentivize the search for the missing Jews by offering a bounty. The bounties were to be paid to Dutch policemen, mainly men from the Amsterdam police, Bureau of Jewish Affairs. The actual investigative squad within the Zentralstelle, known as the Henneicke Column (Colonne Henneicke), was made up of civilian contract employees.1
Staffed almost entirely by Dutchmen with NSB affiliation, the members of the Henneicke Column were an eclectic bunch coming from a number of different professions: 20 percent were traveling salesmen, 20 percent office clerks, 15 percent from the auto industry, and 8 percent small-business owners. Some of the notables, such as Henneicke and Joop den Ouden, were mechanics. Den Ouden had worked for Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. and was notorious for his ruthlessness in stealing Jewish property. Eduard Moesbergen, a wireless radio operator by profession, was a skilled bookkeeper and was responsible for the efficient management of the Henneicke group.
After the group was disbanded on October 1, 1943, the hunt for Jews fell to men with police powers, namely the SD Jewish Affairs squad known as unit IV B4. The chain of command started with the German-born SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann at the top with fellow German Otto Kempin directly under him in charge of the Dutch SD detectives. Those two were in place from 1942, but the Cold Case Team discovered that Kempin was transferred just days before the Annex raid. His absence is probably the reason that the phone call regarding the Annex went upstairs to Dettmann. As a German SD officer, Karl Silberbauer, who conducted the raid, would have reported to Kempin, but since Kempin was no longer there, Silberbauer was taking his orders directly from the top.
After the war was over, all of the Dutch members of IV B4 were accused of collaboration, and thus a CABR file under each of their names exists in the Netherlands’ National Archives. Some of the non-Dutch members were prosecuted for war crimes; Kempin was sentenced to ten years, and Dettmann was arrested but committed suicide in jail before he could be prosecuted. Yet others, such as Silberbauer, had already slipped out of the Netherlands.
It was clear from the files that the IV B4 Dutch detectives depended heavily on civilians to inform them about Jews in hiding. These V-Men and V-Women could be Jew or Gentile. Most had done something to cause them to fear for their lives if they didn’t turn on others. In return for their cooperation, they remained free but under the watchful eye of their handlers, who profited nicely from their work. They might be paid expenses and given a place to live. They might even, on occasion, receive some additional token of nice clothing or food products, but the Kopgeld reward and any plunder would go into the pocket of the detective handling them.
The best-known V-Frau, Ans van Dijk, later identified Gerrit Mozer and Pieter Schaap, two of the most prolific handlers of the V-people, as the detectives to whom she passed information. Eduard Moesbergen, who joined IV B4 after the Henneicke Column was disbanded, successfully ran a productive V-Frau by the name of Elisa Greta de Leeuw, who went under the code name “Beppie.” These informants tricked unsuspecting Jews into trusting them. It all came down to the detectives and V-people understanding what Jews in hiding needed (e.g., a new hiding spot, false papers, food) and then making it known in the right circles that they could help. They set up apartments known as “Jew traps,” offering safe shelter to desperate and unsuspecting Jews. This was the ruse used on May 10, 1944, to capture the husband and son of Otto’s second wife, Fritzi Geiringer, which led to the capture of Fritzi and her daughter, Eva, the following day, coincidentally Eva’s birthday.2
Another trick the SD detectives used was to place V-people in jails or camps to elicit information from prisoners about addresses where other Jews were hiding or valuables were stowed. In his postwar interrogation, Schaap admitted to sending a V-Man named Leopold de Jong to Westerbork to collect addresses from recent prisoner arrivals. He would become a potential suspect in the Annex betrayal.
Non-Jewish informants were also used, but they expected some form of payment for their information or, at a minimum, forgiveness for some prior infraction of the law, such as petty theft. People who were caught hiding Jews were given the chance to escape their fate by becoming V-people and supplying other addresses where Jews were hiding or their resistance contacts. One postwar trial involved a man who ran a boardinghouse on Weteringschans in Amsterdam and offered Jews safe accommodations. After collecting the rent in advance, he would contact the authorities to pick up the Jews. During his interrogation, he identified SD detective Frederick Cool as the officer who ordered him to call when new tenants arrived. He claimed that he followed Detective Cool’s orders because he feared that if he didn’t, he, too, would be arrested. So he made the calls—but only after he collected and deposited the rent money.
The men of IV B4 eventually found themselves making less money as the number of Jews easily found in hiding started to dwindle. Fewer arrests meant fewer bounty payments at the end of the month. To compensate for that, the Jew hunters would often steal whatever valuables the Jews or hiders possessed. For example, Dutch police officer Pieter Schaap from the Bureau of Jewish Affairs was not immune to helping himself to some of the loot. When the postwar arrest team went to pick up Schaap, they found furs, paintings, jewelry, and other valuables that had somehow made their way into the Schaap household. Witnesses claimed to have often seen Schaap’s wife wearing furs and jewelry while out on the town.
Vince was intrigued to see the name of the Dutch detective Willem Grootendorst in one of the NIOD documents. His name appeared on a number of the Kopgeld receipts, and, of course, he was one of the Dutch policemen who accompanied Silberbauer in the raid on the Annex. The other policeman on the raid, Gezinus Gringhuis, was reported for extorting a Dutch woman who was harboring a Jew. He demanded 500 guilders to “make things go away.” Instead, she went to the local police to report him. When Gringhuis went back to her house to collect his 500 guilders, police officer Hendrik Blonk was waiting behind the curtains to apprehend him. Unfortunately, a gust of wind blew the curtains open, exposing Blonk and ruining the sting. When Blonk went to Sergeant Kaper to report Gringhuis, Kaper told Blonk in the presence of his men that if he ever interfered in their business again, he would give his men the right to shoot him.3 Such was the extent of the corruption within the force.