As it was becoming evident by the fall of 1944 that the Allies had won the war, Van Dijk turned to Otto Kempin and asked for help to get a visa to travel to Germany. Kempin refused. However loyally she may have worked as a V-Frau, she was not to be rewarded.11 She then moved with her lover, Mies de Regt, to The Hague, where she made her living from black-market trade.
After the liberation, Van Dijk was arrested and tried by the Special Court of Justice. She was convicted of twenty-three cases of betrayal involving sixty-eight people and sentenced to death. Her CABR file is massive and suggests a much higher number, probably closer to two hundred betrayals, but many cases simply couldn’t be proven because so few witnesses had survived.
Launching an appeal, Van Dijk’s lawyer asked for a psychological investigation, claiming that both her parents had died while suffering from mental illnesses; his attempt to suggest that her behavior was a result of some inherited condition did not impress the judges. On January 14, 1948, Ans van Dijk was executed at Fort Bijlmer after having been baptized a Catholic the previous day.
Van Dijk had the distinction of being the only woman sentenced to death and actually executed in the Netherlands. The other women she had worked closely with, Miep Braams and Branca Simons, were also sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life in prison. It has been argued that part of the reason Van Dijk was executed was that she was an outspoken and openly homosexual woman.
If it had not been for the Nazis, it is unlikely that Van Dijk’s life would have been exceptional. In 1940, she was a thirty-five-year-old clerk in a hat shop with a female lover. As a lesbian she would have been an outsider, which clearly angered her, though there is no suggestion that she acted on her anger. Perhaps, initially, that fact even gave her courage. In the early days of the occupation, she refused to cower before the Nazis’ rules and supposedly helped some fellow Jews find safe hiding places. However, in the last two years of the war, from April 1943 to April 1945, she turned into a grotesque monster capable of betraying several hundred people. Fear for her life may have led her to become a V-Frau, but what happened after that, according to her handler Pieter Schaap, was that she took to the work; she became one of his most effective informants.
Her lover Mies de Regt testified that she believed that Van Dijk had been seduced by the “irresistible excitement of the hunt.”12 Excitement of the hunt! It’s an astonishing phrase. Coerced by fear for her life, then seduced by power. Is it possible that one thing we can learn from Ans van Dijk is that totalitarian regimes achieve their power not just through repression but through the seduction of insiderism, which turns people into craven sycophants? They believe that they are among the elite until, like Van Dijk, the power turns on them and spits them out.
For a time Van Dijk seemed to be a likely suspect in the raid on Prinsengracht 263. In the Arrest Tracking Project, her name came up again and again. Clearly, working as a V-Frau, she had a motive. Did she have knowledge? The Prinsengracht area was part of her regular turf, and, at least according to Gerard Kremer, she was often seen there. Could she have overheard something about the hiders in the Annex? Could she have become suspicious and staked out the building, watching the stream of suppliers who provided what seemed an excess of food? And did she have opportunity? Where was she in the days preceding August 4, and who was she in contact with? Those were the questions the Cold Case Team had yet to answer.
27
No Substantial Proof, Part I
From the beginning of their work, the Cold Case Team collected a wealth of material related to the original 1947–48 police investigation into the raid on the Annex. It included multiple CABR files, personal and official correspondence, court documents, and the nine-page Amsterdam police report. Vince said that one thing was clear: by today’s standards, the quality and thoroughness of the investigation were subpar. One reason for this was that just after the war, the Dutch police force was purged of collaborators. That led to 2,500 people losing their jobs and many others being demoted. Sixteen percent of the force was suspended and investigated. As a result, inexperienced and understaffed investigators had to deal with an overwhelming backlog of cases of collaboration, war crimes, and betrayal.
It was also clear that the investigation might not have occurred at all except for pressure from Otto and his employees at Opekta/Gies & Co. Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler took the initiative to push the postwar authorities to take up the case. They, along with Miep and Bep, concluded that Opekta’s warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, was the most likely betrayer. Kleiman wrote the Amsterdam Political Investigation Service (Politieke Opsporingsdienst; POD) in the summer of 1945, demanding an investigation of Van Maaren. Nothing happened.1
On November 11, 1945, Otto wrote a letter to his mother saying that he, together with Kleiman and Kugler, had gone to the Bureau of National Security (Bureau Nationale Veiligheid; BNV) to check police files for photographs of the Dutch policemen who’d arrested them. He said they’d been able to identify two men—murderers who had been responsible for the death of his family. He was hoping that the men might be able to identify the traitor who had betrayed them to the SD in the first place, though he wasn’t optimistic since such men always said that they had just been following orders.2 (In a letter dated May 2, 1958, Kugler recalled that he and Kleiman had accompanied Otto to the BNV in 1945.) Among the mug shots the police showed them, they recognized Willem Grootendorst and Gezinus Gringhuis, the Dutch policemen attached to the IV B4 unit who were currently serving sentences for collaboration in Amstelveenseweg prison.
Later that November, Otto, Kleiman, and Kugler made a visit to the prison to interview Grootendorst and Gringhuis. Both men admitted to having taken part in the raid at Prinsengracht 263, though later, under official interrogation, they would conveniently forget having done so.3 Both said that Sergeant Abraham Kaper of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs had summoned them. They claimed, probably truthfully, to have no information about an anonymous morning phone call to Julius Dettmann reporting Jews in hiding. Dettmann could not be questioned; he’d hanged himself in his jail cell on July 25, though it was rumored that he’d been helped.
Otto then made a second visit to the prison to interview Gezinus Gringhuis. He made a notation to that effect in his agenda on December 6, 1945, along with the name Ab. That likely refers to Otto’s close friend Abraham “Ab” Cauvern, whose wife, Isa, worked as Otto’s secretary.