Otto was clearly hoping to have his case taken up quickly by the POD, but in 1945 he was just one of 5,500 survivors returning from the camps. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until June 11, 1947, almost two years later, that he next visited the Bureau of National Security in person. Again nothing. Then, after a conversation with Otto, on July 16 Kleiman sent another letter to the Political Investigation Department (Politieke Recherche Afdeling; PRA) (the POD had been renamed in March 1946 after the Allied military forces had handed power over to the civil administration). He asked, on behalf of Otto and himself, that the case be “addressed again.”4
On January 12, 1948, three and a half years after the raid on the Annex, Police Brigadier Jacob Meeboer opened an investigation into the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, the only person ever officially investigated as the betrayer. Brigadier Meeboer interviewed fourteen people, among them the helpers Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Viktor Kugler but not Bep Voskuijl;* the Dutch detectives Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst; Johannes Petrus van Erp and Dr. Petrus Hendrikus Bangert, both of whom knew Van Maaren; the other warehouse worker, Lammert Hartog, and his wife, Lena; and finally, Van Maaren himself. Despite Kleiman’s expression of shock in his July letter that Karl Silberbauer had never been brought over to the Netherlands for questioning, seeing that he had “played an important role in the apprehension of ‘Jewish and other absconders,’”5 Silberbauer was not called to testify. Nor was Otto Frank, probably because he’d already told the police that he and his family had been in hiding in the Annex well before Van Maaren was hired and he did not know the man.
Brigadier Meeboer’s official report begins with Kleiman’s testimony, in which he gives a detailed account of the raid and also outlines Van Maaren’s questions and suspicious behavior. Shortly after he was hired, Van Maaren asked the staff about someone being in the stockroom after hours. He’d found a wallet on a table in the stockroom, where Van Pels must have forgotten it during one of his nightly ventures into the warehouse. Van Maaren presented the wallet to Kugler and asked if it was his. Kugler reacted quickly, saying that, yes, it was his and he’d forgotten it the night before. The contents of the wallet were intact, except for a missing ten-guilder note.
Kleiman explained that Van Maaren certainly knew of the existence of the Annex. He’d seen it when Kugler had sent him to fix a leak in the roof, and in any case, a back annex was a feature of many of the narrow buildings in the area. There was also a door at the back of the warehouse opening onto the courtyard. A man as curious as Van Maaren would likely have gone outside; from there, he could see the entire Annex attached to the building. It would have been only normal for him to wonder why the large “appendage” was never mentioned by anyone or used for business purposes. And he would have asked himself where the access to the Annex was located, since there was no clear indication of an entryway. Absent an obvious entrance, he would likely have suspected a concealed door.
Kleiman explained to Detective Meeboer that they would come across pencils balanced on the edges of desks and flour strewn onto the floor, clearly placed there by Van Maaren to confirm his suspicion that people were in the building after hours. Van Maaren once asked Kleiman whether a Mr. Frank had worked in the building, implying that he was conducting his own investigation. Everything suggested that Van Maaren surmised there were people living in the Annex.
Kleiman reported that after the raid on August 4, Opekta’s accountant, Johannes van Erp, visited Dr. Petrus Bangert, a homeopathic doctor, and mentioned that the Jews hiding at Prinsengracht had been arrested. The doctor asked if the address was 263. He said he’d known for about a year that there were Jews in hiding at that address. When Van Erp told that to Kleiman, apparently Kleiman responded that Van Maaren must have been the source of the information since he was a patient of the doctor.
When Dr. Bangert was interrogated, however, he insisted that Opekta’s accountant was mistaken. He’d never said any such thing, he said, and after he checked his patient records, he claimed that Van Maaren had become his patient only on August 25, 1944, three weeks after the arrest. Was that accurate or simply an evasion? It was 1948, three years after the war ended. Everyone wanted to wash their hands of the catastrophe and get on with the peace.
The most revealing part of Brigadier Meeboer’s investigation was his interrogation of Van Maaren himself as to what he had known about Jews hiding in the Annex. Van Maaren testified that he had not known for certain that there was anyone in hiding, though he’d had his suspicions. He explained the pencils on the edges of desks and the flour on the floor as his strategy to trap thieves he believed were stealing from Opekta. As for his asking about a Mr. Frank, he said he’d heard office talk about “Papa Frank” and had been told by Miep Gies and Kleiman that the former owners, Frank and Van Pels, had fled, supposedly to the United States.6
More damning was the fact that his assistant, Lammert Hartog, swore that Van Maaren had told him fourteen days before the raid that there were Jews in hiding at Prinsengracht. Van Maaren emphatically denied that he’d said any such thing.
Though Van Maaren did eventually admit to stealing from Opekta/Gies & Co., he also accused Miep and Bep of theft. He accused both women of heading up to the Annex after the arrest and, before an inventory could be made by the Germans, grabbing “clothes and papers and a lot of other things to keep for themselves.”7 Van Maaren was a bitter man and turned the accusations against him back onto his accusers.
The investigation was dropped on May 22, 1948. The report concluded that there was no proof of the warehouse manager’s culpability.8 Van Maaren was given a conditional discharge, put under surveillance by the Political Delinquents Surveillance Department for three years, and stripped of his right to vote for ten years.
Van Maaren was outraged at receiving a conditional discharge and appealed. During the hearing, his lawyer argued that the appeal itself was proof of Van Maaren’s innocence. “If the accused had felt even the smallest amount of guilt, he would not have appealed against his conditional discharge, since the restrictions imposed are so slight.”9 On August 13, 1949, a district court dismissed all charges.
Van Maaren likely thought that that was the end of his ordeal, but fifteen years later the matter of who betrayed the people in hiding at Prinsengracht 263 would resurface and he would again find himself the prime suspect. Everyone on the Cold Case Team thought that the first investigation of Van Maaren had been perfunctory; the official report was only nine pages long. At that point, they began to collect all information relevant to the second investigation in 1963–1964, hoping that it might have had a broader focus and delved more deeply into what had precipitated the raid.
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“Just Go to Your Jews!”