The Cold Case Team found no conclusive evidence that the betrayer of Anne Frank was someone in the neighborhood, but their investigation turned up disconcerting evidence with regard to a closer circle, the helpers. The team had become emotionally attached to the helpers, but, as Vince put it, it was necessary to remain objective to protect the integrity of the investigation. Through the Mapping Project, they learned that the next-door neighbor of Johannes Kleiman was not only a fervent NSB member but also an employee at the SD office on Euterpestraat. Both Kleiman’s wife and his brother knew about the hiders, and it seems that their daughter, Corrie, also deduced from a casual remark by her father that the Franks were still in Amsterdam, though she probably didn’t know they were hiding in the Annex.1 The team also discovered that the adoptive brother of Miep, as well as Kugler’s brother-in-law, had been accused of collaboration. Could an unintentional remark by any of them have given the hiders away?
The team began by researching the collaboration file of Kugler’s brother-in-law and discovered that his “collaboration” amounted to operating a movie theater that had played pro-German films during the occupation. As for Miep, any doubts about her were easy to dismiss. She was hugely self-disciplined and able to compartmentalize; as she herself said, during the war she had lost the habit of speech. Regardless, the Cold Case Team found documents indicating that her adoptive brother, Laurens Nieuwenburg, Jr., went to Germany in November 1943 and reregistered at his parents’ address in August 1945; it appears that he was in Germany at the time of the Annex arrests. Finally, Kleiman’s neighbor, too, was a very unlikely suspect; if he was the one to give up the Prinsengracht 263 address, he would not have phoned SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann with the information. As an employee of the SD, he would have known that the person to call with tips about hiders was Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs. Kaper was in charge of the Jew-hunting unit and could be nasty when others went around him, poached on his territory, or tried to claim the Kopgeld rewards.
War brings conflict between countries, between strangers, between neighbors, and between family members. The team discovered that the conflict of war within a family had come right to the door of Prinsengracht 263. There were grounds to believe that Bep’s sister Nelly Voskuijl could have been the one who betrayed the people in the Annex. In his book Anne Frank: The Untold Story (coauthored with Jeroen de Bruyn), Bep’s son Joop van Wijk made what seems a strong case against his aunt.
Vince was able to contact Joop through his social media site and discovered that he was eager to talk with the Cold Case Team. On a freezing day in December 2018, Joop and his wife traveled from their home in the eastern Netherlands to the Amsterdam office, where Vince and Brendan were waiting to interview him.2 Joop was remarkably candid. He said that Anne Frank: The Untold Story was a labor of love for his mother and a tribute to his grandfather, whose efforts in support of the hiders had never been adequately acknowledged. He added that in writing the book he could not avoid expressing his concerns about his aunt Nelly’s role in the betrayal.
Joop began by explaining his relationship with his mother. He is the youngest son in a family of four children and was seven years old when he realized that his mother had helped Anne Frank’s family. He became fascinated by the Annex story. He fondly recalled visits by Otto Frank, whom he addressed as “Uncle Otto.” During the interview Joop became emotional when he recounted an incident that occurred in 1959, when he was ten. He heard his mother crying in the bathroom, and when he opened the door, he could see that she was consuming pills. She looked at him in dismay and stopped. His intrusion undoubtedly saved her life. Only later did he realize how much she’d been traumatized by the war; she told him she felt she’d failed the people hiding in the Annex.
Joop gave the Cold Case Team a detailed profile of Nelly. She was the fourth of eight children, four years younger than her sister Bep, who was the oldest. They lived in a working-class district in west Amsterdam in a house too small to accommodate a family of ten, so as a result the older girls often had to live elsewhere. At the beginning of the war, Nelly and her sister Annie worked as live-in maids for a wealthy family who proved to be Nazi sympathizers. German soldiers often visited the villa. One of the regulars was a young Austrian named Siegfried with whom the eighteen-year-old Nelly soon fell in love.
On November 1, 1941, Nelly was arrested while walking along Nieuwendijk with Siegfried. The Cold Case Team found her police file in the Amsterdam City Archives indicating that she was charged only with breaking curfew.3 Because Nelly was still considered a minor, her father was called to pick her up at the police station the next morning and was almost apoplectic when he learned that his daughter had been out with an enemy soldier. Johannes Voskuijl was profoundly anti-Nazi and insisted that Nelly break off the relationship.4
It seemed impossible, however, to deter Nelly. Her younger sister Diny reported in a 2011 interview with the Anne Frank Foundation that Nelly had brought her Austrian boyfriend home to ask her father’s permission to date him. Peeking through a crack in the door, Diny had watched the young man click his boots and say to their father, “Herr Voskuijl, Heil Hitler!”5
According to the family story, Johannes tried to dissuade his daughter from having any further contact with Siegfried. It didn’t work. Tensions in the family grew unbearable until, in December 1942, Nelly applied for a Dutch passport.6 The Cold Case Team was able to track down her application. It bore the stamp “A.B.,” which meant that the Amsterdam employment office had approved her for work in Germany. It also carried the words “With consent.” As a minor, Nelly required parental permission to travel, but it seems unlikely that her father would have consented. Joop concluded that his aunt had simply lied on her application about having parental consent.
Joop told the Cold Case Team he believes that the Voskuijl family underestimated or deliberately concealed his aunt’s involvement with members of the German Army. They claimed that she moved to France after a falling-out with Siegfried and that she remained there until the war was over. While researching his book, though, Joop found a different story.
According to her sister Diny, Nelly went to Austria to live with Siegfried’s sister while he fought at the front. Then she discovered a letter to him from his fiancée,7 which sent her home to Amsterdam brokenhearted. But her relationships with Nazis did not end there. Bep’s boyfriend at the time, Bertus Hulsman, was often to be found at the Voskuijl residence. He claimed that after her return to Amsterdam, Nelly continued to consort with the occupiers. He recalled that she “could often be found in the building of the Veronica skating club, opposite the Concert Building. The Germans made this into a so-called Wein, Weib und Gesang (wine, wife [woman] and song) establishment where they’d hold parties.”8
Joop discovered that in May 1943, Nelly traveled to northern France to work for the Wehrmacht at a military air base in Laon. She was the base commander’s secretary. This was serious collaboration, since it meant she would have known the schedules of German bombing raids. It seems she lasted a year. By May 1944, she decided to return home.
As she continued to date Germans, the tension in the home accelerated. Diny said that her father occasionally beat Nelly. She remembered one occasion when the beating was so severe that Nelly fell down on the hall floor and her father continued to kick her. It was so shocking that Diny asked her mother why her father had lost his temper, but her mother refused to answer. Although Diny remembered that the incident occurred in the summer of 1944, she could not recall whether it was before or after the arrest of the people in the Annex.9 If after, her father’s anger might have been a consequence of his belief that Nelly was involved in their betrayal.
At this point in the investigation of Nelly as a suspect, the Cold Case Team came across an anomaly. In The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, edited under the supervision of Otto Frank and published in 1947 all over the world, no mention is made of Nelly Voskuijl. Of course, this could have been simply a matter of producing a readable book of 335 pages; much had to be cut. When NIOD published The Diary of Anne Frank: Critical Edition in 1986, many deleted passages were restored.