One day the Cold Case Team’s researcher Circe de Bruin returned to the office in a state of high excitement. She had discovered a document indicating that Nelly Voskuijl had registered in the municipality of Groningen on October 26, 1945, the same day Müller claimed she had been arrested.22 Müller’s researcher seems to have mistakenly assumed that the registration document was the record of Nelly’s arrest.* Vince said that the roller-coaster ride from excitement to letdown is a normal part of any investigation, but he was somewhat disappointed. Had Nelly been arrested, her CABR file would have provided a narrative of her activities and her German contacts during the war. Whether or not she took part in the Annex betrayal might have become clearer.
By fleeing Amsterdam, Nelly passed under the radar and evaded conviction for whatever crimes of collaboration she might have committed. At the very least, she escaped the fate of women who had had sexual relationships with Germans. Dragged from their houses, their heads shaved, they were drawn in carts through the city streets as bystanders shouted abuse.
After decades of silence, Joop van Wijk renewed contact with his aunt Nelly in 1996. She was living in the small village of Koudum in the province of Friesland in the northern Netherlands and was still in close contact with her sisters, particularly Diny and Willy. Joop recalled, “I was always welcome, but this changed when I brought up the subject of the war and her behavior in the Voskuijl family.”23 Nelly understood that he was writing a book about his mother, but she said that it was difficult to speak about those times; she greatly regretted that period of her life.
Then rather startingly, Joop recounted that “One of the last times I visited her and mentioned Anne Frank and the raid on the Annex, she had a serious fainting spell.”24 He offered to take her to the hospital, but she refused and told him that her fainting was probably a result of the blows her father had given her. Joop was suspicious, believing his aunt was not above using a dramatic performance to obscure her culpability. However, he told the Cold Case Team that, fearing for her health, he stopped asking about the war.
Of course, the most surprising aspect of Joop’s account is that it seems that all he had to do was mention the Annex and Nelly fainted. Could that have been a ruse, Nelly’s way of getting out of having to respond? But he also recounted that he’d actually seen her faint on three earlier occasions, which suggests that she might have had some kind of chronic condition. In his book Anne Frank: The Untold Story: The Hidden Truth About Eli Vossen, the Youngest Helper of the Secret Annex he also mentioned the fainting incident but said that it was occasioned by his mentioning the war and not the raid on the Annex. The Cold Case Team was left wondering: Was Nelly hiding things with her fainting spells and her refusal to speak?25 Or did Joop, already convinced that his aunt was guilty, have tunnel vision? After Joop’s last visit, Nelly moved to an assisted living residence, where she died in 2001. Joop received a final postcard from her with the short text “An embrace, Nel.”
Calling on his twenty-seven years of experience as an FBI undercover agent, Vince said he’d learned to read people—for his own safety. He liked Joop very much, but he felt he was somehow obsessed with proving his aunt Nelly’s guilt. Vince told him not to worry about the betrayal; he should focus on celebrating his mother and grandfather, which had been his motive for writing Anne Frank: The Untold Story.
As expected, Vince went about his investigation coolly, applying the law enforcement axiom “knowledge, motive, and opportunity” to the Nelly Voskuijl scenario. Did Nelly have a motive? Joop visited his aunt fifty years after the war ended, at which point Nelly seemed ashamed of her younger self, but back then, she was rebellious, thoughtless, combative, flirting with the enemy. Could she, in a moment of rage—after a fight with her father, for example—have told the wrong person about the secret her father and sister were keeping? And did that person, possibly one of her German friends, then pass the information on to the SD?
Did she have knowledge? Though her father and sister were very discreet, it’s possible that she overheard them talking about the bookcase. Perhaps she grew suspicious of the goods Bep always seemed to be collecting, sometimes with the help of her siblings. But even Bep’s mother didn’t know about the hiders in the Annex. When she found out after they were arrested, she was furious that her husband and daughter had put their family into such jeopardy.
Nelly had opportunity, having returned to Amsterdam in May 1944. Her father complained that she was still meeting her German friends.
But the team was skeptical that Nelly might have been lashing out at her father, Johannes, when they discovered that the details she’d requested be redacted from Anne’s diary were affectionate toward him. More likely, by 1986 she did not want her past as a German sympathizer known, which could have been damaging not only to herself but also to her father’s memory and to that of her sister Bep, both of whom were now celebrated as helpers in the Anne Frank story.
It seemed that there was no substantial proof that Nelly, however inadvertently, betrayed the residents in the secret Annex. But the Cold Case Team was not yet ready to set that scenario aside.
29
Probing Memory
Vince reminded me that anyone relying on eyewitness statements as an accurate record of a historical moment will quickly learn that memory is fluid. People claim things with great certainty that either are contradictory or simply cannot be true. They are not lying; rather, their memory has been polluted by experiences they have gone through later. The same moment filtered through different emotions can also change the so-called objective record. Vince said that every time the Cold Case Team recorded a scenario, they had to take that fact into account. One of the most compelling cases was that of Victor Kugler.
In one of his accounts of the raid, Kugler recalled that as he was working in the office that morning, he suddenly heard footsteps and saw shadows running past the window in his office door. He opened the door and saw a Gestapo officer climbing the stairs with gun drawn, followed by others.1 The raid team spread to the office, where Kleiman, Bep, and Miep were working. Leaving behind one policeman to guard the helpers, Silberbauer ordered Kugler to precede him up the stairs to the next level of the building. Kugler was alone with the Nazi. As he climbed the stairs, Silberbauer shouted, “Where are the Jews?”2 Kugler led him to the bookcase.
In an article in Life magazine in 1958, Kugler’s version of events was somewhat different. He described the raid team taking him to the front storeroom and looking around until eventually they pulled their guns and led him to the bookcase.3 His account in Ernst Schnabel’s 1958 book The Footsteps of Anne Frank repeated that version. During the 1963–64 investigation, he explained to Detective Arend Jacobus van Helden that, hoping the Nazis were just looking for weapons or illegal IDs, he first showed Silberbauer his office, opening the cabinets and bookcases. He then led him to the back of the building and showed him Kleiman’s office, the washroom, and the little kitchen. Silberbauer had then ordered him up to the next floor. They went first to the stockroom in the front part of the building and then to the Annex corridor in the back. As they came to the bookcase, Kugler noticed that another nearby bookcase and boxes had already been searched, presumably by the Dutch policemen. He saw them trying to move the swinging bookcase. At first, they could not budge it, but then they figured out that the hook had to be unfastened and swung it open.4
Who would expect Kugler’s account nineteen years after the raid to be the same? But it seems that a kind of emotional revisionism was at work.
In the first version, Kugler revealed the location of the secret bookcase almost immediately under mortal threat from Silberbauer, who demanded, “Where are the Jews?”
In later versions, the raid team searched the building; they determined that the bookcase concealed something, confirmed by the marks of the moving wheels on the wooden floor beneath it. The bookcase yielded, and the secret door was exposed. Kugler added that he then understood that the Green Policeman “knew everything.”5