Two nights later, Wiesenthal was having coffee with a friend in a Linz coffeehouse. Everyone was talking about the demonstration. His friend called over a young man he knew and asked him what he thought about it all. The young man said it was exciting: “The diary may be a clever forgery. Certainly, it doesn’t prove that Anne Frank existed.” “She’s buried in a mass grave in Bergen-Belsen,” Wiesenthal replied. The boy gave a shrug. “There’s no proof,” he said. If he could prove that Anne Frank existed, if he could come up with the Gestapo officer who arrested her, would that be proof? Wiesenthal asked. “Yes,” the young man said. “If the man admitted it himself.”2
That exchange was the impetus for Wiesenthal’s quest to track down the SD man who led the Annex raid. The main clue that Wiesenthal had to go on was the last name of the SD officer, which he thought was Silbernagel. He also remembered that Miep said she’d recognized the SD officer’s Viennese accent, but that really wasn’t very helpful since more than 950,000 Austrians had fought on the German side in World War II. Through various sources, Wiesenthal was able to locate eight men with the name Silbernagel who’d been Nazi Party members. However, none of them had been stationed in Amsterdam in the service of the SD. Surely something was off.
In his memoir, Wiesenthal admitted to not having contacted Otto Frank to confirm the name of the SD man. A Holocaust survivor himself, Wiesenthal said he had not wished to upset Otto by forcing him to search his memory of that fateful day. He also worried that, like many other survivors he’d approached, Otto might not wish the SD man to be found. Wiesenthal had come across others who’d asked, “What’s the use? You cannot bring back the dead. You can only make the survivors suffer.”3 But Wiesenthal felt he was looking at the bigger picture: if he could locate the SD man and get him to admit to the arrest, he would have proven that Anne Frank did exist and her diary was real. More important, in the late 1950s, when Germans and Austrians were once again talking nostalgically about the “great past,” they would be confronted with proof of the Holocaust.
What appeared to the Cold Case Team to be crucial was that although Otto learned of Wiesenthal’s mission to identify and locate the SD man, he did not offer his help despite knowing Silberbauer’s real name. In a 1985 interview, Miep explained that Otto had asked her to change the name because he did not want the man’s family harassed and she’d come up with Silberthaler.4 According to Wiesenthal, Victor Kugler was the source of the name Silvernagl.5 Prior to Ernst Schnabel’s book The Footsteps of Anne Frank, there had been no public mention of the SD man who led the raid on the Annex. The ruse of using a false name for Silberbauer must have begun with the interviews Schnabel conducted with Miep, Otto, and the other helpers in 1957. Vince suddenly remembered how during his visit with Pieter and Thijs to the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, the president, John Goldsmith, had taken him aside and said, “You know that Otto lied to Wiesenthal about knowing the identity of Silberbauer. Why do you think he did this?” Vince now believed that answering Goldsmith’s question would be key to the investigation.
During a trip to Amsterdam in the spring of 1963, Dutch friends told Wiesenthal that he should not be searching for Silbernagel but rather for Silberthaler, the name Miep had invented. Then he had a fortuitous meeting with Ynze Taconis, the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department (Rijksrecherche) regarding his investigation. As Wiesenthal was about to leave, Taconis handed him what he called a little “travel literature.” It was a photostat copy of a 1943 directory of the SD in the Netherlands with about three hundred names in it. On the plane back to Vienna, Wiesenthal started flipping through the directory, looking for Silberthaler. He never found it, but running his finger down the list of forty or so IV B4 members’ names, he came to the common Austrian name “Silberbauer.” Elated, Wiesenthal finally had his man—or at least his last name, since the roster did not contain first names.6
It was now an astonishing six years since he had come up with the idea of tracking down the SD man. Known for his searches for Josef Mengele and his tracking down of Adolf Eichmann, he would have been the first to admit that Silberbauer was not a high-ranking Nazi. His goal was not so much to punish him as to get him to admit to the arrest of Anne Frank and her family. In early June 1963, he provided the information he’d gathered on Silberbauer to Dr. Josef Wiesinger, his contact at the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior responsible for war crimes investigations.
At that point it was not clear if Silberbauer had even survived the war. For the next five months, Wiesenthal regularly contacted Wiesinger to learn if there was any progress in identifying and locating the Silberbauer on the list. He was always met with the same response: “We are working on it.” The last such comment was in October 1963. What Wiesenthal didn’t know, and the Cold Case Team discovered in an Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior report dated August 21, 1963, was that the Austrian authorities had already identified, located, and interviewed Silberbauer. They just weren’t telling Wiesenthal.
The team learned from the report that Inspector Karl Josef Silberbauer, an employee of the Vienna police, was quietly summoned before a Ministry of the Interior inquiry panel. During the interview he admitted to having been assigned to the Amsterdam SD, stationed there from November 1943 until October 1944, when he was injured in a motorcycle accident. He confirmed having worked under Willy Lages and Julius Dettmann as well as receiving reward payments for the capture of Jews in hiding. He also admitted to never having mastered the Dutch language and needing a translator to conduct interviews. Most important, he confessed to having been present at the arrest of Anne Frank and her family.
In doing a background investigation on Silberbauer, the team learned that after the war, in April 1945, he returned to his native Austria, where he ended up serving a fourteen-month jail sentence for using excessive force against Communist prisoners prior to his assignment in Amsterdam. After his release he was recruited by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (the Bundesnachrichtendienst; BND) and, according to a Der Spiegel report, worked as an undercover operative. His past membership in the SS served to blind targeted neo-Nazis to his changed loyalties.7 After his time with the BND he was hired by the Vienna police, where he rose to the rank of inspector.
On November 11, 1963, nearly three months after Silberbauer provided his initial statement, Wiesenthal read the news in a headline of the Austrian newspaper Volksstimme: “The Man Who Betrayed Anne Frank.”8 It seemed that someone within the Vienna police department had leaked the story to the local newspaper. The world press descended on Vienna. They also immediately requested comments from Otto, Miep, Bep, Kugler, and even the formerly accused, Willem van Maaren. Many followers of Anne’s story and even its participants thought that finally, now that the SD man who led the Annex raid was located, he would reveal the name of the betrayer.
Probably feeling both outraged and hurt, Wiesenthal immediately penned a letter to Dr. Wiesinger, reminding him that he was the one who had provided the name “Silberbauer” and requested a photo that he could send to Otto Frank for identification purposes.9 To preserve their relationship, Wiesinger eventually told Wiesenthal that he’d been ordered by his superiors not to inform him that they’d found and interrogated Silberbauer.
Based on the text of his letter, Wiesenthal still had no idea that Otto and the other witnesses had known Silberbauer’s name all along. But one week after he sent the letter, he likely learned the truth. In one of his interviews after the news broke, Otto admitted to the Amsterdam newspaper Het Vrije Volk that he had known all along that Silberbauer was the man who led the raid. He further commented, “I have never had contact with Mr. Wiesenthal in Vienna. The reason why he wanted to have Silberbauer in particular is, therefore, a riddle to me.”10 In one of her interviews, Miep also confirmed that she had known Silberbauer’s name but had not revealed it because Otto had asked her to use a fake name.11