So Otto had asked those who knew Silberbauer’s real name to call the man something else? Why would he do that?
Cor Suijk, a past director of the Anne Frank House and Otto’s friend, speculated years later that Otto felt somewhat sympathetic toward Silberbauer because he showed him respect as a fellow German officer when arresting him. He said that Otto wanted to protect the family of Silberbauer from undue attention, though in fact Silberbauer had no children.12
This seems a sentimental—and pat—explanation. Otto was not a sentimentalist. Silberbauer was the man whose actions led to the horrific deaths of his wife and children. At the time of the raid, the Nazi had yelled at Miep—she remembered him “almost bent over with rage”—berating her for helping “Jewish garbage.”13 During their interrogation at SD headquarters, he’d greeted Kugler and Kleiman: “Mitgefangen, mitgehangen” (Caught together, hanged together).14 Silberbauer didn’t deserve any empathy, especially from Otto. There must have been some other reason for his deliberate obfuscation.
Miep, too, had concealed Silberbauer’s identity, and the unexpected announcement about locating the SD officer in Vienna presented somewhat of a problem. Out of the blue five months earlier, on May 3, 1963, she’d been contacted by a detective from the National Criminal Investigation Department regarding her knowledge of the Annex raid. In that interview she’d claimed not to know the name of the man who had led the raid team, even though she’d previously supplied it during the 1947–48 PRA investigation.15 She’d also suggested that they speak with Otto Frank, a hint that he might know more.
Meanwhile, perhaps as a rebuke to the Austrian authorities for failing to tell him that they’d identified Silberbauer, Wiesenthal quietly provided Silberbauer’s home address to a Dutch student journalist, Jules Huf. On November 20, 1963, the ambitious Huf went to Silberbauer’s home without an appointment and knocked on his door, requesting an interview. At first Silberbauer’s wife dismissed the request, but from deep within the house Silberbauer shouted to let the reporter in. Huf spent several hours interviewing Silberbauer about his recollection of the Annex arrest. In a play for sympathy, Silberbauer complained that after he had recently been called in for questioning, he’d had to turn over his gun, badge, and tram pass. “I was suddenly forced to buy my own tram ticket. Imagine the way the conductor looked at me.” His wife occasionally chimed in, complaining that her husband’s overtime pay had been cut: “We had to buy our furniture on loans.” In the end, the bombshell headline that should have led every international newspaper was that Silberbauer claimed the raid was caused by a warehouse employee of Otto Frank making a call to the SD.16 But the heavily edited interview ran in the Austrian newspaper Kurier on November 22, and whether because of the paper’s limited circulation or the fact that the world was consumed by the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there was no marked public reaction.
However, the Austrian authorities clearly saw the story and were likely furious, since Silberbauer had been ordered to keep his mouth shut.17 Just three days after the Huf story broke, Silberbauer was summoned and reinterviewed. His new statement was quite different from the version in the Huf article:
I want to make clear that I was never made aware of whoever reported the family Frank. I was not made aware whether it had been a Dutch or German individual. So, I as the only German and the only police officer went together with the arrest team to the said house. In the storage area on the ground floor was a man standing around, but he did not seem to have been waiting for us. He was questioned by the Dutch arrest team, during which he pointed in an upstairs direction with his hand.18
The Cold Case Team could find no explanation for why Silberbauer changed the story he told Huf about the caller. What is consistent is that in the three official statements Silberbauer supplied to the Austrian authorities (in August 1963, November 1963, and March 1964), he never said that the call was placed by a warehouse employee. In fact, he asserted that he’d never been made aware of who had reported the Frank family, nor whether the caller had been Dutch or German, male or female. That stark contradiction of Huf’s article left the team in a bit of a quandary as to who was more believable, Huf or Silberbauer.
Could Huf’s version of what Silberbauer said be true? The authors Jeroen de Bruyn and Joop van Wijk made an excellent point: Silberbauer’s claim that the traitorous phone call occurred half an hour before the arrest eliminates the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren. The team’s analysis of all available data has the raid occurring at approximately 10:30 a.m. Van Maaren always arrived at work at 9:00 a.m. All public telephone kiosks in the streets had been eliminated on German orders years earlier. The only phone Van Maaren could have used was located in the front office, but Bep, Miep, and Kleiman had been there all morning.19 The only other possibility is that he used a phone in one of the neighboring businesses. The Cold Case Team were confident that if that had happened, given the notoriety of the case, someone from that business would have eventually come forward.
The complete Silberbauer interview did not become available to the public until twenty-three years later, when it ran in the Dutch weekly newspaper De Groene Amsterdammer in 1986.20 It was interesting, but it didn’t answer the most important questions: Had Silberbauer actually been told by his superior SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann who the caller was? Or had he just been grandstanding for the young reporter Huf in one last bid for notoriety?
31
What Miep Knew
Among the helpers, it is hard not to find Miep Gies the most compelling. She saved Anne’s diary, intending to give it back to her when she returned at the end of the war; Otto lived with her and her husband for seven years after his return from Auschwitz; she was the one who kept Otto’s secrets after the war. Following Otto’s death in 1980, she became the de facto spokesperson for the story of Anne Frank. The world press interviewed her on dozens of occasions, and she was invited to speak internationally.
Vince organized what he called the Statements Project: the Cold Case Team was to collect all statements made by the witnesses over the years in print, audio, or video with regard to the betrayal. They were placed on a timeline to identify contradictions or corroborations.
As part of the Statements Project, the Cold Case Team collected all available print, audio, and video material involving Miep.