Van Helden also interviewed another of Van Maaren’s coworkers, Johannes de Kok, who was a warehouse assistant for a few months during the second half of 1943. De Kok admitted to having helped Van Maaren sell the goods he stole from Opekta/Gies & Co. on the black market, but he added that Van Maaren never exhibited any sympathies toward the Nazis.
As Van Helden probed Van Maaren’s past, he uncovered a checkered career of failed businesses, bankruptcies, years of unemployment, and charges of petty theft. But throughout it all, Van Maaren seemed anti-Nazi. Shortly before the war, he’d been supported by a Dutch charity. After the Nazis closed down all private charities and replaced them with Winterhulp Nederland (Winter Aid Netherlands), according to a former charity committee member, Van Maaren refused on principle to accept aid from the fascists. The detective made inquiries among Van Maaren’s former neighbors, and although people reported that he was “financially untrustworthy,” no one suspected him of having had contacts with “people who had served the enemy or the enemy’s henchmen.” He was known to often visit a neighbor in the resistance, and “there had never been any hint of treachery.”2
When Van Maaren himself was questioned, he refuted Silberbauer’s version of events. He said that Silberbauer did not speak Dutch and misunderstood the exchange. When the raid team arrived and the Dutch policeman approached him, the man simply asked, “Where is the office?” and Van Maaren pointed upward.3
Van Maaren was also accused of having spoken to employees from the neighboring businesses about the Jews in the Annex. He clarified that, saying that only after the arrest did he speak with them. He pointed out that people in the adjacent businesses already knew that something strange was going on within the Opekta/Gies & Co. building. Jacobus Mater, who ran an herb business at Prinsengracht 269 and was a member of the NSB, had once asked Van Maaren, “What have you got hidden there?”
The Van Maaren file was closed on November 6, 1964. The final report to the prosecutor stated that “the inquiry did not lead to any concrete results.”4
The Cold Case Team decided to dissect Van Maaren’s interviews from both the 1947–48 and the 1963–64 investigations for any false statements or inconsistencies. Van Maaren claimed that he would not have called attention to himself by telling the Nazis about the Annex because his oldest son, Martinus, was avoiding work duty, a fact the SD would have easily discovered. However, the team found no record of Martinus van Maaren’s being wanted for failing to report for Arbeitseinsatz. Unfortunately, this is not a definitive statement on his status since he might have been placed on one of the SD’s wanted lists after March 1944, by which time the lists were notoriously incomplete.
Several people who were interviewed commented that Van Maaren did not seem pro-Nazi, thus eliminating ideology as a motive. However, a person would not necessarily need to be pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic to provide information on Jews in hiding in order to save a son from arrest. If, for example, Martinus van Maaren had been found to be disobeying the law, to keep his son safe, the father could have been coerced into revealing that there were people in the Annex.
But at that stage the Cold Case Team remained unconvinced of Van Maaren’s guilt. It seemed more likely that he was happy with the status quo. He could steal money from lost wallets or desk drawers without being questioned. He could take produce from the warehouse and sell it with impunity on the black market. The staff might have had their suspicions about his questionable actions, but they would never have risked confronting or firing him for fear that he would retaliate by betraying them.
With Van Maaren looking less likely to be the betrayer, other suspects were also considered. The first was Lammert Hartog, who had only recently joined Opekta and was working illegally, since he’d ignored his call-up to do forced labor in Germany. And then there was his wife, Lena, who was employed intermittently as a cleaning lady at Opekta/Gies & Co.
In her biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Müller pursued the theory, already mentioned earlier, that Lena Hartog gossiped about Jews hiding in the Annex not only to one of the clients she cleaned for but also to Bep Voskuijl, who immediately reported it to the other helpers. She and the others in the warehouse discussed the impossibility of relocating the eight people in the Annex and so didn’t tell Otto. That was only about five weeks before the raid. But logic suggests that it would not have been in Lena’s best interests to call in such information. Her husband was working illegally at Opekta/Gies & Co., after all, and such a call could well have cost him his job, his income, and his freedom. The Nazis did not take evasion of work duty lightly.
Father John Neiman, a close friend and confidant of Otto, was staying with Miep at her home in Amsterdam in November 2000. He recounted telling Miep that he’d read Melissa Müller’s Anne Frank: The Biography, in which she suggested that Lena Hartog was possibly the betrayer. He asked, “Miep, was it Lena? Did she betray them?” Miep looked straight at him and said, “No. She did not.”5
One reason Müller thought Lena might have been the culprit was the theory that the person who placed the anonymous phone call to SD headquarters was female. That idea was perpetuated by the ABC miniseries Anne Frank: The Whole Story, based on Müller’s biography. But the contention that the caller was female has never been substantiated. The source of the rumor was supposedly Cor Suijk, a former director of the Anne Frank House, who claimed he had learned that through a conversation he’d had with Silberbauer. However, there is no evidence of his ever having interviewed Silberbauer.6
Suijk died in 2014, but the Cold Case Team interviewed a close contact and fellow Anne Frank House employee, Jan Erik Dubbelman. Dubbelman claimed that Suijk told him that when Silberbauer was first identified, Otto Frank asked Suijk to go to Vienna and speak with Silberbauer. At the time (1963–1964), Suijk was not employed by the Anne Frank House but claimed to be good friends with Otto. It seems improbable that Otto would make such a request, since he’d sworn he wanted nothing further to do with Silberbauer.7 Furthermore, after his 1963 interview with the Dutch journalist Jules Huf, Silberbauer refused to grant any further interviews, likely on orders from the Austrian authorities. It seemed that Suijk was known to exaggerate. His daughter told Dubbelman that you couldn’t believe a word her father said.
As for Lena’s husband, Lammert Hartog, being the betrayer, the team was doubtful. Yes, he’d made it clear in his 1948 statement that he’d learned from Van Maaren, approximately fourteen days before the raid, that Jews were hidden in the building.8 According to Johannes Kleiman, as soon as Silberbauer and his team arrived, Hartog “immediately took off and we never saw him again.”9 But it is hardly incriminating that someone working illegally would run at the sight of a German SD officer.