Notwithstanding their dismissal of the Hartogs as suspects, the team was still intrigued by Melissa Müller’s research. On February 13, 2019, Vince and Brendan flew to Munich to interview her. She was open and generous in describing her research and still passionately attached to Anne Frank. It turned out that Müller was no longer all that convinced of Lena’s involvement and felt the case was still very much open. She told Vince she’d managed to interview Miep Gies, whom she described as a “tough interview. . . . It was hard to get information out of her.” She strongly suspected that both Miep and Otto knew much more about the circumstances of the raid but for some reason were unwilling to share that information.
Vince said that it was as if alarm bells went off. The question that had been dogging the team all along was: What had changed between the 1948 investigation and the one in 1963–1964? The answer was, not much—except for the way Otto Frank behaved. In 1948, he’d been intent on finding out who’d betrayed the Annex residents. By the second investigation, he was barely present. At most, he was watching quietly from the sidelines. He and the helpers no longer seemed convinced of Van Maaren’s guilt. In several interviews Miep Gies even said that she did not believe Van Maaren was the betrayer. A key puzzle now became: Why did Otto Frank change his mind? What does he know now that he didn’t know before?
Or, as Melissa Müller put it, something happened that made the identity of the betrayer “less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept.”10
33
The Greengrocer
Hendrik van Hoeve owned a greengrocer’s shop on Leliegracht, around the corner and not more than 100 yards from Prinsengracht 263. He supplied fresh vegetables and potatoes to the Annex, secretly delivering the food at midday when the warehouse employees were out for lunch. He worked with the resistance. During the war, he allegedly used a handcart with a hidden compartment to distribute illegal foodstuffs to a list of addresses that he picked up each morning. “He never saw any of the recipients. Either he placed the bags outside the door or someone appeared from inside the house to take them from him.”1 Sometimes he pasted posters on walls. He would always treasure a photo of a large poster bearing the word VICTORIA! with Hitler’s head trapped between the two arms of the V.2
In the winter of 1942, a Jewish resistance worker named Max Meiler contacted Van Hoeve and asked if he would be willing to hide a Jewish couple. When he agreed, Meiler arranged for a trusted carpenter to construct an ingenious hiding place in Van Hoeve’s attic. The Weiszes moved into an extra bedroom at the back of the house equipped with an alarm bell that could be rung in case of danger, at which point they would climb to the secret attic compartment.3 They stayed with the Van Hoeve family for at least seventeen months.
On May 25, 1944, an arrest team headed by Pieter Schaap, the handler of Ans van Dijk, raided the house and shop of Van Hoeve and discovered the Weiszes in hiding.4 The couple and Van Hoeve were arrested, although Van Hoeve’s wife was not. That was not unusual. When there were children involved, the arrest teams often let the wife stay behind.
Immediately the Cold Case Team wondered if the raid was one of the “daisy chain” arrests—Jews who had been arrested being forced to give up the addresses of other Jews in hiding. The obvious question was whether there was a connection between the arrests of Van Hoeve and the Weisz couple and the subsequent raid on Prinsengracht 263, since Van Hoeve’s house and shop were so close to Otto’s business. In that neighborhood news traveled fast. That same day, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that their vegetable man had been picked up by the police, along with two Jews he’d been hiding; they would now be entering the concentration camp universe. As for herself and her family, they would have to eat less. Maybe they’d be hungry, but at least they still had their freedom.5
After six weeks in prison in Amsterdam, Van Hoeve was sent to Camp Vught. Set up in 1942 in the south of the Netherlands by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Vught was the only concentration camp run directly by the SS in Western Europe outside Germany.6 It was a terrifying place. Surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, the camp had its own gallows, an execution grounds in the nearby woods, and a mobile crematory oven to dispose of the dead.
By that time in the Netherlands, it was generally understood that those who had the courage to save Jews, if discovered, usually ended up in such places.
During the war Amsterdam was a small world in which lives and fates crossed relentlessly. Nothing illustrated that more than the web of interrelationships among the people connected to the greengrocer and to the Annex. There were a number of potential suspects in Van Hoeve’s inner circle who might have passed along information about the hiders.
MAX MEILER
Max Meiler was the contact person who placed the Weiszes in hiding at the Van Hoeves’. He was deeply anti-Nazi and as early as Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, used his brother’s summerhouse close to Venlo, near the German border, to shelter Jewish refugees.7
From the beginning of the war, Meiler falsified identity cards (Persoonsbewijzen, or PBs) and ration cards and was soon helping Jewish people find hiding places. As of 1942, he regularly traveled to Venlo carrying the underground newspaper Vrij Nederland and photos of the royal family, which in itself was an act of resistance.8
On May 17, 1944, eight days before Van Hoeve’s home and shop were raided, Meiler was arrested on the train between Utrecht and Rotterdam. He was carrying false identity papers.
In his memoir about the war, now housed at the Anne Frank Stichting, Van Hoeve described how he had encountered Meiler in Camp Vught in mid-July. Meiler was shocked to run into Van Hoeve and pleaded with him not to call him by his real name.9 He was using an alias to hide his Jewish identity. They met again at the Heinkel factories near Berlin at the end of September or early October. Once a large, handsome man, Meiler now looked totally broken.10 All he told Van Hoeve was that the SS had found out that he was a Jew. He died in Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany on March 12, 1945.
Is it possible that Meiler broke under interrogation, perhaps at Camp Vught? It’s surely conceivable that Van Hoeve told him about Prinsengracht 263. They were both engaged in resistance work; Meiler may have seen Van Hoeve’s delivery lists or even been involved in determining the addresses. Could Meiler have revealed the Annex address to the SS? The team thought that was a working hypothesis until they discovered that the timing was off.
Van Hoeve was arrested on May 25 and sent to Amstelveenseweg prison for six weeks before being transferred to Camp Vught around mid-July. When he met Meiler in Camp Vught, Meiler was still passing as an Aryan and would have had no need to hand over names to the SS. But something must have happened to him on August 12, since there is a record of his admission to the camp hospital.11 Perhaps he was beaten by a kapo and that was when his Jewish identity was discovered. However, the raid on the Annex had occurred eight days before his hospitalization, meaning that it’s unlikely that he was beaten into revealing the Prinsengracht 263 address.
RICHARD AND RUTH WEISZ