Jew
? Jewish
Belongs to the Jewish race and community; not approved to have Reich citizenship
Jude
Jew
Jewish
Belongs to the Jewish race and community; not approved to have Reich citizenship
Van den Bergh’s receiving Calmeyer status was quite unbelievable, considering that it took place in the middle of a war. The process took almost eighteen months, although while his application was being considered, he was exempt from deportation. First, a letter was sent to the offices of Drs. J. & E. Henggeler, Zurich, Switzerland, who forwarded a search request to a society of genealogists in London on March 7, 1942.8 The society was required to locate church records in an effort to prove that one or more of Van den Bergh’s parents or grandparents were not Jewish. The agency received the request on August 6, 1942, but did not reply until January 12, 1943. It apologized for the delay, explaining that the records that needed to be located were stored in bomb shelters.9 It is uncertain if any of the searches and results were authentic or all were clever forgeries.
When Schepers discovered that Van den Bergh had secured Calmeyer status, he was apoplectic. Insisting that Van den Bergh had always ostentatiously advertised himself as a Jewish notary before the war, he took his complaint directly to the SS and to the Calmeyer office in The Hague, demanding that they conduct an investigation.10 Unfortunately for Van den Bergh, Schepers was successful. The Cold Case Team concluded from Schepers’s CABR file that he could leverage more pressure with high-ranking Nazi factions in The Hague than Van den Bergh could.
The Cold Case Team located a letter, dated January 4, 1944, addressed to Van den Bergh in which two attorneys who worked in the Calmeyer office warned him that he was at risk of being arrested.11 Van den Bergh immediately vacated his villa and formally registered at a small house at Nieuwendammerdijk 61 in Amsterdam-Noord owned by Albertus Salle, who had been a clerk in his old notary office.12 Pieter was able to locate and interview Salle’s daughter, Regina Salle, who had no memory of people other than her family having lived in the house during that time period, indicating that the address was probably a cover.13
Pieter spent some time at the Amsterdam City Archives and learned from archivist Peter Kroesen that Van den Bergh would have had to physically present himself at the Amsterdam city registry in order to change his address. Evidently, he was not yet afraid to be seen walking about on city streets.14 But he understood that Schepers’s constant harassment of the authorities regarding his “non-Jewish” status was becoming increasingly dangerous for him and his family.
Forced to take notice of Schepers’s complaints, on January 22, 1944, the Calmeyer office issued a formal decision that Van den Bergh had possibly used false evidence to claim his “Aryan” status and that his bank accounts should be blocked.15 The surreal absurdity of those bureaucratic musical chairs, when a man’s life and the lives of his family were at stake, is a brutal example of the Nazi method of murder by small bureaucratic cuts.
Curiously, the Cold Case Team found Van den Bergh’s name referred to in the collaboration file of the notorious Jew hunter and IV B4 squad member Eduard Moesbergen,16 who was with the Henneicke Column until it was dissolved. (He then worked for Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs. Kaper described Moesbergen as one of his most prolific Jew hunters.) Moesbergen’s CABR file contained two witness statements, from a V-Man and a V-Woman working for him, who claimed that Moesbergen would often carry lists of addresses where Jews were thought to be hiding. In the summer of 1944, he was apparently methodically raiding the addresses on the list one after the other.17
In his postwar interrogation, Moesbergen claimed to have learned that Arnold van den Bergh had lost his Calmeyer status, and had gone to his residence at Oranje Nassaulaan 60 shortly afterward only to discover that he was no longer there. When Moesbergen returned a few days later, it was clear that Van den Bergh had fled. Looking to lessen his sentence for his own recent collaboration conviction, Moesbergen claimed that he had wanted to warn Van den Bergh to go into hiding, something that the CABR file reports did not suggest.18
The Cold Case Team wondered whether Moesbergen actually intended to warn Van den Bergh or meant to arrest him for the Kopgeld bounty. After the war, Moesbergen would not have admitted that his purpose in going to Van den Bergh’s residence was to arrest him. There is no record of Van den Bergh’s ever having been consulted about the truth of Moesbergen’s testimony.
But then the unexpected happened. By serendipity, Thijs came across a man who insisted, with convincing documentation, that his grandparents successfully hid Van den Bergh’s daughter Anne-Marie during the war. According to that man’s grandparents, Arnold van den Bergh placed his daughter in hiding with the help of the resistance. One way or another, it seems, either through his relationship with powerful Nazis, who helped him get Calmeyer status, or through the resistance, which helped hide his children, Van den Bergh endeavored to save his family’s lives.
Van den Bergh’s case was exceptional. On the one hand, he was able to ask the resistance to hide his children; on the other, he had enough powerful contacts in the Nazi hierarchy to secure Calmeyer status and then to be warned in time when that status was withdrawn. This, to the team, was suspicious.
37
Experts at Work
Vince clearly remembers the moment that shifted everything in the ongoing cold case investigation. He was rereading the anonymous note for the hundredth time. It said, “Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported at the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat, by A. van den Bergh.”
He suddenly realized that it didn’t say that Otto Frank’s name was passed on; it mentioned only the address. Whoever wrote the note might not even have known who was hiding at Prinsengracht 263. Furthermore, the note said, “At J.A. was a whole list of addresses he submitted.”
Suddenly Vince began to see things differently. If A. van den Bergh indeed passed on a list of addresses, not names, somehow it made the crime of betrayal, if it was betrayal, seem less personal. At the very least, he did not have to feel he was betraying someone he might have known.
In the forty-page report of his investigation, Detective Van Helden had transcribed the anonymous note, but Vince wanted to know if it was the exact wording or a summary. Was there more to the note? Who was the board member of the Anne Frank House to whom Otto said he’d given the original note? Where was the copy he’d made? Just as Abraham Kaper had kept important files at home, Vince was now betting that Van Helden would have done the same. The Cold Case Team set out to locate Van Helden’s relatives and, with a bit of searching, was able to find his son, Maarten.
When Vince first emailed him, Maarten van Helden did not seem much interested in talking about his father. He claimed that he did not know very much about his work and would be of little help in the investigation. But when Vince asked him if he happened to have any papers that his father had left behind, Maarten said he did. About eight years after his father’s death, he said, he’d come across a number of files relating to the 1963–64 investigation.