If the Van den Berghs were at the castle, sharing space with German fugitives could hardly have felt safe. With Miedl now in Spain and unable to protect him, Van den Bergh might have needed to find some additional insurance—something the SD would value enough that it would provide protection for himself and his family. When IV B4 men made arrests, it was standard MO for them to pressure the arrestees for the addresses of other Jews in hiding. For Van den Bergh, addresses where Jews were purportedly being hidden would have been a valuable commodity.
42
A Bombshell
The Cold Case Team began their search for possible sources of address lists by looking into the workings of the Contact Committee (Contact Commissie) at Camp Westerbork. When prisoners needed specific papers to prove they were eligible for a Sperre, they had to go to the Contact Committee. The office was run by two men appointed by the Jewish Council who traveled regularly between Westerbork and Amsterdam to secure necessary documents and intervene on behalf of prisoners. One of the men was Eduard Spier, Van den Bergh’s close colleague and friend. Before the war, they shared an office at Westeinde 24. Spier, Van den Bergh, and van Hasselt often did business together; the team found numerous business ads featuring their names in prewar newspapers.1
Eduard Spier was also in charge of the Jewish Council’s Central Information Office, which worked closely with the Expositur, the liaison office between the Jewish Council and the Zentralstelle, run by Ferdinand aus der Fünten. In other words, Spier had the ear of one of the highest-ranking Nazis in Amsterdam and was in a position to receive information and offer favors. Did he try to help his friend Arnold van den Bergh by providing him with lists of hiders as a bargaining tool to purchase his freedom if he were confronted with arrest?
But the Cold Case Team discovered that in April 1943, the Westerbork camp commander, Albert Konrad Gemmeker, decided that he wanted his own men running the Contact Committee.* He sent Spier to join the Barneveld group in its castle outside the Dutch town of that name. Spier managed only a few months there before the entire Barneveld group was relocated to Camp Westerbork. He was assigned to Barrack 85, where he could well have met Leopold de Jong. But he no longer had the access he once had to the Jewish Council, which had been disbanded, and it seems likely that he was too preoccupied with his own survival to help Van den Bergh.
The corruption at Westerbork was extensive. In a notarized deposition, the four prisoners assigned by Gemmeker to take over the Contact Committee from Spier described how, in May 1944, they were called into Gemmeker’s office and told to offer prisoners the possibility of buying off their “penal” status with diamonds.2 In a postwar criminal investigation of the Contact Committee, it was also reported that Gemmeker ordered Contact Committee members to contact Jews in hiding in Amsterdam and elsewhere to offer them the possibility of buying their freedom with money and valuable jewels.3 The task of the Cold Case Team was to determine how the Contact Committee went about finding the addresses of Jews in hiding in order to offer them Gemmeker’s bargain.
Pieter decided to review the CABR files of the cochairs of the Jewish Council, David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, at the National Archives. The two men were arrested on November 6, 1947, on orders of the Special Justice Court in Amsterdam, accused of collaboration with the Germans. They were imprisoned for a month and then released, pending trial.* There were many witness testimonies as to how the men had curried favor with high-ranking Nazi officials. Asscher was the owner of the Asscher Diamond Company. Hermann G?ring’s proxy A. J. Herzberg visited the factory numerous times, as did G?ring himself at least once. G?ring wanted to buy 1 million Reichsmarks’ worth of diamonds, likely for his personal use and not for the good of the German nation. It was made clear to Asscher in veiled terms that if he refused to sell, there were other ways to obtain his cooperation.4
Witnesses reported that Cohen, and particularly Asscher, visited Willy Lages regularly. Asscher often brought diamond rings and jewelry for Lages and his secretary. According to Lages, who was interrogated in prison, Asscher told him that his first priority was the safety of his family and he needed assurances that if he cooperated, they would be safe. Lages said he replied that they would be permitted to emigrate to another country. That never happened, of course, but Asscher believed him. The Camp Westerbork commander, Gemmeker, who also gave testimony, claimed that Asscher requested that the fiancée of one of his sons, a young woman named Weinrother, be deported to Auschwitz. He didn’t want her as a daughter-in-law. Gemmeker said he refused, but other witnesses reported that she was, in fact, deported. The young woman survived the war, and after she returned home the whole story came out.5
It was in those files that Pieter uncovered a bombshell in the testimony of Ernst Philip Henn, age thirty-seven, a German who from September 1942 to July 1943 was a translator for Air Force Command Holland (Luftgau-Kommando Holland) in Amsterdam. While he was working at Civilian Affairs, Henn claimed to have overheard a sergeant in the Feldgendarmerie (military police) talking to a court assessor by the name of Willy Stark. The sergeant mentioned that the Jewish Council had a list of more than five hundred addresses of Jews in hiding. His department had requested a list, and the Jewish Council had sent between five hundred and a thousand addresses. He added the nasty comment that the Jewish Council members had probably thought that the more addresses they “betrayed,” the more leniently they themselves might be treated.6
Henn said that he’d asked a Jewish woman how the Jewish Council was able to get hold of the addresses of hiders. She said that one way was through the mail. All mail from Camp Westerbork and the occasional mail from camps in the east went through the Jewish Council. Trusting the Jewish Council, people wrote to family and friends in hiding, using their hiding addresses.
Henn did stand trial after the war, since he’d worked as an interpreter for the German occupiers, but it’s hard to see how that particular statement could have helped him. What is interesting in his testimony is that he mentioned addresses and not names. He must have overheard the conversation before July 1943, when he moved on to another position. So the Cold Case Team had to ask if the information was at all relevant to Arnold Van den Bergh and the possibility of his giving lists of addresses to the SD.