As the team discovered, although the council was dissolved, some of its members were still at large—and many likely still had access to addresses. Rudolf Pollak, for example, was a member of the Jewish Council, and part of his role was to distribute food coupons to prisoners in Westerbork and the Dutch Theater (Hollandsche Schouwburg). He also kept a card catalog with addresses of Jewish hiding places.7 In March 1944, the SD arrested him, and under pressure, he immediately buckled. He gave up his card catalog and became a V-Man for the SD; he was eventually targeted and killed by the Dutch resistance in November or December 1944.
The team thought it highly probable that Van den Bergh had had a list of addresses for quite some time and kept it as insurance until he needed to use it. Until the summer of 1944, he had secured safety for his family by sending his children into hiding and also by applying for various exemptions. After his Calmeyer status was revoked he turned to his friend Alois Miedl and probably hid on Miedl’s property. But after Miedl fled to Spain, Van den Bergh might have figured he needed a different kind of protection. Whatever he did, it worked, since he and his immediate family survived the war. It is always possible that he and his wife went into hiding with the help of the resistance, as did his daughters in 1943, but the Cold Case Team never found a record of his either speaking of going into hiding or specifying a hiding place, though he had opportunities to do so during postwar interrogations of Jewish Council members. The team knew that he was also vague about his friendship with Miedl, a Nazi.8 Most people who survived in hiding celebrated the brave people who hid them. Even Van den Bergh’s granddaughter, when asked, said that her grandparents never spoke of hiding.9
After the war, the surviving Jewish community set up Jewish Honor Courts to call to account Jews who they believed had collaborated; the courts carried a moral rather than a legal authority. Having been board members of the Jewish Council, Van den Bergh and four other defendants were called to appear before the Honor Court in Amsterdam. All five chose not to participate.10 Trying the men in absentia, the court ruled in May 1948 that the five had assisted in a number of anti-Jewish measures, including distributing the Jewish star, unfairly determining the lists of exemptions, and participating in the selection of deportees.11 Any defense of Van den Bergh was mild—“No particularly ugly facts had arisen about him,” said one member—and when he refused to step down from the Jewish Coordination Committee (Joodse Co?rdinatie Commissie), which helped Jewish survivors returning from the camps, several members resigned. In the end, he lost his right to hold any Jewish office and access to honorary functions in the Jewish community for five years.12 But there was never any public accusation that he betrayed fellow Jews.
It was around that time that Otto told the Dutch journalist Friso Endt, who worked for Het Parool, “We were betrayed by Jews.”13 He used the plural, likely referring to Van den Bergh and the Jewish Council. Clearly the anonymous note identifying Van den Bergh as his betrayer must have been on Otto’s mind, but although he surely followed the proceedings, he never spoke up either for or against Van den Bergh, who, shortly after the verdict was handed down, was diagnosed with throat cancer.14 Van den Bergh traveled to London to seek treatment and died on October 28, 1950.15
Van den Bergh’s body was returned to the Netherlands for burial. Although his sentence of exclusion from Jewish society had not expired, it didn’t seem to matter; he was buried in a Jewish cemetery. The plane carrying his body was delayed by fog so that the funeral took place at an unusual hour, 7:00 p.m., in Muiderberg. A large procession of cars followed the hearse. Emergency lighting was installed at the grave site, and car headlights lit the path. Those who offered eulogies spoke of a good husband and father, a man who gave his time to the community, though one speaker offered apologies on behalf of his association with the deceased for having “come up short on respect and appreciation.” Van den Bergh’s friend the notary Eduard Spier, who was in the United States, sent word that those who penetrated his “outer closedness” recognized an exceptional colleague and friend.16
Perhaps Otto’s lack of interest in exposing his betrayer can be put down, in part, to Van den Bergh’s death. What would be the point in pursuing a dead man? Otto always said he didn’t want to harm the man’s children. He also may have concluded that Van den Bergh would become a convenient scapegoat for Jew haters. If it was a Jew and the Jewish Council who betrayed the Jews—not the Nazis and a passive German population; not the Dutch Nazis and an acquiescent Dutch population; not the Western governments, which turned their backs on Jewish refugees—wouldn’t he just be playing into the hands of the many anti-Semites who still roamed Europe?
43
A Secret Well Kept
According to Vince, by midsummer of 2019, the Cold Case Team had only four theories about the betrayal that still seemed viable. All others had been eliminated, either because the team found them improbable or, for a few, because there was not enough information to investigate further.
The case against Ans van Dijk was still particularly strong. She was a prolific V-Frau, having betrayed an estimated two hundred people, and was known to work in the Jordaan neighborhood close to where the Annex was located. Although the team had discounted Gerard Kremer’s theory that Van Dijk had heard about the Annex from the Wehrmacht secretaries at Westermarkt 2, she was still a viable suspect.
However, after searching Van Dijk’s extensive CABR file, the Cold Case Team discovered that she and her crew of V-people (Branca Simons; her husband, Wim Houthuijs; and Mies de Regt) were not in Amsterdam in August 1944; they had moved to the town of Zeist, near Utrecht, at the end of July to infiltrate a large resistance network there.1 (When “Zeist” was typed into the AI database in relation to Van Dijk and her whereabouts that August, there were 705 hits, including handwritten notes and even video files attesting to her presence in that city.) On August 18, Van Dijk and her cohorts in Zeist turned over to the SD five of the resistance members they’d been stalking and six Jews in hiding.
There is another consideration: the Cold Case Team knew that Otto went out of his way to protect the identity of the betrayer. It doesn’t make sense that he would do so for Van Dijk, who was not only widely despised after the war but had also been indirectly responsible for the capture of his second wife, Fritzi, and her entire family. Why would he hesitate to name her?
The scenario involving Bep’s sister Nelly also seemed initially possible. Nelly was a known Nazi sympathizer and had worked for a year on a German air base in France. Her father and sister were among the helpers to the Jews in hiding and privy to the secret of the Annex. The various theories—that she was the anonymous female caller; that she betrayed the people in the Annex out of anger at her father’s mistreatment—were only speculation. However, after Bep’s son Joop van Wijk and his coauthor, Jeroen de Bruyn, published Anne Frank: The Untold Story, in which they advanced the theory that Nelly was the betrayer, the Cold Case Team had reason to pause. Joop said that when he had asked Nelly about the war for the purposes of the book, she had fainted. Did she conveniently faint to evade addressing his questions?
At the end of the book, Joop said that “claiming Nelly was the betrayer is taking it too far. We have no smoking gun.” He wrote eloquently of his mother, Bep:
She often lived in the past after the war and mulled over the split she found herself in: the loss of her Jewish loved ones from the Annex on the one hand, and her loyalty to her sister who had proven her services to the occupier on the other hand. An occupier that had brutally deported and killed those same loved ones.2