The betrayal of Anne Frank
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The betrayal of Anne Frank to the occupying Nazi forces by an informant in August 1944 resulted in her imprisonment, deportation, and her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. In spite of repeated investigations the identity of her betrayer has never been established and remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Second World War.
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[edit] Background
As a Jewish asylum seeker, Anne Frank fled to Amsterdam from the state-sponsored Anti-Semitism of Germany in February 1934 after the succession of Adolf Hitler to Chancellor. Although anti-Jewish decrees followed the Nazi invasion of The Netherlands in 1940 she and her family remained relatively safe until her sister, Margot received a deportation order in July 1942. Their father, Otto Frank immediately took his family into the hiding place he had already prepared in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annexe of his office building in the city centre. He and his wife Edith, with Margot and Anne, were joined within the month by Otto Frank's colleague Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste and their son Peter and then four months later by another German Jewish refugee, Fritz Pfeffer. The eight fugitives were successfully hidden for just over two years by their small group of friends who worked in the building, who concealed the hiding place and provided its occupants with black-market food and clothes. Although the threat of discovery was ever-present, the sudden arrival of the Gestapo and Dutch policemen on August 4, 1944 took everyone involved by surprise.
[edit] The arrest
At around ten o'clock on the morning of Friday August 4, the warehouseman of Prinsengracht 263, Willem van Maaren was met by a uniformed German officer, Karl Silberbauer, and several plain-clothed Dutch policemen. While one of the policemen stayed with van Maaren in the warehouse the others made their way to the first floor above where they found Victor Kugler in his office at the rear of the building, and Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, and Johannes Kleiman in theirs at the front. They were instructed to stay in the room but in the confusion that followed Bep Voskuijl managed to escape with a few documents which would have incriminated their black-market contacts. Kugler was instructed by Silberbauer to accompany him and the policemen on a search of the building and after investigating the store rooms on the second floor of the front building, the officers took him to the first floor of the rear building, to the corridor in front of the hiding place. They pulled aside the bookcase which concealed the door and Kugler was forced to walk in ahead of them at gunpoint, where he found Edith Frank in the room she shared with her husband and daughter Margot. He told her the Gestapo had come and the police officers ran through the rooms with their guns drawn. Once the eight fugitives, including Anne Frank, were gathered at gun-point in one room their valuables were confiscated by Silberbauer. He demanded their money and jewelry and requiring a bag to carry them in, emptied a briefcase of papers onto the floor. Thus, the diaries and papers of Anne Frank were found by Miep and Bep after the eight prisoners together with Kugler and Kleiman had been arrested and removed from the building. It became apparent to Bep, Miep and her husband Jan, (who knew about and assisted the people in hiding), that the specific nature of the arrest indicated they had been betrayed rather than discovered by chance by the Gestapo.
[edit] Suspects
Warehouseman Willem van Maaren (1895 - 1971) had replaced Bep Voskuijl's father when he retired through ill-health in 1943. His inquisitiveness about the sealed-off rooms which formed the hiding place and the discovery that he had been making petty thefts of office supplies made his colleagues wary of him, but it was only when they discovered he had set small traps in the store rooms to reveal movement within the building at night that suspicion was raised that he may have been trying to expose them. His apparently untrustworthy character, his seeming determination to uncover what his colleagues were hiding, a boast he made to Miep Gies about having Gestapo connections and the fact that the building's keys were given to him by the arresting officer contributed to their suspicion that he had correctly deduced people were being hidden in the building but hardly indicated that he had informed the Gestapo about them. The protectors were divided. Kugler, Bep and Kleiman suspected him guilty, while Miep, Jan, and Otto Frank remained unconvinced. During a 1948 investigation into the betrayal van Maaren denied being the informant but confirmed he had suspected 'something peculiar' taking place in the building. He was cleared by the investigating body, the PRA (Politieke Recherche Afdeling, the Political Investigation Branch), of betrayal because of a lack of evidence and placed on probation. He appealed and the case was heard by a district court in 1949. He was unconditionally cleared. However he was called back as a suspect when another investigation into the betrayal took place between November 1963 and November 1964. The Criminal Investigation Department re-opened the case after Karl Silberbauer was traced. Silberbauer could neither identify Van Maaren (or Miep Gies for that matter) or provide any new information which could lead to a suspect as his superior (who had committed suicide after the German defeat) had not divulged the informant's name when he was sent to Prinsengracht 263. Van Maaren was investigated more than any other suspect in the case and continued to assert his innocence until his death in 1971.
Lena van Bladeren-Hartog (died 1963) was the wife of van Maaren's assistant, Lammert Hartog, and was employed in the Opekta offices as a cleaner in 1944. Kleiman reported in an official investigation that in June 1944 he was told by a friend, Anna Genot, that Lena told her she knew that people were being hidden at 263 Prinsengracht. When questioned later Anna and her husband Petrus claimed they'd also known about the hiding place since 1942, when they were cleaners in the building and noticed the large quantities of milk and bread being delivered. Lammert stated in an investigation that van Maaren had told him that Jews were being hidden in the building and it is possible that he told his wife, who passed it to the Genots. In her 1998 biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Muller went as far as to name Lena van Bladeren-Hartog as the informant, and this subsequently represented in the televised mini-series based on the book. The claim was dismissed in 2003 after an investigation by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation after Carol Ann Lee contradicted the assertion in her biography of Otto Frank. Lee quotes a 2000 interview with Miep Gies, who also dismissed the claim.
Tonny Ahlers (1917 - 2000) was a Dutch Nazi, petty criminal, and informant to Kurt Döring at the Amsterdam Gestapo headquarters. According to Carol Ann Lee's investigations he met Otto Frank in 1941 and attempted to blackmail him after the war. In 2002 she named him as the betrayer of Anne Frank, which prompted the first investigation into the case since 1964. Lee's claim was refuted by Ahlers's wife Martha but corroborated by his brother Cas Ahlers, and Tonny's son, Anton, who claimed to have heard confessions from Ahlers himself that he had betrayed the inhabitants of the Secret Annexe. As no hard evidence could be produced, and Tonny Ahlers's claims to his family could not be verified, he along with Willem van Maaren and Lena van Bladeren-Hartog were cleared by The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in their 2003 summary of their investigation.
[edit] Conclusions in the 2003 investigation
The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) reopened their archives in light of two new theories about the betrayal of Anne Frank. The first, in Melissa Muller's Anne Frank: the Biography asserted a claim against Lena van Hartog. The second in Carol Ann Lee's The Hidden Life of Otto Frank concluded that Tonny Ahlers was indeed guilty. As both were supported by circumstantial evidence neither could be substantiated. NIOD concluded that the identity of the betrayer is still unknown and will remain so until further evidence presents itself.
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources and recommended reading
- The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank
- The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom
- Anne Frank Remembered Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold
- The Hidden Life of Otto Frank Carol Ann Lee
- Roses from the Earth Carol Ann Lee
