Karl Silberbauer, Otto, the four helpers, and the two warehouse workers all provided slightly different accounts of the raid. Not surprisingly, the accounts changed over the years, which is to be expected. Memory is fluid and inevitably alters over time. Official statements about the Annex raid were gathered from four to nineteen years after the event.
As part of the Arrest Tracking Project, Vince and the Cold Case Team put together a precise timeline of the raid based on witness statements, police reports, press interviews, and private correspondence:
9:00 a.m.: The Opekta/Gies & Co. office staff （Miep, Bep, Kugler, and Kleiman） arrive and start their day.
9:10 a.m.: Miep goes to the Annex and obtains the daily shopping list.2
10:00 a.m.: A call comes in to the IV B4 “Jew-hunting unit” located at the SD office, Euterpestraat 99, Amsterdam. The report is that there are Jews hiding in the Annex of a building at Prinsengracht 263. SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann takes the call and then orders SD officer Karl Silberbauer to go to that address.
Silberbauer’s statements varied as to the number of Jews he was told would be found. In his initial statement3 to the Dutch authorities and to the Dutch journalist Jules Huf,4 he merely said, “Jews,” not citing a specific number. In his second statement, to Austrian authorities, he said, “six to eight Jews” and then, in his final interview, “eight Jews.”5
Dettmann contacts the desk officer, Sergeant Abraham Kaper, assigned to IV B4, to send Dutch detectives from the Amsterdam SD to the address.
10:30 a.m.: Otto is in Peter’s room, giving him English lessons.6
10:30–10:55 a.m.: The Dutch SD raid team pulls up in front of Prinsengracht 263 in a German Army car with Silberbauer. In another version Silberbauer arrives separately by bicycle. The warehouse doors are wide open, and the raid team enters. Willem van Maaren and Lammert Hartog, who are standing inside, see the car pull up. A Dutch plainclothes detective enters and speaks to Van Maaren.7 One Dutch SD man stays in the warehouse, while the remainder go up the steps to the office area.8
10:30–11:00 a.m.: Miep and Bep are at their desks in the office. Kugler is in his office, and Kleiman may not have been at his desk but is in the office area with Miep and Bep. According to Miep, she looks up and a fat man （probably one of the detectives） sticks his head around the door frame and in Dutch shouts at Kleiman, Bep, and her, “Quiet. Stay in your seats.”9 In a 1974 statement she says a tall, slender man also threatened them with a firearm.10 He then walks toward the back office, where Kugler is working.11 Kleiman says that the first thing he saw was the fat man’s head.12
Kugler hears footsteps and sees shadows pass behind the glass in his office door. He opens the door to see SD officer Karl Silberbauer.13 They go into Kugler’s office, where he is questioned. Kugler claims that there is one German SD （Silberbauer） and three plainclothes Dutch detectives in the raid team.14
Bep and Kleiman maintain that they heard the fat man and one other in Kugler’s office. The fat man asks him in German, “Where are the Jews?”15 The fat man then comes into their office and plants himself there. Bep will later confirm that there were （at a minimum） three Dutch detectives at the arrest.
11:15 a.m.: Bep, Miep, and Kleiman remain in their office. Silberbauer takes his pistol （a Browning） out of his jacket and orders Kugler up the stairs. Several Dutch detectives follow with their guns drawn.16
There are two options as to how they got to the upper floor:
Option one: They make an immediate right out of Kugler’s office and then up a semispiral staircase that leads to the room where the bookcase is located. （This is the most likely and logical avenue that Kugler and the raid team would have taken.）
Option two: They go back downstairs, out of the warehouse, and onto the street and reenter the building through one of the exterior doors, which reveals a two-story staircase leading up to the Annex level.*
What they did next is important. Did they go immediately to the bookcase because they had prior information, were they led to it by Kugler at gunpoint, or did they find it on their own after looking around? Which of the scenarios is true determines whether the betrayer was an insider who knew exactly where the bookcase was or simply someone who’d received the information of the presence of Jews secondhand.
Kugler describes the raid team tugging at the bookcase until it tears loose from its fastening.17 The heavy bookcase moves on a bottom support wheel. Over the two years since Bep’s father built it, this wheel would have left a curved mark in the floor, what law enforcement agencies call a “witness mark.” The Jew-hunting units were used to searching houses for ingenious hiding places. Rather than having foreknowledge of the hidden door behind the bookcase, they may simply have noted the marks indicating that the bookcase moved to conceal something.