In his remarkable book Hitler’s Bounty Hunters: The Betrayal of the Jews, Ad van Liempt provided exhaustive proof of the Kopgeld, or head bounty, allotted to the Jew hunters for each person they turned in. Among other evidence, he quoted the testimony of Karel Weeling, a Dutch police officer who’d been assigned to the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung in 1943. In a police investigation report in 1948, Weeling stated, “It was common knowledge that the staff of the Colonne Henneicke received a bonus for every Jewish person they brought to the Zentralstelle.” Weeling had been present several times when Henneicke had paid his men, always at the end of the month. At least initially, the bounty for a single Jew was 7.50 guilders （$47.50 USD today）。 Weeling stated, “I saw that the personnel then had to sign a number of receipts. I believe there were three in total. . . . I also saw Henneicke paying out sums varying from 300 to 450 guilders per person. In my opinion these sums were much higher than their salaries.”9
A member of the column could receive a bonus of between $1,850 and $2,790 （in today’s money）， which probably explains the “unremitting zeal” of those Dutchmen as they hunted their prey. Each captured Jew meant bounty money. Even more sinister, the money to pay the abductors came from confiscated Jewish property. On December 8, 1944, the Dutch resistance assassinated Henneicke.
16
They Aren’t Coming Back
That moment in July 1945 when Otto Frank stood in Miep’s office, a letter from a nurse in Rotterdam in his hand, was one that Miep would never escape. In a voice that was “toneless, totally crushed,” Otto said, “Miep. Margot and Anne are not coming back.”
We stayed there like that, both struck by lightning, burnt thoroughly through our hearts, our eyes fixed on each other’s. Then Mr. Frank walked towards his office and said in that defeated voice, “I’ll be in my office.”1
Miep went to her desk and opened the drawer containing the small checkered diary and the notebooks and loose sheets that she’d been saving for Anne’s return. She carried them into Otto’s office and held them out to him. Recognizing the diary, he touched it with the tips of his fingers. She pressed everything into his hands and left.
When Miep and Jan invited Otto to live with them, he said he preferred staying with them because he could talk about his family. In fact, in the early days he rarely spoke of his family. Miep understood that words were not necessary. “He could talk about his family if he wanted to. And if he didn’t want to, in silence we all shared the same sorrow and memories.”2
But then, slowly, he began to break his silence. He started to translate into German snippets of Anne’s diary, which he included in letters to his mother in Basel. Some evenings he would come out of his room, diary in hand, and say, “Miep, you should hear this description that Anne wrote here! Who’d have imagined how vivid her imagination was all the while?”3
At first, he could read only a few pages a day, overwhelmed as he was by the trauma of loss. But then he began to read excerpts to his friends, and most were impressed, though a few found the material too intimate. In December 1945, he decided he would publish the diary. He knew that Anne had wanted it published, and he was determined to show the world that something positive could come out of all the grief. He gave the typescript he’d created to his friend Werner Cahn, who worked for a Dutch publisher. It made its way to a well-respected historian, Jan Romein, who on April 3, 1946, wrote about it under the title “Kinderstem” [A Child’s Voice] for the front page of the newspaper Het Parool. Diaries from the war were surfacing all over, but Romein remarked, “I should be very much surprised if there were another as lucid, as intelligent, and at the same time as natural.”4 Soon publishers were calling. The diary came out on June 12, 1947, under the title Anne had picked: The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from June 14, 1942, to August 1, 1944. A total of 3,036 copies were sold in the first printing, with a second printing in December 1947 selling 6,830 and a third in 1948 selling 10,500. In the spring of 1952, it was published in the United States and the United Kingdom, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The year 1952 was an important one for Otto Frank. He decided to move to Basel, Switzerland, where he still had family. Staying in Amsterdam had become too painful. The endless barrage of readers of the diary showing up at Prinsengracht 263 wanting to speak with him had begun to overwhelm him. At least when he was in Basel, readers would have to resort to writing him letters, which he conscientiously answered. Interviewed by Life magazine years later, he explained that it had come to the point that he could no longer tolerate Amsterdam for more than three days. He’d visit the secret Annex, where nothing had changed.5