Vince enumerated for me the assumptions that Lee had made. First, Ahlers had to have been aware that Otto Frank and his family were hiding in the Annex. Lee claimed he had known this because the annex of Prinsengracht 263 was similar to the one attached to his mother’s nearby residence at Prinsengracht 253, where he’d lived for some time in 1937.3 Second, Ahlers had kept the information about the hiders to himself until, in the summer of 1944, his business was floundering and he needed money. The bounty he could receive for reporting Jews proved too tempting.4 Tipped off by Ahlers on August 4, 1944, a team of SD agents stormed into the Opekta office, demanding to know where the Jews were hiding. Neither the blackmail nor the betrayal came out after the war because Ahlers continued to have the power to blackmail Otto Frank. Ahlers’s leverage, according to Lee, was the knowledge that Otto Frank’s company had delivered goods to the Wehrmacht during the war.5
The Cold Case Team found Lee’s deductions intriguing, but they would have to be proved. Monique set up the evidence board in the office and assigned each of her researchers a stage in Lee’s deductions. The first question was: What would Ahlers’s motive in taking the Jansen letter to Otto have been? Was it blackmail? Ahlers did pay a second visit to Prinsengracht 263, at which point Otto gave him another few guilders. But if it was blackmail, even Otto suggested that far more could have been extorted. It’s clear from Otto’s postwar account in his letter to the Bureau of National Security （Bureau Nationale Veiliheid; BNV） that his and Ahlers’s paths did not cross again before Otto and his family went into hiding.6 Otto said that he felt grateful and indebted to Ahlers for saving his life. That was of course absurd: Ahlers was an unscrupulous Dutch Nazi and a petty thief. But Otto did not know that.
In his CABR file, there are statements from witnesses that Ahlers worked for the SD. Couriering letters from the Dutch Nazis to the SD, he would have had little compunction about opening them. He was known to have kept a list of the names and addresses of Jews in hiding. It was also his job to report all persons found to be listening to the BBC on illegal radios, which he’d sometimes confiscate and resell. There is evidence that he informed on numerous people, including his mother’s new husband, who was sent to Camp Vught, as well as a butcher and greengrocer who were friends of the family. He was said to have been a fierce anti-Semite even before the war.7
Ahlers was not the kind of man to be motivated by sympathy or generosity toward Otto Frank. Rather, he would have seen a good opportunity for a shakedown. It’s likely that he intended to return a third time for more money, but by then Otto had disappeared.
At the time of his encounter with Otto, Ahlers was twenty-four years old. In his identity photo, he looks rather handsome, with fine cheekbones, square chin, and high forehead, his dark hair greased and combed back severely in the fashion of the day. Yet one might also say that he has the aggressive features of his fellow Dutch fascists, with an arrogant, even smug, look about the mouth and eyes. He was a cocky opportunist, trading on his affiliation with the SD to maneuver himself into a position with more power and money.
Vince and his team examined Ahlers’s childhood as recorded in his CABR file. Born in Amsterdam in 1917 to working-class parents, in his early years Ahlers contracted polio and spent nine months in a sanatorium. He would always be slightly lame in one leg. His parents divorced when he was eleven, and both lost custody of their children. He and his five siblings were placed in a Salvation Army children’s home and then in Vereeniging Nora, a home for neglected children.8 When he was twenty-one, he tried to drown himself, apparently after a failed love affair.
Ahlers’s working life was unstable. He started out as a hairdresser’s assistant and then worked in a factory in France. His ID file at the Amsterdam City Archives indicated that he had lived with his mother for three months at Prinsengracht 253, a few doors down from Prinsengracht 263, but that his mother had relocated long before Otto moved his business there. Other than knowing that the buildings had similar annexes, what would that have told him?
Ahlers joined the NSB as early as 1938 and, according to his CABR file, was soon involved in an assault on personnel and customers at the Jewish-owned Bijenkorf department store. In March 1939, with a group called the Iron Guard （De IJzeren Garde）， he vandalized the Amsterdam office of the Committee for Jewish Refugees （Comité voor Joodsche Vluchtelingen; CJV） and ended up in jail for nine months in the northern province of Friesland.9
The Cold Case Team researchers brought in an abundance of information confirming that Ahlers was not the man Otto Frank took him to be. After the German invasion, he immediately aligned with the enemy. He acted as the official photographer during raids made by the WA （Weerbaarheids Afdeling）， the uniformed paramilitary wing of the Dutch fascists. He was often seen at Café Trip on Rembrandtplein and other places where Nazi sympathizers could be found, bragging about his connections with German officials.10 In the February 18, 1941, issue of De Telegraaf reporting on the funeral of Hendrik Koot, killed when Dutch Nazis invaded the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, there is a photograph of Ahlers standing proudly next to high-ranking German officials.11 He is wearing a white belted raincoat and looks as if he’s posing as a detective. That was the same funeral before which Job Jansen, the author of the betrayal note, and Martinus J. Martinus illegally arrested a Jew for disrespectfully crossing in front of the procession. Although the Cold Case Team could not confirm a relationship between Jansen and Ahlers, they did confirm that both Martinus and Ahlers were involved in the arrest of a man falsely claiming to be a member of the Gestapo and SS in November 1940. Clearly Ahlers and Jansen moved in the same political circles.