By November 1943, Ahlers’s work for the SD enabled him to move into an elegant house that had previously been occupied by a Jewish family. His neighbors included SD Sturmführer （assault leader） Kurt D?ring, who was in charge of tracking down resistance organizations and Communists. Ahlers’s CABR file indicates that after the war, when he was under interrogation in Amsterdam prison, D?ring admitted that he had known Ahlers well. He had “found him too stupid” for serious work and so had sent him to the Fokker airplane factory to report on Communist propaganda. He added, “Later I made him a V-Man [a paid informant]. He never did anything big.” But he did admit that Ahlers was a dangerous man.12
After the Netherlands was finally liberated in April 1945, Ahlers was one of the first to be arrested by the Political Investigation Service （Politieke Opsporingsdienst; POD） of the National Police Corps. He was accused, among other things, of acting as an informant for the SD and was sent to prison in The Hague. In the chaos of those first months, he escaped several times but was soon recaptured.13 One wonders if the incarceration of prisoners was half-hearted. In December 1945, the Dutch daily De Waarheid reported that between 100 and 150 prisoners were escaping each month.14 After serving four years, Ahlers was released on October 3, 1949. His possessions were confiscated, and he was stripped of his Dutch nationality.
When Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz, he was not seeking revenge for the crimes committed against him and his family; he was seeking accountability. It was almost as if he believed that justice could be restored. Therefore, he wrote to the POD, denouncing Job Jansen for his slanderous letter. By November, he’d tracked down two of the Dutch policemen who’d been part of the raid team sent to the Annex, hoping to find out who had betrayed him and his family. And he looked for Tonny Ahlers.
On August 21, 1945, Otto wrote to the Bureau of National Security （BNV） to say he’d heard that it had Tonny Ahlers in custody.15 He wanted to testify to the fact that the man had saved his life. However, when he finally went to the bureau that December, the personnel there were able to set him straight. As he explained cryptically, “I went to the Committee and said: ‘That man once saved my life.’ But they showed me the documents on him, and I saw that I was the only person he saved. He had betrayed a great many others.”16 The BNV showed Otto an illegal underground publication from 1944 called Signalementenblad （Description Booklet）， produced by the resistance to warn citizens of the presence of provocateurs and betrayers. Tonny Ahlers’s name was listed among the dozens of the most dangerous individuals.17
As Vince explained, the question confronting the Cold Case Team was whether Lee’s accusations stood up. She claimed that Ahlers continued to extort money from Otto even after he and his family went into in hiding.
However, that would have meant that the office staff would have witnessed Ahlers’s visits and might even have been responsible for paying him. That seemed an unreasonable hypothesis. If the office staff had any inkling that Ahlers had been blackmailing Otto, they wouldn’t have hesitated to report him to the postwar authorities.
Lee suggested that Ahlers’s failing business had left him with no other option than to betray Otto Frank for the Kopgeld. Like Lee, the team first thought that a person could earn a tidy bonus by passing a quiet tip about Jewish hiders to a Dutch SD policeman. However, Vince’s discovery of the Kopgeld receipts in the National Archives in Maryland made it clear that a reward was paid not to the informant but to the Dutch detectives who made the arrest. At their own discretion, the detectives might share a small portion of the reward with the informant. Tips from regular citizens were likely to come from someone who ran afoul of the law for theft or minor infractions such as forgetting to put up air-raid blackout curtains at night.
In any case, would Ahlers have known that Otto and the others were hiding in the Annex? The Cold Case Team could find no proof of it. About a month after Ahlers delivered the Jansen letter, the Nazi law forbidding Jews to own businesses came into effect and the name on the building at Prinsengracht 263 was changed from Opekta to the Aryanized Gies & Co. The change of name would have signaled to anyone who did not know otherwise that Otto was gone. Keeping in mind that Ahlers first visited in 1941 and the arrest was almost forty months later, if he knew that there were Jews in hiding, he did not seem like someone who would keep the information to himself for such a long time.
In her book, Lee noted that according to Ahlers’s family members, he liked to boast that he himself was the betrayer of the by then famous hiders in the Annex.18 It is a peculiar, though perhaps sadly not uncommon, psychosis to want to claim fame as a villain. Even Ahlers’s family didn’t really believe him.