In the postwar period, the special courts took keen notice of the behavior of the IV B4 members as well as the informants and V-people who worked for them and reflected it in their sentencing. Nearly one-fourth of the IV B4 members tried received the ultimate sentence of death, though most of the sentences were commuted. Abraham Kaper, Pieter Schaap, Maarten Kuiper （a police agent assigned to the SD who specialized in tracking down and arresting members of the resistance）， and Ans van Dijk were executed. Only those guilty of the most egregious crimes were executed, which led the Cold Case Team to exhaustively examine their CABR files to assess what role, if any, they might have played in the betrayal of the hiders in the Annex.
26
The V-Frau
Anna “Ans” van Dijk was born in Amsterdam in 1905. Her parents were lower-middle-class secular Jews. She had one brother. When she was fourteen years old, her mother died, and her father soon remarried. At the age of twenty-two, she married but separated from her husband eight years later. In 1938, after her father was confined to a mental hospital, where he eventually died, she officially divorced her husband.
Her story might have remained unremarkable except that when she turned thirty-three, as she later testified in court, she fell in love with the female nurse who nurtured her through an illness.
Van Dijk worked in a hat shop, Maison Evany, owned by Eva de Vries–Harschel, who was also Jewish. （That was where Gerardus Kremer remembered meeting her.） After it was forbidden for Jews to own businesses, the shop was seized, and van Dijk lost her job. Soon after, she began a romantic relationship with a woman named Miep Stodel. Stodel, also Jewish, left Van Dijk in 1942 to seek safety in Switzerland. How different Van Dijk’s life might have been had she managed to flee with her.
During her postwar collaboration trial in 1946–1948, Ans van Dijk claimed that from the beginning of the invasion she had defied the German occupiers, refusing to wear the yellow star or obey any of the discriminatory laws against Jews. She said she had worked for a resistance group of mostly young Jewish people who met clandestinely on Tweede Jan Steenstraat, the majority of whom would be arrested and not survive the war. With fake identity papers in the name of Alphonsia Maria “Annie” de Jong, she distributed forged documents and successfully placed many Jewish people in hiding. Van Dijk stated that she had also worked for the resistance newspaper Vrij Nederland.1
The Cold Case Team could find no record to corroborate those details, but that does not necessarily mean they are untrue since resistance members worked in small cells and seldom exchanged names, let alone kept records. In case of capture, the less they could reveal under torture, the better. If a group was largely Jewish, the chances of its members surviving to testify in someone’s favor were small.2 At her trial, which was obsessively followed in the newspapers, someone could easily have come forward to debunk her assertion of having helped the resistance. No one did. But neither did anyone come forward to support her.
Van Dijk claimed that she engaged in resistance work for almost two years but, as the situation worsened, decided to go into hiding in Marco Polostraat. Sadly, she miscalculated: her hiders, a woman named Arnoldina Alsemgeest and her daughter, betrayed her.3
On Easter Sunday, April 25, 1943, Van Dijk was arrested by Pieter Schaap, the notoriously cruel Dutch officer working for the IV B4 unit. He’d begun his police career before the war working with the dog brigade; by the end of the war, he was responsible for the betrayal and execution of hundreds of Jews and resistance fighters. Schaap gave Van Dijk the usual ultimatum: either cooperate or face certain death in one of the eastern camps. She claimed that on her third day in captivity, she agreed to cooperate. She became one of the most prolific V-Frauen in the Netherlands.
Pieter Schaap had many V-persons working for him, and he saw the advantage of pairing up collaborators to work together. Van Dijk was assisted in her “work” by Branca Simons, a Jewish seamstress who was no longer protected from deportation as her Christian husband, Wim Houthuijs, had been arrested for theft. After she was turned by Schaap, her apartment at 25 Kerkstraat became a Jew trap.4 People who needed to hide were lured to the apartment with the promise of safe shelter and food stamps. After a few hours or days, the SD would come by to make the arrest.
It’s difficult to contemplate the transition from working for the resistance and saving people to becoming a V-Frau who betrayed them. However, when you are thirty-eight years old and faced with death, many might choose life. Van Dijk claimed that she was terrified of Schaap, who threatened her at gunpoint with deportation to Mauthausen.