The play The Diary of Anne Frank and later the movie build to the climax of Anne’s comment in the last pages of her diary:
It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impossible. Yet I keep clinging to them, because I still believe, in spite of everything that people are truly good at heart.5
It was impossible for people to face what had happened: murder on an industrial scale; mass graves annihilating all personal memory of the dead. In both play and movie, references to “Germans” were changed to “Nazis,” and the Jewish experience was toned down. For example, mention of Yom Kippur was eliminated. This was supposedly done to strengthen the story’s secular, universal appeal. The translator of the German edition of the diary, which came out in 1950, blurred “every hostile reference to Germans and German” on the grounds that “a book intended after all for sale in Germany cannot abuse the Germans.”6
But it is as if the diary is a living document. Its reception changes with what we know or are willing to confront. Beginning in the 1960s, books, films, museums, and monuments were created to memorialize the Holocaust. People were finally ready to face up to the madness that was Nazism and willing to examine the indifference to violence that had allowed fascism to spread like a virus.
More apropos to our understanding now would be Anne’s comment toward the end of her diary: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged.”7
You might wonder: What is the point of questioning who betrayed Anne Frank in a war that happened so long ago? The answer is that almost eight decades since the end of the war, we seem to have grown complacent, thinking, as the Dutch once thought, that it cannot happen here. But contemporary society seems to be increasingly susceptible to ideological divisiveness and the lure of authoritarianism, forgetting the simple truth that incipient fascism metastasizes if allowed to go unchecked.
Anne Frank’s world makes this clear. What are the real tools of war? Not only physical violence but rhetorical violence. In attempting to determine how Adolf Hitler had taken control, the US Office of Strategic Services commissioned a report in 1943 that explained his strategy: “Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.”8 Soon hyperbole, extremism, defamation, and slander become commonplace and acceptable vehicles of power.
To look at the transformation of a city such as Amsterdam under occupation is to understand that although there were those who supported the Nazis, whether out of opportunism, self-deception, venality, or cowardice, and those who opposed them, the majority simply tried to keep their heads down.
What happens when people cannot trust the institutions that are supposed to protect them? What happens when the fundamental laws that constitute and protect decent behavior crumble? The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door. It is a question still worth asking today.
3
The Cold Case Team
The office of the Cold Case Team is located in the northern reaches of the city, which requires taking a ferry from Amsterdam Central Station across the IJ River, which connects the main city with Amsterdam-Noord. With its twin clock towers, turrets, and Gothic Renaissance facade, the station is so large that it could easily pass for a royal palace until you enter and see the stores, restaurants, railway tracks, subway entrances, and ferry docks. Walking through it today and stepping onto a boat on the Amstel River, with most of the passengers leaning on their bicycles, feels almost surreal; the freedom of it all is so seductive. But it isn’t hard to imagine the goose-stepping Wehrmacht marching through the huge building or, out in the square, men, women, and children being herded down the street by soldiers with truncheons, a sight that devastated Anne Frank as she peered through a narrow slit in the curtains in the front office of Prinsengracht 263.
The team’s office, in a newly developed residential area, turned out to be a large room organized into sections for investigators and research and administrative personnel. I was told that by January 2019 the office housed a team of twenty-three people, with an “ops room,” timelines on the walls, and highly secure access. A soundproof MuteCube enabled up to four people to confer privately.
One of the walls was filled with photographs of the Nazi hierarchy, their Dutch SD collaborators, and the informants called V-M?nnen （Men） and V-Frauen （Women）—the V stands for vertrouwens, or trust—who played a role in the persecution of Jews. Beneath this photo gallery sat a small three-dimensional model of Prinsengracht 263, with the Annex at the back.