The complete Silberbauer interview did not become available to the public until twenty-three years later, when it ran in the Dutch weekly newspaper De Groene Amsterdammer in 1986.20 It was interesting, but it didn’t answer the most important questions: Had Silberbauer actually been told by his superior SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann who the caller was? Or had he just been grandstanding for the young reporter Huf in one last bid for notoriety?
31
What Miep Knew
Among the helpers, it is hard not to find Miep Gies the most compelling. She saved Anne’s diary, intending to give it back to her when she returned at the end of the war; Otto lived with her and her husband for seven years after his return from Auschwitz; she was the one who kept Otto’s secrets after the war. Following Otto’s death in 1980, she became the de facto spokesperson for the story of Anne Frank. The world press interviewed her on dozens of occasions, and she was invited to speak internationally.
Vince organized what he called the Statements Project: the Cold Case Team was to collect all statements made by the witnesses over the years in print, audio, or video with regard to the betrayal. They were placed on a timeline to identify contradictions or corroborations.
As part of the Statements Project, the Cold Case Team collected all available print, audio, and video material involving Miep.
One day in 2019, while he was reviewing a recording of one of her international speaking engagements, Vince stumbled upon something totally unexpected. In 1994, she gave a lecture at the University of Michigan and was accompanied onstage by Professor Rolf Wolfswinkel, who served as moderator and also assisted her when she occasionally struggled with an English word or phrase.1 Lying on his couch listening to the speech through headphones, Vince almost fell asleep. It was essentially the same speech he’d heard Miep give in most of the other recordings he’d reviewed. Then, at the conclusion of the speech, Wolfswinkel invited questions from the audience, and a young man posed the question “What gave the Franks away?” In the course of answering, Miep made the startling statement, “After fifteen years . . . we began again to search for the betrayer. But that was 1960, and by this time the betrayer had died.” She concluded by saying, “So we have to resign ourselves to the fact that we will never know who did it.” Vince sat up in shock. Both things couldn’t be true. If Miep had known the betrayer was dead by 1960, she must have known who the betrayer was.
Vince turned to the writings of University of Texas at Austin psychologist Art Markman to explain the discrepancy. In an article by Drake Baer for The Cut, “The Real Reason Keeping Secrets Is So Hard, According to a Psychologist,” Markman explained that the mind has a limited capacity to process information, and to keep track of what is privileged and what can be divulged is a multifaceted cognitive maneuver. Sometimes the temptation is to unburden oneself by letting slip a part of the secret.2 Vince believed that that was what happened to Miep: she admitted that she had known who the betrayer was and left a clue: that he or she was dead by 1960. What else did she know?
Though she clearly knew the name of the betrayer, she never disclosed it. When her friend Cor Suijk asked her directly if she knew the name of the betrayer, she asked, “Cor, can you keep a secret?” Very eagerly he answered, “Yes, Miep, I can!” And she smiled and said, “Me, too.”3
Vince decided to contact Father John Neiman, who was a close friend of both Otto and Miep. He had been with Miep at the Academy Awards party in 1996 hosted by Leslie Gold, a coauthor of Miep’s book Anne Frank Remembered. The book had been made into a documentary film and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Neiman recalled that he was talking privately with Miep when, out of the blue, she told him that Otto Frank knew the betrayer of the Annex and the betrayer was dead. It wasn’t clear to him if she meant that Otto knew the betrayer personally or just the betrayer’s name. “You could hear a pin drop.” He asked if she also knew who it was. She said she did, and there the conversation ended.4
According to Bep’s son Joop, his mother told him that in the late 1950s, a “spontaneous agreement” was reached between Otto and the helpers. From then on, Otto would be the spokesman who addressed the media. “The helpers would remain non-committal as much as possible regarding their role in the hiding.”5
The aggression of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers and the manipulation by journalists writing about the story of the Annex were reasons enough for Otto to want to control the narrative. Bep, Miep, and Jan Gies had no problem with the arrangement, so annoyed were they by the frequent press errors.6 Yet it seemed that for Otto, something deeper was at stake; the team was determined to probe this mystery.