Father John Neiman, a close friend and confidant of Otto, was staying with Miep at her home in Amsterdam in November 2000. He recounted telling Miep that he’d read Melissa Müller’s Anne Frank: The Biography, in which she suggested that Lena Hartog was possibly the betrayer. He asked, “Miep, was it Lena? Did she betray them?” Miep looked straight at him and said, “No. She did not.”5
One reason Müller thought Lena might have been the culprit was the theory that the person who placed the anonymous phone call to SD headquarters was female. That idea was perpetuated by the ABC miniseries Anne Frank: The Whole Story, based on Müller’s biography. But the contention that the caller was female has never been substantiated. The source of the rumor was supposedly Cor Suijk, a former director of the Anne Frank House, who claimed he had learned that through a conversation he’d had with Silberbauer. However, there is no evidence of his ever having interviewed Silberbauer.6
Suijk died in 2014, but the Cold Case Team interviewed a close contact and fellow Anne Frank House employee, Jan Erik Dubbelman. Dubbelman claimed that Suijk told him that when Silberbauer was first identified, Otto Frank asked Suijk to go to Vienna and speak with Silberbauer. At the time （1963–1964）， Suijk was not employed by the Anne Frank House but claimed to be good friends with Otto. It seems improbable that Otto would make such a request, since he’d sworn he wanted nothing further to do with Silberbauer.7 Furthermore, after his 1963 interview with the Dutch journalist Jules Huf, Silberbauer refused to grant any further interviews, likely on orders from the Austrian authorities. It seemed that Suijk was known to exaggerate. His daughter told Dubbelman that you couldn’t believe a word her father said.
As for Lena’s husband, Lammert Hartog, being the betrayer, the team was doubtful. Yes, he’d made it clear in his 1948 statement that he’d learned from Van Maaren, approximately fourteen days before the raid, that Jews were hidden in the building.8 According to Johannes Kleiman, as soon as Silberbauer and his team arrived, Hartog “immediately took off and we never saw him again.”9 But it is hardly incriminating that someone working illegally would run at the sight of a German SD officer.
Notwithstanding their dismissal of the Hartogs as suspects, the team was still intrigued by Melissa Müller’s research. On February 13, 2019, Vince and Brendan flew to Munich to interview her. She was open and generous in describing her research and still passionately attached to Anne Frank. It turned out that Müller was no longer all that convinced of Lena’s involvement and felt the case was still very much open. She told Vince she’d managed to interview Miep Gies, whom she described as a “tough interview. . . . It was hard to get information out of her.” She strongly suspected that both Miep and Otto knew much more about the circumstances of the raid but for some reason were unwilling to share that information.
Vince said that it was as if alarm bells went off. The question that had been dogging the team all along was: What had changed between the 1948 investigation and the one in 1963–1964? The answer was, not much—except for the way Otto Frank behaved. In 1948, he’d been intent on finding out who’d betrayed the Annex residents. By the second investigation, he was barely present. At most, he was watching quietly from the sidelines. He and the helpers no longer seemed convinced of Van Maaren’s guilt. In several interviews Miep Gies even said that she did not believe Van Maaren was the betrayer. A key puzzle now became: Why did Otto Frank change his mind? What does he know now that he didn’t know before?
Or, as Melissa Müller put it, something happened that made the identity of the betrayer “less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept.”10
33
The Greengrocer
Hendrik van Hoeve owned a greengrocer’s shop on Leliegracht, around the corner and not more than 100 yards from Prinsengracht 263. He supplied fresh vegetables and potatoes to the Annex, secretly delivering the food at midday when the warehouse employees were out for lunch. He worked with the resistance. During the war, he allegedly used a handcart with a hidden compartment to distribute illegal foodstuffs to a list of addresses that he picked up each morning. “He never saw any of the recipients. Either he placed the bags outside the door or someone appeared from inside the house to take them from him.”1 Sometimes he pasted posters on walls. He would always treasure a photo of a large poster bearing the word VICTORIA! with Hitler’s head trapped between the two arms of the V.2
In the winter of 1942, a Jewish resistance worker named Max Meiler contacted Van Hoeve and asked if he would be willing to hide a Jewish couple. When he agreed, Meiler arranged for a trusted carpenter to construct an ingenious hiding place in Van Hoeve’s attic. The Weiszes moved into an extra bedroom at the back of the house equipped with an alarm bell that could be rung in case of danger, at which point they would climb to the secret attic compartment.3 They stayed with the Van Hoeve family for at least seventeen months.