In searching through Pleij’s CABR files, Cold Case Team researcher Christine Hoste discovered a bank statement indicating a large deposit of 4,110.10 guilders （the equivalent of $28,000 today） made on August 5, 1944—one day after the raid on the Annex. Such a large sum; such a suspicious date! How to account for it? Had Pieter Schaap taken part in the raid and this was money he’d stolen from the Annex and passed to his lover, Pleij, to deposit? For Christine it was a eureka moment. But further examination of bank records made it clear that Pleij received such payments on a regular basis.21 Selling food stamps on the black market was obviously a lucrative scam.
In the summer of 1944, Leopold de Jong began to panic. It seemed to him that too many people knew about his connection to Schaap through his wife and might suspect him of being a Jewish informant. Schaap ordered de Jong to go to Westerbork, where he could act as a cell spy, or prison informant.22 De Jong entered Westerbork on July 1.23 On the transport list, it is stated that his status as a Jew was still under investigation, which of course was a subterfuge.24 He was assigned to the Barneveld Barrack. Camp records indicate that on one occasion he requested to go to the town of Groningen to help Pieter Schaap track down a resistance leader named Schalken.
The team couldn’t ignore the obvious question: Did Leopold de Jong, in his role as prison informant, somehow learn from the Weiszes about Jews in hiding at Prinsengracht 263?
Whether or not the Weiszes knew about the secret Annex, it’s clear that the greengrocer Hendrik van Hoeve knew; he was the one who commented to Jan Gies, after the warehouse break-in in April 1944, that he’d thought better of contacting the police.25 But Richard Weisz had been a greengrocer before he went into hiding. It could very well be that he helped Van Hoeve with the preparation of deliveries before he made his rounds and thus learned that Prinsengracht 263 was one of the addresses on the list.
Van Hoeve said his grocery store had acted like a doorganghuis （transit house） for people in hiding. There might have been an opportunity to hear rumors of onderduikers in the secret Annex. In that environment, with so many pressures and fears, people slipped and traded information without always realizing it.
Any information sharing could have come about by accident if, say, the Weiszes, who had managed to lose their penal status, met Leopold de Jong in Barrack 85 or elsewhere. They had no reason to suspect he was a V-Man. Like them, he was Jewish; they probably thought they could trust him. As a V-Man he would have cultivated their trust, much the same way Ans van Dijk did with hiders. Perhaps they shared their suspicion that there were Jews in hiding in the Annex. Thinking they were celebrating the Franks’ ingenuity in staying hidden, they might have bragged about them. De Jong would, of course, have tipped off Schaap.
In April 1945, De Jong went to meet Schaap in Groningen. He was hoping to ask for his help in escaping to Switzerland. Instead, Schaap, accompanied by an SD man named Geert van Bruggen, lured him to an empty house and shot him in the back. Bruggen later testified, “I saw the Jew in a puddle of blood lying in front of the stairs next to the kitchen. I did not see any sign of life in the Jew.”26 De Jong’s file in Camp Westerbork recorded him as having gone AWOL on April 9.
After Dolle Dinsdag （Mad Tuesday） and the wild rumors that the Allied forces were about to liberate the rest of the Netherlands, most SD agents and Nazi collaborators fled from Amsterdam. After the rumors proved false and the panic subsided, Schaap stayed on in Groningen and, together with many of his cronies, established a reign of terror there. They hunted down resistance workers and engaged in multiple summary executions and horrific acts of torture. When liberation finally came in early May, Schaap tried to flee, taking the name “De Jong” to hide his identity.
In his postwar interrogation, Pieter Schaap confirmed that De Jong worked for him as a V-Man and was successful in Westerbork, delivering several addresses where Jews were hiding. According to Schaap, one of the addresses he delivered was that of the “greengrocer on the Leliegracht” where two Jews were hiding. That was Van Hoeve’s address. However, that would not have been possible since the raid on the greengrocery was carried out on May 25 and De Jong did not enter Westerbork until July 1. Perhaps Schaap was mixing up the raid on Leliegracht and the raid on Prinsengracht 263.
Schaap was executed by firing squad on June 29, 1949, in the town of Groningen.
Both the excitement and the frustration of a cold case investigation were never clearer than in this instance. When the Cold Case Team began looking for Frieda Pleij, for example, they believed that she was dead. However, when the researchers checked the archives, they learned that she was not registered as deceased. The archives are usually fairly reliable and up to date, so it seemed for a moment that Pleij might still be alive. As she was born in 1911, that would mean she’d have reached the respectable age of 108 years. Eventually they discovered that she had actually lived to be 104 and had died in Düren, Germany, on December 15, 2014.