As the writer of the anonymous note was clearly aware, since the note included the address, Van den Bergh resided in an elegant villa on Oranje Nassaulaan, a street adjacent to the famous 120-acre Vondelpark with its rose garden and Blue Tea House. He seemed to be a quiet but confident man. His wife loved to entertain guests at their home, and he had a passion for fine seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings, a luxury that his income afforded him. Not surprisingly, the team discovered that Van den Bergh had been registered as the notary for Goudstikker N.V., a famous Amsterdam art house that dealt in priceless paintings and artworks.
At the beginning of the occupation and prior to the Nazis’ strangling restrictions against the Jewish population, it was business as usual for Van den Bergh, much as Otto Frank’s business was for him. The Cold Case Team located records that showed Van den Bergh still officiating at various transactions in 1940. Several art sales drew the team’s particular scrutiny, not so much for what had been sold as for the prominent Nazis, such as Hermann G?ring, who bought the works.
Van den Bergh’s invitation to become a founding member of the Jewish Council came in early February 1941, probably from David Cohen. Van den Bergh was appointed to the council’s Commission of Five, a committee concerned with the council’s internal organization. In addition to serving as the council’s notary, he attended weekly meetings of its Emigration Department, the group with the unenviable task of compiling the names of Jews who would be placed on the deportation lists. At the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Cold Case Team was able to review the preserved minutes of the Jewish Council, which showed that Amsterdam SD leaders Willy Lages and Ferdinand Aus der Fünten had constant interactions with the council, sometimes even attending its meetings.1
Ten months into the occupation, on February 21, 1941, the Nazis decreed that all Jewish notaries must surrender their public functions to non-Jewish notaries. But it was not unusual for months to go by before a replacement was named.2 In Van den Bergh’s case, it wasn’t until January 1943, almost two years later, that he was informed that he would be replaced by an Aryan notary.
Van den Bergh had begun to understand the terrible threat the Nazis posed to his own and his family’s safety. When the Cold Case Team checked the NIOD files, they discovered that his name and the names of his wife and three daughters appeared on the list of persons who held the exclusive 120,000 Sperre （approximately 1,500 people held it）; it was supposed to offer the most protection. The elite of the Jewish Council and all other Jews whom the Germans found it expedient to protect held this protection, which shielded them from deportation “until further notice.” According to the NIOD files, Van den Bergh applied for （in effect bought） the Sperres for himself and his family in July 1943. With the coveted Stempel （stamp） on his ID, he was able to live openly in Amsterdam. In effect, he was “hiding in plain sight.” Interrogated after the war, a man named Hans Tietje claimed to have assisted Van den Bergh to obtain the Sperres.3
Hans Tietje was a German businessman who’d moved to the Netherlands to direct a firm producing tin. He’d climbed from civil servant to millionaire, art collector, and Wehrmacht supplier and was married to a Jewish woman. His friends were some of the most powerful people in the Netherlands, including Willy Lages, Ferdinand aus der Fünten, and the businessman and art dealer Alois Miedl. During the postwar investigation by the BNV into his collaboration, Tietje claimed that he had maintained high-level contacts with German officials only to help Jews. He said that more than a hundred Jews were not deported because of his close relationship with Lages and insisted that he was never paid for the work he did.
Vince and the Cold Case Team saw things differently. Tietje was by no means a “Schindler’s list” character, although he tried to portray himself as such. He did save some Jews, but most were the children of influential industrialists who would be able to provide him with protection after the Germans lost the war, which he was convinced would happen. On the other hand, when twelve workers from one of his factories were imprisoned, he did not use his influence to free them. And he was unable （or unwilling） to save his own brother-in-law and his family, who were deported and perished in the east.4 Tietje was essentially a war profiteer who played both sides of the fence. He dealt in stolen art coerced from Jews and sold them 120,000 Sperres. Sometimes they were a con and people were deported anyway. But that was the kind of man with whom Van den Bergh, by necessity, found himself working.