When Schepers discovered that Van den Bergh had secured Calmeyer status, he was apoplectic. Insisting that Van den Bergh had always ostentatiously advertised himself as a Jewish notary before the war, he took his complaint directly to the SS and to the Calmeyer office in The Hague, demanding that they conduct an investigation.10 Unfortunately for Van den Bergh, Schepers was successful. The Cold Case Team concluded from Schepers’s CABR file that he could leverage more pressure with high-ranking Nazi factions in The Hague than Van den Bergh could.
The Cold Case Team located a letter, dated January 4, 1944, addressed to Van den Bergh in which two attorneys who worked in the Calmeyer office warned him that he was at risk of being arrested.11 Van den Bergh immediately vacated his villa and formally registered at a small house at Nieuwendammerdijk 61 in Amsterdam-Noord owned by Albertus Salle, who had been a clerk in his old notary office.12 Pieter was able to locate and interview Salle’s daughter, Regina Salle, who had no memory of people other than her family having lived in the house during that time period, indicating that the address was probably a cover.13
Pieter spent some time at the Amsterdam City Archives and learned from archivist Peter Kroesen that Van den Bergh would have had to physically present himself at the Amsterdam city registry in order to change his address. Evidently, he was not yet afraid to be seen walking about on city streets.14 But he understood that Schepers’s constant harassment of the authorities regarding his “non-Jewish” status was becoming increasingly dangerous for him and his family.
Forced to take notice of Schepers’s complaints, on January 22, 1944, the Calmeyer office issued a formal decision that Van den Bergh had possibly used false evidence to claim his “Aryan” status and that his bank accounts should be blocked.15 The surreal absurdity of those bureaucratic musical chairs, when a man’s life and the lives of his family were at stake, is a brutal example of the Nazi method of murder by small bureaucratic cuts.
Curiously, the Cold Case Team found Van den Bergh’s name referred to in the collaboration file of the notorious Jew hunter and IV B4 squad member Eduard Moesbergen,16 who was with the Henneicke Column until it was dissolved. （He then worked for Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs. Kaper described Moesbergen as one of his most prolific Jew hunters.） Moesbergen’s CABR file contained two witness statements, from a V-Man and a V-Woman working for him, who claimed that Moesbergen would often carry lists of addresses where Jews were thought to be hiding. In the summer of 1944, he was apparently methodically raiding the addresses on the list one after the other.17
In his postwar interrogation, Moesbergen claimed to have learned that Arnold van den Bergh had lost his Calmeyer status, and had gone to his residence at Oranje Nassaulaan 60 shortly afterward only to discover that he was no longer there. When Moesbergen returned a few days later, it was clear that Van den Bergh had fled. Looking to lessen his sentence for his own recent collaboration conviction, Moesbergen claimed that he had wanted to warn Van den Bergh to go into hiding, something that the CABR file reports did not suggest.18
The Cold Case Team wondered whether Moesbergen actually intended to warn Van den Bergh or meant to arrest him for the Kopgeld bounty. After the war, Moesbergen would not have admitted that his purpose in going to Van den Bergh’s residence was to arrest him. There is no record of Van den Bergh’s ever having been consulted about the truth of Moesbergen’s testimony.
But then the unexpected happened. By serendipity, Thijs came across a man who insisted, with convincing documentation, that his grandparents successfully hid Van den Bergh’s daughter Anne-Marie during the war. According to that man’s grandparents, Arnold van den Bergh placed his daughter in hiding with the help of the resistance. One way or another, it seems, either through his relationship with powerful Nazis, who helped him get Calmeyer status, or through the resistance, which helped hide his children, Van den Bergh endeavored to save his family’s lives.
Van den Bergh’s case was exceptional. On the one hand, he was able to ask the resistance to hide his children; on the other, he had enough powerful contacts in the Nazi hierarchy to secure Calmeyer status and then to be warned in time when that status was withdrawn. This, to the team, was suspicious.
37
Experts at Work
Vince clearly remembers the moment that shifted everything in the ongoing cold case investigation. He was rereading the anonymous note for the hundredth time. It said, “Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported at the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat, by A. van den Bergh.”