Evidently at Miedl’s request,9 in September 1943 Van den Bergh opened the doors of his villa at Oranje Nassaulaan to Goudstikker’s mother, Emilie Goudstikker, and she remained there until the end of the war. A check of her Jewish Council card indicated that Miedl managed to have her card “cleaned”： there was no identification number, no Sperre number, and no mandatory J.10 That was impressive; the man obviously had real power. Van den Bergh was clearly counting on Miedl to return the favor by using his influence with the Nazi administration to protect him and his family.
Van den Bergh was a clever man. He’d tried several strategies to save his family. He applied for and received several Sperres and even a Calmeyer exemption—until the Dutch notary J.W.A. Schepers challenged it. He had the resistance hide his children. He clearly recognized that survival was a matter of whom you knew. Through his relationship with Miedl he enjoyed the （indirect） protection of Ferdinand aus der Fünten and Willy Lages. But even though he had connections at the highest levels of the Nazi world, Van den Bergh was not naive enough to trust a Nazi. His duties as notary for Goudstikker N.V. ended on February 28, 1944. After this he must have been making plans to find refuge. The Cold Case Team knew that Van den Bergh and his wife were never deported, were never listed as being in any concentration camp, and survived the war. What did Van den Bergh do to secure their survival?
By 1944, it was becoming clear that the Germans were going to lose the war. Hermann G?ring’s influence was on the wane; Hitler was furious that G?ring’s Luftwaffe was unable to stop the Allied bombings of German cities. Miedl saw the writing on the wall. No longer able to count on G?ring’s protection, he decided to move his family to Spain, whose caudillo, Francisco Franco, was friendly toward Germans. In his postwar interrogation by a US Army representative, Miedl claimed he entered Spain on July 5, 1944, with three paintings in his personal luggage. The Cold Case Team found a report indicating that he was arrested and briefly held by the Germans in France on August 21, 1944. He probably smuggled his paintings across the frontier into Spain on a number of occasions. He left his business and two mansions to his friend Hans Tietje, the same Tietje who had secured the 120,000 Sperres for Van den Bergh and his family. The caretaker, servants, and a neighbor of Miedl’s reported to the Dutch resistance that in the months prior to Miedl’s departure, many German Army trucks had stopped at his villa and loaded valuables into them for transportation to Germany.11
With Miedl’s power seriously diminished, Van den Bergh was more exposed than ever. Although the team cannot be certain, it’s possible that he and his wife sought sanctuary at one of the two properties Miedl had “bought” from Goudstikker and for which Van den Bergh had served as notary. The Cold Case Team checked to see if the couple stayed at the Oostermeer estate just outside Amsterdam. They discovered that there were many people in hiding there at the end of the war, but there was no mention of Van den Bergh and his wife, and they therefore ruled that possibility out. However, Castle Nijenrode remained a plausible address for the Van den Berghs.
One former resident, a German friend of Miedl named Henriette von Schirach, the wife of the notorious leader of the Hitler Youth and Reich governor of Vienna Baldur von Schirach, was a close personal friend of Hitler. She described the castle as a very strange place:
The same evening, I followed Miedl’s advice and moved to his moated castle. In this house you would find anybody that feared persecution in Germany: engineers of the Messerschmittwerke, who were brought here because of G?ring and had Jewish wives, actors who had escaped from a Wehrmacht tour in Holland, journalists, impostors, men and women with fake/wrong passports and fake/wrong names.12
If the Van den Berghs were at the castle, sharing space with German fugitives could hardly have felt safe. With Miedl now in Spain and unable to protect him, Van den Bergh might have needed to find some additional insurance—something the SD would value enough that it would provide protection for himself and his family. When IV B4 men made arrests, it was standard MO for them to pressure the arrestees for the addresses of other Jews in hiding. For Van den Bergh, addresses where Jews were purportedly being hidden would have been a valuable commodity.
42
A Bombshell
The Cold Case Team began their search for possible sources of address lists by looking into the workings of the Contact Committee （Contact Commissie） at Camp Westerbork. When prisoners needed specific papers to prove they were eligible for a Sperre, they had to go to the Contact Committee. The office was run by two men appointed by the Jewish Council who traveled regularly between Westerbork and Amsterdam to secure necessary documents and intervene on behalf of prisoners. One of the men was Eduard Spier, Van den Bergh’s close colleague and friend. Before the war, they shared an office at Westeinde 24. Spier, Van den Bergh, and van Hasselt often did business together; the team found numerous business ads featuring their names in prewar newspapers.1