A third scenario, the one involving the greengrocer, also had sticking power. Van Hoeve was arrested on May 25 for hiding a Jewish couple. Under duress, could he have provided information about the Annex? It’s possible, but had he done so, it’s unlikely that Dutch detectives would have waited nearly three months to initiate the Annex raid. In addition, Van Houve was sent away to a work camp after his arrest. Had he turned in eight Jews that day, he most likely would have been released.
As for Richard and Ruth Weisz, they may well have known that Van Hoeve was delivering food to the Annex. However, as with Van Hoeve, if they gave up that information upon their arrest, the SD would not have waited so long to act. Still, the fact that they arrived at Westerbork as penal cases and after a short period of time had their status changed continued to give the Cold Case Team pause. Had the Weiszes given up something of value—i.e., a list of Jews in hiding? But again, the timing was off; the Weiszes’ status was upgraded in Westerbork sometime in June 1944, well before the Annex was raided on August 4. The Nazis were not in the habit of rewarding informants before confirming that the information they gave was accurate.
With all of the other scenarios eliminated, only one was still viable: the Van den Bergh scenario, the only theory ever bolstered by a piece of physical evidence identifying the name of the betrayer. All of the theories proposed by the helpers, researchers, and authors were grounded in assumptions as to the identity of the betrayer, based on either their suspicious activity or their past actions. The piece of evidence that the Cold Case Team recovered, although not the original note, was an actual copy made by Otto Frank. Although that alone did not prove that the allegation in the note was true, it did provide inherent credibility since Otto clearly took it seriously.
Of course, the Cold Case Team had to consider that the note was sent anonymously by someone with a vendetta against Van den Bergh. But why send the note to Otto? If there was no list of addresses handed over by Van den Bergh, how and why would the sender have settled on the Annex address as opposed to other possible addresses in Amsterdam?
The wording of the note—“Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported at the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung”—would seem to suggest that the betrayer didn’t have the names of the onderduikers in the Annex but only knew that there were some. The probability that the sender directed the note to a random address, which just happened to be the site of the betrayal of Jews and also Otto Frank’s address, is minuscule.
The Cold Case Team also considered the possibility that whoever sent the note might have sent similar ones to other addresses on the list. If so, they have never been discovered—possibly because most of the Jews who were betrayed at those addresses did not survive the camps, besides which, most had been hiding at addresses other than their own homes or offices. Otto was the exception. He was hiding in his own building—and he survived the war.
If the letter had arrived ten years later—say in the mid-1950s—it could be argued that someone was just trying to use Otto’s fame to cast a negative light on Van den Bergh. But at the time the note was received in 1945, the diary was not yet published and Otto Frank was just one of 5,500 Jews returning to the Netherlands. In a sea of Dutch people coming back from the labor camps, hundreds of thousands of people coming out of hiding, and the returning Jews struggling to put their lives back together, he was an unknown figure.
In other words, if the accusation in the note was false, the sender would have to have been someone who:
Had a specific vendetta against Arnold van den Bergh yet inexplicably did not want to notify the postwar authorities, who were aggressively pursuing and locking up collaborators and betrayers within days of the liberation
Knew that Otto had been betrayed while in hiding—and had survived the camps
Knew that Otto had returned to his wartime address
Was aware that lists of Jews in hiding were passed by members of the Jewish Council to the SD
The odds of the sender knowing all of that are exceedingly slim. It can be assumed that the author of the anonymous note is now dead, but there is always the possibility that he or she informed family members who passed the story down. Vince believes that after the Van den Bergh theory is made public, the team may hear from them.
Through the Arrest Tracking Project, by which the arrests of all Jews in the Netherlands between 1943 and 1944 were analyzed, the Cold Case Team discovered that the raid on the Annex was somewhat different from other raids, specifically in that a German officer led the team. This was very unusual and suggests that it was not the Dutch desk officer, Sergeant Abraham Kaper, at the Zentralstelle who called in Silberbauer. Kaper would not have called a German officer to accompany Dutch policemen. The call must have come from higher up, which in fact Silberbauer always claimed when he said that SS Lieutenant Julius Dettmann at Euterpestraat took the call and then ordered him to organize the raid. Furthermore, if an ordinary Dutch civilian was intent on betraying Jews, he or she would have called the JA; Kaper’s number was listed in the phone directory. Dettmann was too senior an officer to receive a random call. His number was not listed in the phone book, he did not operate V-persons, and he did not speak Dutch. If he received the call, it almost certainly came from within the German organization, either from another German department or from someone he knew. Among the suspects the Cold Case Team examined, only Van den Bergh had connections with high-ranking German officials, was in contact with important individuals such as Tietje, and would have been known to the German intelligence services.