For Vince, what made the Van den Bergh scenario convincing is that, unlike any of the other suspects, Van den Bergh met all of the criteria of the law enforcement axiom:
Knowledge: It’s almost certain that the Jewish Council had lists of addresses of Jews in hiding. Through his key position on the Jewish Council, Van den Bergh would have had access to those lists. He may also have had access to the lists of addresses collected by the Contact Committee at Camp Westerbork.3 Prinsengracht 263 could easily have been on a list in 1943 or 1944, placed there by a member of the resistance who’d been turned or by an informant and available for purchase if the money was sufficient.
Motive: Van den Bergh’s motive was to safeguard himself and his family from capture and deportation by making himself useful to the Nazi occupiers, some of whom were “friends” or business acquaintances. The fact that the note states that the list contained addresses and not names makes it more plausible that Van den Bergh used it to guard his own family. Addresses are less personal.
Opportunity: At a time when anyone could have had a motive for betrayal, Van den Bergh possessed something that most other Jews did not: freedom to move about and access to the SD. He was in regular contact with highly placed Nazis. He could have passed on the information he had at any time.
Even though the Van den Bergh theory was clearly the most likely, Vince said he had played the devil’s advocate with all of the key points over and over. Time and again, Van den Bergh emerged as the most likely perpetrator. In fact, it was the only theory that explained Otto’s behavior and the statements he and Miep had made over the years. But before officially concluding anything, Vince wanted to conduct one more test: he wanted to present all of the evidence in the form of a closing argument to Pieter in a manner similar to the way prosecutors present a case at the conclusion of a trial.
Vince and Pieter often found themselves alone in the office after everyone else was gone. “I was sitting at my desk, and Pieter was sitting in Brendan’s chair with the pictures of the SD IV B4 Dutch detectives over his shoulder,” Vince recalled. “I began by reminding him of Melissa Müller’s statement that ‘this is not so much a case unsolved as a secret well kept.’” Then he listed Otto’s actions as they related to the Van den Bergh theory.
The fact that Otto survived the horror of the concentration camps demonstrated his profound will to live. Obviously, he was sustained by his determination to be reunited with his wife and daughters. But his return to Amsterdam was overshadowed by his uncertainty about their fate. To those who encountered Otto at the time, he seemed to be a man purged by fire, walking through Amsterdam as though in a strange dream, searching for news of his children. Finding out that he was his family’s sole survivor must have sent him to a very dark place. Vince hypothesized that Otto’s grief had eventually turned into a mission to find the people responsible for the Annex raid, although his motive was not vengeance; he was seeking accountability and justice. There is evidence of his saying this, both in a letter he sent to his mother in November 1945 and later in the CBS documentary Who Killed Anne Frank?, which aired on December 13, 1964.
But, Vince asked, was it also possible that his search for justice was influenced by the anonymous note he’d received naming Van den Bergh as the betrayer? The note must have occasioned endless questions. Why would Van den Bergh, a fellow Jew, pass on his address to the SD? How did he get the Annex address? What did he receive in return for providing the addresses? Otto must have asked himself if he should go to the authorities with the allegation. He certainly conducted his own investigation. He, Kugler, and Kleiman went to the Bureau of National Security as early as November 1945 to review photos of the Dutch detectives who’d worked for IV B4. Then he, Kugler, and Kleiman went to Amstelveenseweg prison to confront the two men they’d identified as having participated in the raid. Otto even returned with his friend Ab Cauvern to question Detective Gringhuis, and that time he pointedly asked about Van den Bergh. He also made numerous visits to the Dutch collaboration authorities between 1945 and 1948, although some of the visits probably dealt with the inquiries concerning Tonny Ahlers and Job Jansen.
At the time, it must have been a tough decision for Otto not to inform Kugler or Kleiman about the anonymous note, for they, too, were victims of the betrayal and ended up in internment camps. Perhaps Otto thought that if he did tell them, they would immediately contact the collaboration authorities, which he was not prepared to do.