Otto was closer to Miep than to any of the other helpers. Vince concluded that it would have made sense for him to inform her of the note’s contents, and he probably did so sometime after the 1947–48 investigation and well before the Schnabel book came out in 1958. Reading Miep’s statements to investigators in 1947, it’s clear that she still believed Van Maaren was the culprit, but when she was interviewed later by Schnabel, she was much more circumspect. By that time, she and Otto knew about Van den Bergh.
Otto was making inquiries about Van den Bergh between late 1945 and 1949. He would have known that, during that time, Van den Bergh was being targeted by the Jewish Honor Court for his membership on the board of the Jewish Council. This poses a question: Why didn’t Otto present the contents of the note to the court, since it was Jews judging the actions of Jews, something quite different from the collaboration investigations? Perhaps as he followed the court’s proceedings, Otto was waiting for others to come forward with similar anonymous notes as the tipster had referred to Van den Bergh’s list of addresses. Since that did not happen, Otto may have felt uncertain about how to proceed.
After the Jewish Honor Court’s verdict, which was only mildly punitive to Van den Bergh, Otto might again have considered the consequences of revealing the existence of the note. And if he learned that Van den Bergh was suffering from cancer and would soon leave Amsterdam for treatment in London, would he likely have pursued the case?
In the years following Van den Bergh’s death, the astonishing success of Anne’s diary, play, and movie dominated Otto’s life. By staying busy and focusing on other things, it was probably easier to assign the uncertainty concerning the betrayer of the Annex to the recesses of his mind. The world knew the story of the Annex only up until Anne’s last entry, made on August 1, 1944, and so far, there was no public curiosity regarding the betrayer. But that changed in the mid-1950s, when Otto was convinced by the German publisher of the diary to collaborate with Ernst Schnabel on a book that would tell the full story of the Annex before, during, and after the raid.
Such a book might help dispel the rumors that Anne’s diary was fake. By agreeing to collaborate on the book, Otto and the helpers hoped to prove to the world that Anne Frank was real, the diary was real, and so were the people whom Anne wrote about. But Schnabel’s book also provided information about the raid and clues as to who might have caused it, thus unintentionally opening a Pandora’s box. Otto had asked Miep to disguise the name of the SD officer Silberbauer. Why? The only reasonable explanation is that he feared that Silberbauer might know who made the anonymous phone call and might point to Van den Bergh—and by now Otto did not want his name revealed.
Sometime just prior to or immediately after Schnabel’s book was published, Otto decided to take a bold but very risky step about the anonymous note he’d kept secret all these years. He knew that Schnabel’s book contained information that would cause the news media, along with readers, to question him or the others about the raid. Clearly, he decided not to destroy the note. Instead, he found someone to whom to entrust it. In case he were ever confronted about its existence, he could truthfully respond that he no longer had it. One might have expected him to choose Kleiman, but he gave the note to his friend, the notary Jakob van Hasselt, who also happened to be a friend and business contact of Van den Bergh.
Looking at it from multiple perspectives, Vince and the Cold Case Team speculated that, without irrefutable proof that Van den Bergh was the betrayer, Otto chose never to publicly mention the name or the note. But by cooperating with Schnabel to prove the validity of the diary, he actually created the possibility that Van den Bergh’s name might surface if the SD officer were located. So he went out of his way to make it harder for even someone as committed as Simon Wiesenthal to find Silberbauer.
Otto had been involved in several well-publicized civil suits to disprove claims that Anne’s diary was fake, but when Wiesenthal tried to do the same thing, Otto chose not to help. At first, the Cold Case Team was puzzled by that contradiction, but it later came to make sense. Otto knew he could defend the diary without exposing the true name of the SD officer, but he wouldn’t be able to control Wiesenthal, who already had a dogged reputation as a Nazi hunter, if he were to find it. And although it did take him six years, Wiesenthal eventually did locate Silberbauer, at which point the world press descended on Otto and the helpers. Only then did Otto admit he had known the arresting officer’s name, but he said that Wiesenthal had never contacted him for the information. He also implied that the SD officer would not remember much after so long a time.4