When I was in Amsterdam researching my third novel, a writer who had known Otto Frank told me that in 1963 he’d found out who had betrayed his family, including his daughter Anne Frank, to the Nazis. I wasn’t expecting to hear this and was startled that the writer, Mies Bouhuys, had brought it up, especially since she said it was a great secret.

Over the past year and a half, the secret has become a matter of heated controversy, with books by two Canadian writers naming two different men they believe betrayed the Frank family and four fellow Jews, causing the deaths of all but Otto Frank. The renewed controversy brought me back to what Mies Bouhuys told me more than 20 years ago–which I bring up hesitantly and with some trepidation.

I had travelled to the Netherlands to discuss the psychology of Dutch citizens who had collaborated with the Germans when they occupied Holland during the Second World War. My plan was to create a fictional collaborator in my novel, The Corner Garden, for reasons I wrote about earlier. A Dutch writer I knew told me before I set out that of course no one would admit to having collaborated with the Nazis. I needed to speak with former members of the resistance, whose survival depended on knowing who the collaborators were and how they were likely to behave. He kindly offered some introductions. 

One of the people he introduced me to was Mies Bouhuys, who had been born in 1927. This made her thirteen when Hitler’s army occupied had Holland in 1940 and began its murderous program of sending Dutch Jews to concentration camps in Eastern Europe. Both her father and brother had worked for the resistance in their home town of Weesp, her father having been dismissed by the Nazis from his position as a Protestant minister after speaking out against the fascists’ treatment of Jews. I met Bouhuys in her house in Amsterdam in April, 2000, after I’d been vetted by the Dutch writer we both knew, Herman Divendal, and someone at the Resistance Museum whose name I didn’t write down. Bouhuys was on the board of the Resistance Museum and the Anne Frank House, and she’d written a biography of Anne Frank. On the day I visited, she kindly gave me tea in cups identical to ones I told her we had at home. The coincidence seemed to delight her. 

I wondered at the time if so small a detail had turned her as confidential as she became. She answered my questions about collaborators very fully, as well as describing with a writer’s eye what Canadian soldiers would have seen when they liberated Holland in 1945. I’ll write about these things another time, since what came next is more important. 

After we had spoken for a while, Bouhuys veered off to talk about her friend Otto Frank and a woman she called a very good friend, Miep Gies, one of the people who had hidden the Frank family and four other Jews in an Amsterdam warehouse at Prinsengracht 263. I hadn’t asked her about them, although I’d recently re-read The Diary of Anne Frank as well as Anne Frank: A Biography by Melissa Müller, along with many other books about the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. This meant I knew that Otto Frank had run an import business in the warehouse before the war, and that there had been an annex off the back where he and his family had hidden. The Secret Annex, Anne Frank called it in her famous diary, which she wrote and rewrote until they were betrayed after 25 months in hiding. All eight were sent to concentration camps, where everyone but Otto Frank was murdered by the Nazis or died of malnutrition and disease. Many theories were floated over the years about the identity of the person who betrayed them, but it had remained a mystery, at least publicly.

Then the two bombshell books came out last year. By that time, 22 years had passed since I’d spoken with Mies Bouhuys, and I remembered only that she had told me Otto Frank hadn’t rested until he knew who had betrayed his family. This struck me as entirely logical, then and now. I remembered that she told me he’d found out in 1963. Both Otto Frank and Miep Gies had told her this, Bouhuys said. By that time, The Diary of Anne Frank was one of the most famous books in the world, and Otto Frank had told her that he wouldn’t reveal the name of the man responsible—she said it was a man—because he had four children who would suffer if their father’s betrayal were known, even though they were innocent of any crime. Otto Frank was a good man, she told me emphatically. A saint. She used that word.

Memory is important here, and the passage of time. Also the fact that Mies Bouhuys died in 2008 and I never went back to her to either confirm or question what she had said, nor did I do any further research into the betrayal. 

Because there’s also something I didn’t remember until I looked out my journal of that trip a few days ago: that Mies Bouhuys had told me the name of the man she said Otto Frank was certain had betrayed his family, and gave me the details of how he’d found out. I wrote it down, and since the name didn’t mean anything to me, over the intervening years I not only forgot the name, I forgot I’d ever heard it. Mainly I remembered that Bouhuys asked me not to repeat what she’d said, and I haven’t said anything until now, after reading the two books by two Canadian writers.

The first is non-fiction, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Written by acclaimed academic, poet and biographer Rosemary Sullivan, it centres on a police-style search for the person who had betrayed the Franks and their friends to the Nazis. In 2016, Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens had started work on the project with journalist Pieter van Twisk, planning to produce both a film and book about a forensic-style search for whoever was responsible. They eventually assembled a team of at least 22 historians and researchers to treat the betrayal as a cold case crime, bringing in retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke to head the investigation. 

With the use of both traditional police methods and AI analysis, over six years the team identified about 40 people who might have turned in the Franks and their friends. Pankoke’s cold-case mantra was knowledge, motive and opportunity, meaning the team needed to find someone who knew that Jews were hidden in the warehouse, who had a motive for betraying them to the Nazis, and who had the opportunity to do so. In other words, they couldn’t have died, been sent to a concentration camp or gone into hiding themselves very long before August 4, 1944, when the Gestapo entered the warehouse on Prinsengracht and seized the people inside. 

In 2019, the team opened their process to Rosemary Sullivan, who began researching and writing the book, bringing with her the subtle knowledge she had gained of complicity and betrayal from her award-winning books, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (2006) about artists and Jews hidden in the south of France during World War 2, and Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (2015). I know Rosemary, although I haven’t seen her since before the pandemic or talked to her about her book, which is as clearly and elegantly written as anyone who knows her work would expect. I have no idea what she feels about the controversy that immediately surrounded the book when it was published, although I have every sympathy for the position she now finds herself in–which, after all, comes because she reported on the findings of the cold case team rather than because she was behind the investigation.

As she writes, the team gradually narrowed down the suspect list to four people, and finally came up with someone they felt certain was guilty of betraying Anne Frank, her family and friends. This was a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh. Team members felt he’d been forced to betray fellow Jews hidden in Prinsengracht to the Nazis—or at least, had given them the address—in order to save his family. The team’s conclusion ignited such a storm among historians in the Netherlands that the book was pulled from bookstores by its Dutch publisher. Publishers elsewhere have stood by it, but the team’s conclusion remains the subject of widespread debate.

The second book published last year about the Franks offered up a different suspect, an equally shocking one. Newfoundland writer Wayne Johnson has written a novel, The Mystery of Right and Wrong, about a brutal but charming man—is psychopath the right word?—who was originally from the Netherlands. He sexually abused his four daughters and was a suspect in at least two unsolved murders of young women. The man also alternately boasted to his family that he was the one who had turned in the people in the secret annex to the Nazis, and claimed he had been a member of the Dutch resistance. In a 14-page author’s note at the end of the book, Johnson says the novel is based on fact. His late father-in-law, Jan Langhout, had often boasted to his family about being the one to betray Anne Frank, as well as claiming he’d been active in the resistance. This became a secret kept by his four daughters, and their guilt about it damaged them profoundly.

I remember hearing Wayne Johnson interviewed on the radio when the book came out, and wondered again about Mies Bouhuys’s motive for telling me that Otto Frank knew the name of his betrayer. Johnson said that Jan Langholt had four daughters; I always remembered Bouhuys saying that the betrayer had four children. He also spoke about Langholt having lived in Canada. Maybe Bouhuys knew the betrayer had moved to Canada and wondered if I was a relative, a daughter seeking information. Maybe she was feeling me out by telling me the secret, hoping to learn what I might know. 

Then I didn’t read the books, either Johnson’s or Sullivan’s, not until last month. 

My reason for doing so now is as insignificant as a set of identical tea cups. With a new novel out this fall, I’m updating the covers on four of my backlist books, including The Corner Garden. This means I re-read The Corner Garden for the first time in years, and grew interested in reading the latest books about life in the Netherlands during the war, bringing myself up to date. First I read a book released this year called The Diary Keepers, which I wrote about earlier. That brought to mind the books by Rosemary Sullivan and Wayne Johnson. All three books speak to each other, and the ones by Johnson and Sullivan quietly argue. 

While reading Sullivan’s book, I came across a telling paragraph about one of the suspects in the betrayal, a Dutch fascist named Tonny Ahlers whom the cold case team investigated and ruled out. He was first mentioned in a biography of Otto Frank by British writer Carol Ann Lee. Writes Sullivan: “In her book, Lee noted that according to Ahlers’s family members, he liked to boast that he himself was the betrayer of the by then famous hiders in the Annex. It is a peculiar, though perhaps sadly not uncommon, psychosis to want to claim fame as a villain. Even Ahlers’s family didn’t really believe him.”

The problem for Wayne Johnson’s wife and her sisters was that they did believe their father, and it hurt them terribly, even though it’s probably not true. While I’m neither a historian nor a cop, I believe what Sullivan writes about people who insist that they are giants, either heroes or villains, when like most people their lives are small and human, god help us all. I wonder if Johnson’s family might read Sullivan’s book, at least this one short paragraph, and take some solace. 

But what about the claim in Sullivan’s book that Arnold van den Bergh turned in the Jews in the annex, even though he was Jewish himself? The team says it found a note naming van den Bergh as the betrayer, one sent to Otto Frank not long after the war. They also claim van den Bergh had close ties to the Nazis, and that he had access to a list of addresses where Jews were in hiding. When he and his family were in danger of being sent to a concentration camp, he turned over the address to a high-ranking Nazi contact to save his family. The team doesn’t blame him. Who wouldn’t have done the same thing?

Once down the Dutch rabbit hole, I read not only Sullivan’s book, but a refutation of its claims by a team of six Dutch historians, headed by Professor Dr. Bart Wallet and Dr. Petra van den Boomgaard, along with the response to the historians by the cold case team.

The historians argue that many unproven notes flew around the Netherlands after the war, with people naming others as collaborators in revenge or self-defence, not always accurately. They point out that the note contains an allegation that van den Bergh betrayed the people in the annex but offers no proof. The historians say the note could have been sent to Otto Frank by a disgruntled acquaintance of van den Bergh’s settling a score, revenge for some grudge originating in his practice as a notary. No other known document names van den Bergh as the betrayer, and the historians dispute claims by the cold case team that he had high-ranking Nazi contacts. Instead, they call him a good man, and say that as a notary, he forged documents for Jews trying to avoid being sent to the camps.

Yet to me, at the centre of the historians’ refutation are statements made by van den Bergh’s daughters when they filed their WUV (Victims of Persecution Benefits Act) application after the war. They say that their parents left Amsterdam in January or February of 1944, and lived in hiding with them and several other relatives in the Dutch town of Laren. The historians claim the van den Berghs were brought there separately, probably by one of their contacts the resistance, a German communist named Albert Schlösser. According to the historians, Schlösser “played an important role in the National Organisation for Aid to Those in Hiding (LO), was the printer of the illegal newspapers Vrij Nederland, Ons Vaderland and Trouw, and was one of the central figures in the underground in Laren (NH).” At the time, he was the lover of Arnold van den Bergh’s niece, Hester van den Bergh, who was also hiding in Laren. The historians say he remained a friend of the family after the war.

The fact they were hiding in Laren is confirmed in part by a diary entry found by the historians. It was made by a local painter named Gerard Huijeser, who was married to a Jewish woman. Huijsser writes on March 11, 1945 that he’d had dinner with the van den Bergh family, who lived in the guesthouse of a woman who bravely hid Jews. He lived next door and the woman trusted him not to betray her or her guests. Together with other documents cited by the historians, these statements suggest that van den Bergh had already been in hiding with his family for several months before the secret annex was betrayed on August 4, 1944. Since and he and his family were safe by then, they point out that van den Bergh had no need to betray anybody, and certainly not to go against his conscience and betray eight fellow Jews. 

In their rebuttal to the historians, the cold case team agrees that that van den Bergh disappeared from Amsterdam in February, 1944, and that they didn’t succeed in definitively tracing him afterwards, although they believe he stayed in a castle protected by a high-ranking Nazi sympathizer, a man they say he knew well, and with whom he had unsavoury financial dealings. The team acknowledges the daughters’ statements and the diary entry, but claims it’s possible van den Bergh slipped the address of the annex to the Nazis before he disappeared from Amsterdam. He would only have had an address where Jews were or had been hiding, they say, not the names of people there. They feel this would have made the betrayal slightly easier on his conscience.

Yet if the Nazis had the address early in 1944, it’s hard to understand why they waited until August to raid the secret annex. Again, I have to say that I’m neither a cop nor a historian, but I would set the chances of van den Bergh’s guilt at less than the 75 or 85 per cent claimed at different times by the cold case team—which, as New York-based freelance journalist Sarah Weinman points out in a Toronto Star opinion piece, isn’t enough to get a guilty verdict in a criminal trial.

Writes Weinman, the cold case announcement of van den Bergh’s complicity “is nowhere close to an ending. Too many questions arise as a result, most of them deeply discomfiting. The first is whether it is even possible to prove that van den Bergh was the betrayer. Pankoke, speaking with Jon Wertheim of “60 Minutes,” called his guilt “85 per cent certain”—enough reasonable doubt that, if a trial was even possible, a conviction would not be likely. Erik Somers, a historian with NIOD, the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, praised the work but questioned the conclusion, specifically why the team made the anonymous note so central to its investigation. And Ronald Leopold, the executive director of Anne Frank House, was even more emphatic: “No, I don’t think we can say that a mystery has been solved now. I think it’s an interesting theory that the team came up with.”

Then there’s the name Mies Bouhuys gave me, and the question of why she told me, and whether she told me the truth. 

To be continued…

The historian’s paper, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Refutation; Critical Analysis of the Argumentation and Use of Historical Sources by Prof. dr. Bart Wallet, Dr. Petra van den Boomgaard, Dr. Bart van der Boom, Dr. Raymund Schütz and Dr. Laurien Vastenhout Aaldrik Hermans MA is available here.

The reply from the Cold Case team, Formal defence and final verdict of the Cold Case Team with respect to the historians’ criticism, by Pieter van Twist, Head of Research, is available here.