I’ve been taking long and winding roads in my reading lately, and as I wrote last week, the latest one brought me back to the name of the man I was told had betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis. A Dutch writer told me his name, and I’d written it in a journal I kept during a trip to Amsterdam in April, 2000. The writer, Mies Bouhuys, was a friend of Anne’s father Otto Frank, and I still don’t know why she told me. (That’s her in the picture.)

I was starting work on my third novel at the time, The Corner Garden, and planned to create a Dutch character living in Canada who had collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. I wanted to talk about the psychology of collaboration. Nobody was going to admit they’d been a collaborator, so I talked to people who had worked in the anti-Nazi resistance, and who needed to know everything they could about collaborators. It was a matter of life and death.

Mies Bouhuys’s father and brother had been in the resistance, and she sat on the boards of the Anne Frank House and the Resistance Museum. After giving me a great many details about the occupation, she began unexpectedly to speak about the man who betrayed the Frank family and four other Jews who had been hiding in a secret annex to a warehouse in Amsterdam at 263 Prinsengracht. They’d been there for 25 months when someone slipped the address to the Nazis and the annex was raided. The eight people found inside were sent to concentration camps, where all but Otto Frank died, murdered in gas chambers or shot, or dying from typhus and malnutrition.  

Here I want to emphasize a point about memory. Re-reading these journal entries showed me that I’d forgotten a great deal of what Mies Bouhuys had told me 22 years before. I remembered that she’d said that Otto Frank was her friend, and that she was close to one of the women who had helped the eight people hidden in the annex, Miep Gies, who was later named Righteous Among Nations. Mies Bouhuys told me that Otto Frank hadn’t rested until he found out who had betrayed his family, and that he’d never made the name public because the man had four children and they would suffer. I didn’t remember that she’d actually given me the man’s name, since it didn’t mean much to me, and in any case she’d asked me to keep it secret. So what does that say about other people’s memories of the war, of collaboration and betrayal? Even in the year 2000, this was all nearly half a century in the past.

The man’s name was Willem van Maaren, and he had long been suspected of betraying the people in the annex to the Nazis. Mies Bouhuys told me Otto Frank had always wondered if van Maaren was responsible, but he had no proof for many years. Van Maaren was a warehouseman employed by Frank’s import company, which fronted the annex where eight Jews were hiding, including Anne Frank and her family. Van Maaren was well-known as a thief who stole both money and goods from the warehouse, a black marketeer who was known to sneak around the building at night. He told other people working in the warehouse that he heard whispers from the annex and asked questions about who was up there. Van Maaren left pencils or sticks of wood precariously on the edges of desks and flour on the floor to try to find evidence of night-time intruders (other than himself). He wasn’t fired from his job because he was known to be anti-Nazi. He was also hiding someone himself: his son, who hadn’t reported to the Germans for work duty, as young Dutch men were could be called up to do. 

However, Bouhuys told me, Otto Frank found proof of van Maaren’s guilt in 1963. That’s when a German from the Nazi security service was brought before an investigation, SS Oberscharführer Karl Josef Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD. He had led the raid on the Annex, and after a long search, he’d been located by Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal. Otto Frank gave a statement during the investigation, saying that Silberbauer had been condescending but acted correctly during the arrests at the annex. This was part of the reason why Silberbauer was let off. Frank said publicly that he hadn’t spoken to Silberbauer during the investigation, but Mies Bouhuys told me that he had.

“Of course he did,” she said. Why would he pass up an opportunity to speak to a man who must have known at least something about who had betrayed his family? I wrote what she said in my journal. “He asked him, ‘Did van Maaren tell you?’ Yes, the Nazi replied, and provided details.

“But Mies said Otto Frank decided not to make this public for the sake of the thief’s children… This man had four children, and life for the innocent children of collaborators has been—and is—awful in Holland. There was a famous case where a rising young actor stopped getting work when it was discovered that his father had been a Dutch Nazi official, the head of what I think she called the Nazi-run General Workers’ Union. He committed suicide at 35. So Otto Frank decided for the sake of the children not to make it public that their father had effectively killed Anne Frank, who by then was famous and revered.”

As I wrote last week, one of the books about the annex published last year was The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Canadian biographer and academic Rosemary Sullivan. It’s a controversial book, its conclusion debated by a team of Dutch academics headed by Prof. Dr. Bart Wallet and Dr. Petra van den Boomgaard, who published their refutation of the theory it espouses here.

Despite the controversy, the book is meticulously written and the investigation it chronicles both thorough and heartfelt. A team of more than 20 researchers headed by a Dutch filmmaker and a retired FBI agent set out in 2016 to find who had betrayed Anne Frank, and they considered van Maaren one of their suspects. Over six years, they investigated 40 possible perpetrators, and spent considerable time looking into van Maaren. However, they dismissed him for the same reason that the helpers in the warehouse did: he was a thief but also a strong anti-Nazi. The cold case team found no evidence to support the rumour that his son had been ordered to report for work duty with the Nazis and was in hiding after failing to comply. However, they also note that by 1944, records about work duty were poorly kept and the rumour might have been true. If so, they considered this was another reason for van Maaren to avoid any contact with the Nazis, and why he wasn’t guilty of telling them about the annex.

Yet as the situation with the son’s status demonstrates, records can get sketchy in wartime, and so much of what happens anywhere at any time isn’t written down. It’s possible that van Maaren was picked up for one of his crimes and tried to get out of it by telling the arresting cops he knew where Jews were hiding. He could then have been handed up the chain of command to Silberbauer and given him the Prinsengracht address, or at least spoken to someone senior who could have told Silberbauer the address and where the tip came from. There doesn’t seem to be any written proof that van Maaren was picked up, but there’s no proof that he wasn’t, either.

And there’s this. It says in the book–released more than 20 years after I spoke with Mies Bouyhus–that the cold case team came to feel both Otto Frank and Miep Gies learned who had turned in the people hiding in the annex sometime around 1963. The team also felt that around this time they grew intent on hiding a name.

Sullivan reports that chief cold case investigator Vince Pankoke, a retired FBI agent, was struck by something told to him by Anne Frank’s biographer Melissa Müller. Müller’s book, Anne Frank: A Biography was published in 1998. Müller had interviewed Miep Gies, who had remained close to Otto Frank. He lived with Mies and her husband for seven years after the war, and they remained in touch all his life. 

Müller told Vince Pankoke “she’d managed to interview Miep Gies, whom she described as a ‘tough interview… It was hard to get information out of her.’ She strongly suspected that both Miep and Otto knew much more about the circumstances of the raid but for some reason were unwilling to share that information. 

“Vince said that it was as if alarm bells went off. The question that had been dogging the team all along was: What had changed between the 1948 investigation (by Dutch officials into the betrayal) and the one in 1963-64? The answer was not much—except for the way that Otto Frank behaved. In 1948, he’d been intent on finding out who’d betrayed the Annex residents. By the second investigation, he was barely present. At most, he was watching quietly from the sidelines. He and the helpers no longer seemed convinced of Van Maaren’s guilt. In several interviews Miep Gies even said that she did not believe that Van Maaren was the betrayer. A key puzzle now became: Why did Otto Frank change his mind? What does he know now that he doesn’t know before?

“Or, as Melissa Müller put it, something happened that made the identity of the betrayer ‘less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept.’”

If Mies Bouhuys told me the real story, what changed is that Otto Frank spoke to Silberbauer in 1963 and confirmed that van Maaren had indeed betrayed his family and friends. She didn’t say this, but it strikes me as possible that he gave his lukewarm endorsement of Silberbauer in return for the information about van Maaren. And if Mies Giep went on to repeatedly deny that van Maaren was responsible, she could have been doing as Frank asked in protecting the man’s children. That’s a lot of conjecture, but the cold team reached their theory about their suspect, a notary named Arnold van den Bergh, on the basis of a great deal of conjecture themselves. And in fact, they also note at one point that “Otto always said he didn’t want to harm the man’s children,” even though they ended up with a different suspect.

I don’t know if the name Mies Bouhuys gave me is correct. Maybe she was deliberately misled by Miep Gies, even though she said they were close. Maybe Silberbauer lied to Otto Frank and he decided to believe him, wanting the painful search to end. Maybe Silberbauer was the one who wanted to end his pain by giving Otto Frank the real name. Motives are always hard to fathom, memories falter and documents get lost, presuming they existed in the first place.

There’s also that other small mystery: Why Mies Bouhuys told me all this, “a secret well kept.” She died in 2008, so I can never ask her, although once again I can think of any number of reasons. The man’s children could have been dead by then, or well hidden under other names, and Mies might have decided there was no longer any overwhelming reason not to pass on the secret. She could have been bursting with the need to tell, then backtracked by asking me not to make it public. I half got that impression. It’s also possible she was misleading me, too. I have no idea why, but that’s the way this has usually been handled.

Yet. Yet. Yet. She might also have told me the truth.

One thing I feel sure of: that Otto Frank kept the guilty man’s name secret to protect his children, who would have been damaged profoundly. Wayne Johnson’s latest novel, The Mystery of Right and Wrong, circles around this type of damage, and the type of person who would cause it. His antagonist is a Dutch man living for a time in Canada, a devious and charming bully who claims that he was the one to betray Anne Frank. He also claims that he was a fighter in the anti-Nazi resistance, and we learn that he’s a suspect in the death of at least two young women. Meanwhile he abuses his four daughters miserably, and the novel follows their difficult lives in the aftermath of his multiple betrayals.

As I wrote earlier, Johnson says in a 14-page afterward that the Dutch character is closely based on his late father-in-law, Jan Langholt. This makes his 537-page novel a study of the trauma suffered by the children of someone they thought had betrayed Anne Frank. It’s powerful, and very hard to read, and as I said last week, I think Jan Langholt was lying. But his daughters believed him and were they were badly damaged by his claims. No doubt they would have suffered even more if the claims had been made public.

So why am I writing this? Partly because so many years have passed that the sting of any new allegations is diminished. Partly because van Maaren has always been a suspect, and I doubt that his family will suffer any more from what Mies Bouhuys told me, whether or not it’s correct. And, finally, because the cold case team named a new suspect whose descendants are indeed facing repercussions they’ve never had to deal with before, and this might give the public even more reason to think twice about what was said.

None of the suspects’ children did anything to Anne Frank and her family. Their grandchildren, if they have any, bear not the slightest trace of guilt. They have to deal with trauma, maybe, after the war and the Holocaust. Trauma tends to reverberate down through the generations. According to the Bible, “The sins of the father are visited on his sons.”

That, at least, is true.

Part two of four.

Lesley Krueger is the author of The Corner Garden, which is set partly in wartime Holland.