I fear my aunt betrayed Anne Frank – it tormented my family for decades but I found ‘proof’ in secret pages of her diary
‘WHERE are the Jews?’ screamed SS officer Karl Silberbauer on August 4 1944 as he stormed into Opteka Works warehouse at Prinsengracht 263 following a tip-off 30 minutes earlier.
Within moments, Silberbauer and his Nazi comrades pulled back the moveable bookcase and at that moment, secretary Bep Voskuijl, 25, knew it was over for Anne Frank and the seven other frightened Jews hiding upstairs.
For just over two years, Bep was part of a small group that included her father Johan Voskuijl, Miep Gies, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman that had kept the Annexe a secret.
Thousands of Jews went into hiding at the beginning of WWII and businessman Otto Frank, his wife Edith and their two daughters Margot, 16 and Anne, 13, were one such family.
They lived alongside Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste and their 15-year-old son, Peter. In autumn 1942, Fritz Pfeffer joined them.
While rampaging through the Secret Annex, Silberbauer emptied Otto’s briefcase on the floor which held the papers and notebooks which made up the diary of Anne Frank.
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Upon their discovery the ‘hiders’ were sent via train to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Westerbork Transit Camp and in early November, Anne and Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen where Margot and Anne died of typhus fever.
Their mother, Edith died at Auschwitz from starvation - and although Anne and Margot believed that their father had also died, he miraculously survived.
After the war Otto was given the diary that Anne wrote during captivity and published it for the world to read.
Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family is one of the mysteries from the Holocaust. For years, it was assumed that the culprit was employee Willem van Maaren, although this was later disproved.
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In a new book, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex, Bep’s son, Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and author Jeroen De Bruyn look at the evidence surrounding the betrayal.
In an exclusive extract, Joop reveals why he fears that his aunt Nelly could have been the traitor...
FROM the moment the Secret Annex was raided by the Gestapo on August 4, 1944, until her death on May 6, 1983, my mother avoided the subject of World War II Anne Frank.
If she thought about it she would get a migraine, slip into a depression, and spend much of the next day in bed.
For years my mother believed that Willem van Maaren, the warehouse manager, who in 1943 was hired as Johan’s replacement, was the informant. Johan was my grandfather and he built the revolving bookcase.
Yet something changed when Silberbauer was found in Vienna in 1963 by Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal. He revealed that the alleged phone call occurred 30 minutes before the raid when van Maaren was working, and that the informant had the “voice of a young woman.”
Her tempestuous sister Nelly, who was 17 at the start of the Occupation, believed that Jews were "untermenschen" - subhuman creatures.
Anne Frank frequently wrote about my mother and grandfather in her diary - but Nelly appears in a much less heroic light and it was widely known that she had cosied up to the occupiers.
Chilling discovery
She remained a troubled and divisive figure until the day she died in 2001, but my mother always did her best to stay loyal to her sister and tried to minimise conflict between her and other members of the family.
One day in March 2010, came the moment when everything changed for me.
We discovered previously unpublished pages that had been accidentally uploaded to a public server at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies which contained entries from Anne’s diary proving Nelly was not some innocent girl.
She had many contacts with the Nazis and Anne’s original diary showed that in May 1944, after learning of her father’s illness, Nelly who up until that time was working for the Luftwaffe in France had returned home to Amsterdam, which meant she had been living at Lumeijstraat with Bep and Johan at the time of the betrayal in August 1944.
We found two living witnesses who confirmed what Anne had written in her diary — that Nelly had had not just one but several romantic entanglements with Nazi officers during the war.
We also learned that her contacts with the enemy had not been only social.
Before she had gotten her job working for the Luftwaffe in France, she had worked in Amsterdam for the Wehrmacht as one of the militarised women.
Did Nelly offer up her information on the condition that her sister Bep would not be punished after the arrest?
Was that why Silberbauer had left my mother alone after the raid, allowing her to flee, while Miep was harshly interrogated and Kugler and Jo Kleiman were arrested and sent to prison?
Black sheep
Nelly was treated like the black sheep in my family — my grandmother Christina would never sit next to Nelly at family functions, my mother would turn red in her presence and their kisses were fake, my father cursed his sister-in-law until his dying day.
Nobody remembered where Nelly had been on the day of the betrayal. But according to aunt Diny, on the day after, August 5, 1944, she showed up at Lumeijstraat just after dinner where she was attacked by her father.
When he started hitting Nelly, he did not stop. Nelly covered her face with her hands. Johan started kicking her; first, he struck her legs, then her head, over and over again.
Diny remembers that her mother, Christina, just stood back and watched as Nelly cried out, “Please, Father, not my head! Punish me —but not my head.”
My aunt Nelly left the city for Germany almost exactly a month after the raid on Tuesday, September 5, 1944.
Rumours
I tried twice in the late 1990s to talk to Nelly about her past but when I summoned the courage to ask what had happened to her during the war, she said she felt dizzy. Her eyes fluttered, and she nearly lost consciousness.
When she finally regained her composure, she explained that: “This happens to me sometimes. I’ve never been the same since Father kicked me in the head.”
My mother mentioned the possibility that it was Nelly only once in her life, to aunt Diny in the summer of 1960.
She said, ‘Rumour has it that Nelly is the betrayer. As a matter of fact, we think that’s true, but things should be proven first. Otto says he doesn’t want to know anymore.’
Cover-up?
Nelly Voskuijl’s name never surfaced in any of the official police investigations into the betrayal of Anne Frank.
And in editing the diary for publication, Otto chose to cut out all the passages dealing with Nelly, most likely to protect my mother and her family.
After returning to the Netherlands from Germany in 1945, Nelly lived for a time in Groningen, where she worked first as an usher in a movie theatre and then in a café preparing snacks.
She never talked about the past, although sometimes she would say things that indicated regret about the choices she had made as a very young woman. “I can’t believe I worked for that pig Hitler,” she once told Diny.
The last time I saw Nelly was in 1998. I picked her up at home in Koudum to take her to lunch.
The last word I got from her was in 2000. She sent me a postcard, with no return address, signing it simply: “An embrace, Nel.”
At that point she was in her late 70s and in poor health; she had recently moved into an assisted-living facility.
One day in 2001, she fell down a flight of stairs in her apartment and suffered a catastrophic head injury.
Her body was discovered several days later.
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Hearing the news, I felt such pity and sorrow - this is the kind of death you wish on no one.
This is an edited extract by Natasha Harding taken from The Last Secret of the Secret Annex: The untold story of Anne Frank, her silent protector and a family betrayal, by Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn (Simon & Schuster, £20).
