Karl Silberbauer
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Karl Josef Silberbauer (June 21, 1911 – 1972) held the rank of SS - Oberscharfuehrer (Sergeant Major) in the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) in the Netherlands. He arrested Anne Frank and her family in their hiding place in 1944. [1]
[edit] Life
Born in Vienna, he served in the Military of Austria before following his father into the police force in 1935. Four years later he joined the Gestapo, moved to the Netherlands and in 1943 transferred to the Sicherheitsdienst in The Hague.
On August 4, 1944 he was instructed by a superior officer to investigate a tip-off that Jews were being hidden at Prinsengracht 263. He took a few officers with him and upon arrival interrogated Victor Kugler about the entrance to the hiding place. Miep Gies was also interrogated but allowed to stay on the premises after Kugler and his associate Johannes Kleiman, together with Otto Frank, Edith Frank-Holländer, Margot Frank, Anne Frank, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer were arrested and taken to the Gestapo headquarters. From there they were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Of the ten, only Otto Frank, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleimann survived.
Silberbauer returned to Vienna in April 1945 to begin serving fourteen months in prison for his activities during World War II. He was reinstated by the Viennese police force in 1954, two years after the English language publication of Anne Frank's diary.
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's search for the man who had arrested Anne Frank began in 1958 when he was challenged by Holocaust deniers to prove the existence of Anne Frank by finding the Nazi who caught her. His name had been disclosed in 1948 during the initial investigation into the betrayal and arrest of Anne Frank, her family, the four people she hid with, and two of their protectors. Two of the Dutch Sicherheitsdienst detectives who had assisted with the raid were identified by Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Miep Gies. The two men said they remembered nothing about it, other than the name of their superior, Karl Silberbauer.
Wiesenthal requested the help of Anne's father, Otto Frank, who refused on the grounds that their betrayer, not the arresting officer should bear the blame. Wiesenthal disagreed, and in October 1963 after two years eliminating fourteen other Austrians with the same name he tracked Silberbauer to Vienna. Silberbauer was suspended from the police force pending an investigation into undeclared Nazi activities during the war and when the Dutch media learned of his whereabouts they descended on his home and he admitted to them that he had arrested Anne Frank. The story was broken to the world's media on November 11, 1963 and an investigation into the identity of the betrayer was re-opened.
Silberbauer's memories of the arrest were notably vivid - he in particular recalled Otto and Anne Frank. When he asked Otto Frank how long they had been in hiding, Frank answered "Two years and one month". Silberbauer was incredulous, until Otto stood Anne against the marks made on the wall to measure her height since they had arrived in the annexe, showing that she had grown even since the last mark had been made. Silberbauer said that she "looked like the pictures in the books, but a little older, and prettier. 'You have a lovely daughter', I said to Mr. Frank" ("Roses from the Earth", pp. 245-246). Silberbauer had not been told by his superiors who had made the tip-off, only that it came from a 'reliable source', and was unable to provide any information that would further a police investigation. His superior officer, Julius Dettmann, who had originally taken the call committed suicide immediately after the war. The Viennese authorities and the Amsterdam police could not produce enough evidence of criminal misdemeanor to prosecute Silberbauer himself, and given Otto Frank's crucial declaration that Silberbauer had obviously acted on orders and behaved correctly and without cruelty during the arrest, the judicial investigation was dropped. His suspension from the police force was lifted and he returned to work.
Silberbauer died in 1972.
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources
- The Critical Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank, edited by David Barnow, 2003
- Anne Frank House: a museum with a story, Anne Frank Foundation 1999
- Roses from the Earth, Carol Ann Lee
