7 – Karl Silberbauer
Our next fugitive is nowhere near as high-ranking as Adolf Eichmann or Martin Bormann. He was not as furtively sought as Heinrich Müller or Alois Brunner and he was not as widely despised as the likes of Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie. His name – Karl Silberbauer – is not one that most people will know and his career in the Nazi Party was far from exceptional, in the sense that he never amounted to more than the rank of staff sergeant within the Gestapo.
What makes Karl Silberbauer famous, however, was his role in one of the most noted tales of the war. He was a sergeant in the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and thus the man who ordered the raid on the house of Anne Frank. Born in Vienna, Austria, Silberbauer took a relatively well-traveled path for men of his standing: he joined the Austrian Army for national service and, on leaving at the age of 24, followed in his father’s footsteps to become a police officer. He joined the Gestapo after the Anschluss between Austria and Germany in 1939 and was posted to the Netherlands, initially to the Hague.
In August 1944, he was ordered by his superior to raid the house on Prinsengracht in the center of Amsterdam that had been housing the Frank family, in secret, for the previous two years. He broke in and arrested the family, as well as the Dutchmen who had been protecting them. He turned over the house, taking money and tipped out Otto Frank’s papers, including the manuscript of his daughter’s diary. The family was split up: initially sent to Bergen-Belsen, Anne and her sister Margot were sent to Auschwitz, where they would die in early 1945. Otto would survive and later publish Anne’s diary, which had been kept safe by Miep Gies, a woman who had helped to shelter the family.
Silberbauer would spend just over a year in prison for excesses against communists committed during his time in the Viennese police, but his life in Amsterdam was unknown until the 1960s. Miep Gies, a fellow Viennese, identified the arresting officer of the Frank family as having a Viennese accent and from that, it was discovered who he was. Silberbauer had spent the intervening 20 years as a police officer in Germany, often exploiting his SS credentials to help spy on neo-Nazis. Though the Vienna police knew who he was, they did nothing to expose him, as they feared the bad press that would inevitably come from having employed a former Nazi for so long.
He was eventually uncovered in 1963, and it took famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to discover Silberbauer and give his name to the Dutch media for something to be done. When asked by reporters if he had been the man to arrest Anne Frank, Silberbauer owned up straight away. The Austrian authorities declared that, as he had just arrested the Frank family under orders, he was not a war criminal and thus could not be prosecuted. Otto Frank spoke on his behalf, telling a Vienna police inquiry that he had “only done his duty and behaved correctly. The only thing I ask is not to have to see the man again.”