Silberbauer, Karl

(1911–1972)

   The Austrian-born Gestapo officer who on 4 August 1944 led the raid on the secret annex at 263 Prinsengracht, where Anne Frank, her family, and four other Jews had been in hiding for two years and one month. After the war, Silberbauer returned to Austria, where he was jailed for 14 months on charges of having roughed up some communists in 1938. He was later hired by the Vienna police force, where in 1963 Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down from a 1943 telephone directory that listed the names of all the Gestapo officials who had served in occupied Holland. Commenting on Silberbauer, Wiesenthal in his memoirs stated that in comparison with other names in his files, “He was a nobody, a zero. But the figure before the zero was Anne Frank.”