It is stated in the movie that anyone that hides Jews would receive the same punishment as the Jews. Does this mean that Kraler and Miep were sent to concentration camps and/or received some form of punishment? In the movie, it appears as though nothing happened to them. I'm confused.
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Miep Gies died January 11th at the age of 100 and it says in obit that she escaped punishment because the presiding officer was from her home town and apparently he decided not ot arrest her...
FROM OBIT
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She recounted the following in an interview:
Gies said she never knew who betrayed the Franks. Suspicion fell on a co-worker, she said, but an official investigation found no evidence. As for her own fate, Gies said she was lucky that the supervising officer was from her hometown of Vienna.
“When he came to interrogate me, I jumped up and said, as cheerfully as I could, ‘You are from Vienna? I am from Vienna, too,’” Gies said in an interview with students published on the Scholastic magazine Web site in 1997. “Although he got very angry initially, it made him obviously decide not to arrest me. Apart from the shock, the fear and my heart-breaking concerns regarding the fate of my friends, nothing happened to me.”
Kraler was a composite of two men, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, both of whom were arrested. Kleiman spent six weeks in a work camp until the Red Cross intervened to have him freed. He returned to work at Opekta, the company Otto Frank owned until the Nazis forced all Jews to sell their businesses to Aryans. He suffered a fatal stroke at his desk in 1959.
Kugler spent seven months in a work camp, from which he escaped in March 1945. He made his way back to his Dutch hometown, which was liberated by Canadian armed forces. In 1955 he moved to Canada and lived there until his death in 1981.
Miep was also a composite of two women, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, neither of whom were arrested. During the war "Bep" took and passed correspondence courses--at least, that was her name on the assignments. They were actually done by Margot Frank.
Had the fugitives been betrayed earlier in the war, all four of the helpers probably would have been executed. But by August 1944, all but the most fanatical German knew that Germany was losing the war, and the Dutch people would not have been intimidated into believing otherwise by the murders of four anti-Nazis.