Lena van Bladeren-Hartog

Who was Lena van Bladeren-Hartog?

Lena van Bladeren-Hartog (died 1963) was the wife of van Maaren's assistant, Lammert Hartog, and was employed in the Opekta offices as a cleaner in 1944. Kleiman reported in an official investigation that in June 1944 he was told by a friend, Anna Genot, that Lena told her she knew that people were being hidden at 263 Prinsengracht. When questioned later Anna and her husband Petrus claimed they'd also known about the hiding place since 1942, when they were cleaners in the building and noticed the large quantities of milk and bread being delivered. Lammert stated in an investigation that van Maaren had told him that Jews were being hidden in the building and it is possible that he told his wife, who passed it to the Genots. In her 1998 biography of Anne Frank,[1] Melissa Muller went as far as to name Lena van Bladeren-Hartog as the informant, and this subsequently represented in the televised mini-series based on the book. The claim was dismissed in 2003 after an investigation by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation after Carol Ann Lee contradicted the assertion in her biography of Otto Frank. Lee quotes a 2000 interview with Miep Gies, who also dismissed the claim.