Weinreb grew up in Scheveningen, to which his family had move in 1916, and became notorious for selling a fictitious escape route for Jewish people from the occupied Netherlands in the Second World War. When his scheme fell apart in 1944, he left his home in Scheveningen and went in hiding in Ede. He was imprisoned for 3.5 years after the war for collaboration with the German occupier, though in his memoirs published in 1969 he maintained that his plans were to give Jewish people hope for survival and that he had assumed that the liberation of the Netherlands would take place before his customers were deported. The debate about his guilt or innocence was very heated in the Netherlands in the 1970s, involving noted writers like Renate Rubinstein and W.F. Hermans.