In addition to documents and book scans, the speech recognition portion of the Microsoft AI program was able to convert video and audio recordings to text, make them searchable, and translate them into English. As the team had hoped, the program began to show connections among people, addresses, and dates. These connections—policemen on the same raids, female informants who had worked together—had obviously been there all along but had not been noticed. Now the links began to form a narrative.
Because it was web-based, the AI program could be used anywhere. Pieter described the thrill of working with it at the National Archives: “If for instance, an address of interest came up in one of the files I was examining, I could very quickly cross-reference it within the database. Running the address through the AI would provide me with all relevant documents or other sources in the data store in which this address was mentioned. Sources where it was mentioned the most would appear highest. It could also give me a graphic on how this address connected to other relevant items such as different people who were somehow connected to this address. It could provide a map with all connections between this address and others and would indicate which connections were the most common. It would also provide a timeline when and where this address was most relevant.”
Investigative psychologist Bram van der Meer was approached, and he agreed to work with the team. Vince knew him as a criminal profiler and investigative psychologist in the Netherlands, who advised investigative teams throughout Europe and had worked on several cold cases. The team eventually brought him all the data they’d collected about the witnesses, victims, and persons of interest and asked him to examine it from a behavioral perspective. This included information about their backgrounds, family life, social and work life, and especially behavioral responses and decision-making in unusual situations or under specific circumstances.
In the hope of somehow making a miraculous discovery of physical evidence, the team developed a plan for evidence analysis with Detective Carina van Leeuwen, a cold case forensic detective with the National Police Corps. Since the investigation was not officially sanctioned, Vince knew that access to governmental laboratories for testing of physical evidence (e.g., DNA, fingerprint analysis, radiocarbon dating) could be difficult, but he was optimistic. As he put it, in the Netherlands there is probably no unsolved crime closer to the national heart than the betrayal of Anne Frank.
Another of the team’s investigative tools was straight out of a millennial’s playbook: crowdsourcing. From the day they announced the project and appealed to the public for any information they might possess regarding what had caused the Annex raid, the team received a steady flow of tips. Some even led to new theories that needed to be investigated; others were from people claiming to be the reincarnations of resistance workers or insisting that Anne Frank had survived the war and was living with a new identity somewhere in the world.
The investigation was deeply serious, but there were humorous moments. For instance, at one point Vince was amused to find himself taught a valuable lesson by a teenage student doing a school-sponsored day internship at the Cold Case Team office. He’d asked the student to confirm the addresses and telephone numbers of particular witnesses by checking these in a 1963 telephone book. He went over the names and addresses and explained what he was looking for. Then he asked the young man to repeat the instructions, which he did. “Any questions?” Vince asked. “Just one,” said the student. “What’s a telephone book?” The lesson: “Never presume.”
Based on existing theories, those newly developed by the Cold Case Team, and those received from the public, the team ended up with roughly thirty different possibilities of why the raid occurred. Several of the theories had already been heavily researched, but cold case protocol required making a due diligence review of the material, checking the source of information for accuracy, and carefully evaluating conclusions.
One such scenario came to the team from a Dutch psychiatrist. A patient had told him the story of a youthful memory she’d had in which the arrest of a Jewish couple hiding in Utrecht had ultimately led to the Annex raid. The couple, who knew the Frank family, emerged from hiding every month and traveled to Amsterdam for food. During one of their trips, they were arrested by a well-known Dutch SD detective at the Utrecht train station. While in custody they fell victim to a cruel trick by a V-Frau (informant) named Ans van Dijk, who, posing as a fellow Jewish prisoner, asked them about the location of other Jews in hiding whom she could warn to move on in case the couple gave away their addresses under torture.
The team’s interest was piqued partly because of a detail: the couple was known to bring bags of ground spices back from their monthly trips to Amsterdam. Otto’s business ground and sold spices. Was there a possible connection? But when the team located reports and confirmed the arrest of the couple, they discovered that it had actually taken place in mid-August 1944, weeks after the Annex raid and with no mention of a female informant. The theory was placed in the “highly unlikely” category.
Vince believed that some theories were like rabbit holes: you went headfirst into the tunnel, which took dips and turns, never seeming to end, and you had no idea where you’d pop up. Yet a good investigator took the plunge anyway. “Such is the way with most investigations,” he said. Finally, the list was narrowed down to roughly thirty theories, some of which were then combined because they had common connections or themes. Applying the team’s hybrid law enforcement axiom of knowledge, motive, and opportunity to the remaining theories allowed the team to eliminate even more. Simply put, if the investigators couldn’t prove that a suspect had ample knowledge to commit the crime, motive to commit it, and the opportunity to do so, he or she would most likely not remain a suspect.
By the fall of 2018, the final investigative team was in place and had started to work full-time. Before then, work had been done on a volunteer basis. By the spring of 2019, the Cold Case Team had reduced the thirty theories to twelve scenarios, including a well-known informant, a local businessman, and a relative of one of the helpers. It would take another year before they landed on the likeliest scenario of all. All in all, the investigation lasted some five years.
18
The Documents Men
Before he went to Amsterdam in the spring of 2017, Vince had already begun research into the cold case at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. He knew that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) holds millions of captured German documents related to the war. As it liberated country after country, the US Army designated a special unit to search for documents that could be exploited for intelligence purposes such as troop strength, weapons depots, and battle plans. The soldiers were told not to overlook burned and bombed-out buildings in the search for such records.
In 1945, the collected documents were crated and shipped to the United States, where they were stored in various military facilities. In the mid-1950s, West Germany requested their return and the US government agreed, but not before identifying the records that would be of interest to future investigators. Those were microfilmed in an old torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia. Named the Alexandria Project, it took more than a decade to complete. By March 1968, the US Army had returned thirty-five shipments of captured war records to Germany.1