In her book, Lee noted that according to Ahlers’s family members, he liked to boast that he himself was the betrayer of the by then famous hiders in the Annex.18 It is a peculiar, though perhaps sadly not uncommon, psychosis to want to claim fame as a villain. Even Ahlers’s family didn’t really believe him.
To complete their due diligence, Vince had the Cold Case Team review Lee’s claim that Ahlers continued to extort Otto after the war over his alleged business dealings with Germany. With the Anne Frank House providing extraordinary access to its archives, the team was able to dig into the Opekta and Gies & Co. order books and found out that Opekta did receive pectin from the parent company in Frankfurt and ultimately did supply the Germans, but so did many other Dutch companies.
The order book for 1940 indicated that pepper and nutmeg were supplied to the Wehrmacht in The Hague. But the Gies & Co. profit-and-loss books for 1942, 1943, and 1944 do not indicate any direct deliveries to the Wehrmacht. After the war the Netherlands Administrative Institute (Nederlandse Beheersinstituut; NBI), which monitored wartime trade with the enemy, indicated that it was not concerned about small businesses, as long as they did not actively seek German orders. If Otto’s firm had ever worked with the Germans, it was on a very small scale and surely not worthy of blackmail. Otto Frank was not a war profiteer.19
Vince, it turns out, is something of a bulldog. Once he finds the scent, he proceeds in a straight line and is relentless. “During my investigations in the FBI,” he said, “I never allowed anything to get in my way. In fact, when I was teaching new agents how to approach major case investigations, I told them if they ran into administrative roadblocks my advice was ‘If you can’t go around them, go through them.’” You have to admire his intensity.
In this case the team revealed another aspect of Dutch society under the occupation. Tonny Ahlers and Job Jansen were grudging opportunists who viewed the Nazis’ rampage as a neutral system to benefit themselves. They had no moral qualms about the murder of Jews, of Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies” in the parlance of the day),* of hostages, of resistance fighters. If they thought of them at all, those people were enemies who deserved their fate. Though prone to violence, they themselves didn’t commit murder. But they condoned it.
22
The Neighborhood
Prinsengracht 263 is on the edge of the Jordaan district of old Amsterdam where the houses lean against each other and face the canal. During wartime, the neighborhood was relatively poor. People were crowded together into small apartments and often spilled out onto the streets, adults walking to the shops and gathering along the canal, children playing. Neighbors knew one another.
In his book The Phenomenon of Anne Frank, former NIOD researcher David Barnouw suggested that the betrayer might have lived in the neighborhood because neighbors living cheek by jowl would probably have known if there were Jews hiding nearby. He further suggested that not only is there a sea of windows in homes on the adjacent streets Keizersgracht and Westermarkt that are visible from the Annex but also that the Annex can be seen from the windows in the rear of the houses that share the courtyard.
If the raid was indeed caused by a tip from a neighbor, the Cold Case Team had to find out who lived in those houses. That was when Vince came up with the idea of the Residents Project. He tasked three of the researchers with locating and compiling all available information on persons working and residing in the Annex neighborhood in the time period 1940–1945. That involved locating and retrieving thousands of records from five different archives in three different countries.
In Amsterdam, anytime a person moved and established a new residence, he or she was required to file the new address with the city. The Amsterdam City Archives gave the Cold Case Team unprecedented access to those records, which tracked the flow of people—when they arrived in the city and when they moved to a new address. Population registry cards recorded where and when a person was born; the names of their parents, spouse, and children; and all addresses where they lived. One section of the card indicated religious affiliation. On a few cards, the researchers noted that NI, which stood for “Netherlands Israelite,” was crossed out, meaning that the person had somehow managed to get him-or herself “Aryanized” and off the deportation lists.
Once the list of residents and those who worked in businesses in the neighborhood was complete, the next step was to determine who among them were NSB members, collaborators, informants, and/or betrayers.
The team turned first to Yad Vashem in Israel since the institute’s archive indicated that it possessed the records of all Dutch NSB members recovered after the war. NIOD and the Amsterdam City Archives held copies of the Signalementenblad, compiled by the Dutch resistance, regularly updated, and containing incredibly detailed information on known collaborators, their modi operandi, and occasionally a photograph. (As noted above, Tonny Ahlers made the list.) Vince was also able to locate a list of SD informants in the NARA files in Maryland in the same collection where he’d found the Kopgeld receipts.
There should have been proces-verbalen (police reports) that could have provided critical details on collaborators, but according to Jan Out, a policeman working as an archivist for the police, due to lack of space and money, the records from that period were all (one might say conveniently) destroyed. What did survive were the daily police reports kept by every precinct in the city. Anyone who was arrested or otherwise involved in an incident that required police or even came into the precinct to report something was noted in the record book, often together with the officer involved. Twelve-year-old Anne Frank is in one of the books, reporting the theft of her bicycle on April 13, 1942, a little less than three months before the Franks went into hiding.
In the mid-1990s, the archivist Peter Kroesen discovered daily police reports from the period 1940–1945 among a huge batch of files about to be destroyed. He saved them by smuggling them to a safe storage location. (These files, which can be viewed but not scanned, are among the most visited at the Amsterdam City Archives.) The Cold Case Team painstakingly reviewed the police reports for all incidents and calls for service originating from the Annex neighborhood, looking for any clues that might shed light on who or what could have initiated the raid.
The team of researchers assigned to the various portions of the Residents Project entered the information into a database and then uploaded it to the AI platform so they could cross-reference the names on residence cards, NSB membership lists, SD informant lists, known V-Men and V-Women, and daily police reports, as well as purge files and social services files, focusing on Prinsengracht and the surrounding streets: Leliegracht, Keizersgracht, and Westermarkt.