Maarten van Helden emailed the Cold Case Team scanned copies of some of the documents he’d located. As he was going through the records, Vince came across a small typewritten note that also contained ink handwriting. The contents and size matched Van Helden’s description of the anonymous note. That couldn’t be the original, Vince thought, not with handwritten comments on it. Could it be the copy that Otto himself had made?
Immediately after the Christmas holidays, Vince set up a meeting with Maarten van Helden. As he walked into Van Helden’s living room, his eyes were drawn to a large stack of papers sitting on the coffee table. He felt a kind of shock. Vince turned to the elderly man, who was extending his hand in greeting. His wife of forty-five years stepped forward and introduced herself as Els. Maarten began talking about his father.
Arend van Helden was eighteen when he joined the army and rose to the rank of sergeant in the military police. After the German invasion in 1940, he was captured and imprisoned in The Hague. After he was released, the Germans allowed him to continue as a policeman, an oversight on their part since he was soon working for the resistance.
Arend used his position to help people in hiding by providing them with food. Because meat was scarce during the war, a policeman needed to be present when pigs or cows were slaughtered to ensure that there was no theft. Since there were always scraps of meat left behind, Arend would gather them and deliver them to homes where he knew people were hiding.
Maarten became the archivist of the war stories his father told him. One story involved his father’s capture of a man he had been ordered to transport to Camp Amersfoort. The prisoner pleaded to be released for one hour so that he could warn others of a pending roundup. He gave his word that he would then turn himself in. Maarten’s father complied with his request, and the man kept his word and returned for transport. Another story was about a confrontation between his father and a Nazi officer. In September 1944, Arend was involved in the investigation of the black-market activities of a particular SS officer in the town of Elst. He picked up the officer for questioning. As they were driving, the officer ordered Arend to hand over his pistol. He complied, and the SS officer made him pull off the road. He was preparing to shoot Arend but heard the sound of approaching footsteps. When he lowered the gun, Arend took off like a deer, running through ditches and meadows to escape.
After the war Arend van Helden remained a policeman and was eventually promoted to the rank of inspector in the Amsterdam police force. Maarten was twenty years old in 1963 when his father was assigned to the investigation of the Annex raid. When the elder Van Helden was frustrated or blocked at work, he occasionally brought up the case at home. Maarten recalled that his father had traveled to Vienna to meet Simon Wiesenthal and during that same trip had gone on to Basel to interview Otto Frank.
When the two men turned their attention to the stack of papers on the table, Vince recalled that he tried to hide his excitement. Here were dozens of originals and carbon copies of almost every page from the 1963–64 investigation, including the original Criminal Investigation Department file folder cover. He said his hands began to shake.
At the bottom of the stack of papers, he found what he was looking for: an approximately five-and-a-half-by-nine-inch page of bonded stationery, slightly yellow in color, with a typewritten message below which were handwritten sentences in ink. The note appeared to be original and not photocopied or reproduced. The ink handwriting also appeared to be original. No wonder the copy of the anonymous note was not to be found among Van Helden’s papers filed with the State Department of Criminal Investigation—because it had been here all these years in his private collection!
At the top of the note was typed the German word Abschrift (copy). That would support the theory that it was the copy Otto had made. Otto’s native language was German, and it would have been natural for him to use the German word for “copy.” The remainder of the typewritten text was in Dutch. There was handwriting on the note, and Maarten identified it as his father’s. He agreed to lend the Cold Case Team the Abschrift note, as Vince came to call it, for forensic testing. Vince wanted to confirm that the note was typed by Otto Frank and that the handwriting was indeed Van Helden’s.
Vince decided to contact one of his former colleagues from the FBI laboratory, and together they worked through all available tests that might help extract the maximum information. Unfortunately, many of them would have destructive side effects, and Vince hesitated to conduct any test that could alter the note. Testing for fingerprints was a possibility, but because the dusting or cyanoacrylate (superglue) process can cause extreme discoloration, it was ruled out. He then turned to forensic expert Detective Carina van Leeuwen. Together they concluded that the examination of the note would require a two-pronged approach: a scientific examination and a linguistic analysis.
Not trusting the mail with such a potentially historic document, Maarten drove to Amsterdam with his sister and personally handed the note to Vince and Brendan. They were asked if they recognized the cursive handwriting on the note to be that of their father. Both agreed that it was.
For a scientific opinion, Vince contacted a Dutch handwriting expert, Wil Fagel, now retired from the Netherlands Forensic Institute. He asked them to obtain exemplars, copies of the detective’s handwriting, from Maarten, who still had several of his father’s handwritten letters. Fagel compared that handwriting to the Abschrift note and concluded that the handwriting on both was the same.1 (By coincidence, Fagel’s department at the Netherlands Forensic Institute examined Anne Frank’s diary for authentication of her handwriting in the mid-1980s. The results of the examination were published in the NIOD critical edition of the diary and refuted all claims that the diary was not written by Anne Frank.)2
It was essential to determine when the Abschrift note was written. Radiocarbon dating would probably determine how old the paper was, though not the writing on it, but it would require cutting off a piece of the note. Vince noticed that there were two punch holes on the left side of the note, one of which actually cut through a portion of the handwriting. He phoned Maarten van Helden, who explained that he’d punched holes in all the documents to store them in a binder. Vince wondered if the hole-punch device he’d used had a compartment to catch the punched-out rounds. Had Maarten ever emptied the compartment? No? Soon the office mail room delivered a bulging envelope. When it was opened, about a thousand punched-out rounds spilled out.
Vince and Brendan examined all of them on a retina screen. After several hours they were able to select fifteen possible matches on the basis of color but could not find any punched-out rounds with the ink handwriting, nor could they say definitively that any of them exactly fit the holes in the note.