Vince has an affable nature, talking easily about his family and his German heritage. His father had fought in the US Army in World War II. Even when he was a kid and his father told him stories of the war, it struck him that the soldiers his father was shooting at could have been relatives. It is evident that Vince believes in evil and has seen a lot of it. The Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, fresh from the gulags, once said that the world has a certain tolerance level for evil; there will always be evil in the world. But when that tolerance level is surpassed, all morality cracks and human beings become capable of anything.
How, Vince wondered out loud, did German culture—sophisticated, advanced, democratic—submit to totalitarian dictatorship and so disintegrate, so lose its way, that it initiated a war that would eventually kill an estimated 75 million people, Allied and Axis, civilian and military? With his FBI undercover experience, Vince knows that one element is always present: somebody is making money. German industrialists bankrolled Hitler in secret from 1933, and the war proved profitable to them, with Bayer, BMW, Krupp, Daimler, and IG Farben emerging richer than they had gone in. In the occupied Netherlands, Vince understood that the bureaucratic ingenuity the Germans called on to remove all Jews from the country was matched only by the stealth with which they plundered Jewish property.
Like almost every other American, Vince learned about Anne Frank in school. He visited the Anne Frank House when he was well into his career—and was astonished to find that the question “Who betrayed Anne Frank?” has never been decisively answered. He said he loved nothing better than a challenge, and so he signed on to the cold case investigation immediately. But when he was well into the project, he had moments of wondering what he’d gotten himself into: the case was more than seventy-five years old, the betrayer and most of the immediate witnesses were probably dead, and there were so many other complexities. “We couldn’t get any tougher circumstances,” he said. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was what he needed to do. One of his first steps was to build a team of experts on wartime police matters, Amsterdam history, collaborators, looting Dutch fascists, and the resistance.
Monique Koemans, who works as a criminal analyst for the Dutch government, joined the team in October 2018. Besides obtaining a PhD in criminology, she had also trained as a historian. When she found an email in her mailbox with an invitation to join the Cold Case Team, she didn’t hesitate. It’s not often that a project calls on her skills as a criminologist as well as historian. She requested a one-year leave from her job.
Monique read Anne Frank’s diary more than twenty times when she was young and wrote about Anne Frank at the beginning of her career as a journalist. The case of the betrayal may be old, but she feels that the present is never far from the past.
At least in Amsterdam, remnants of the war are everywhere in the streets—on her way to work she used to pass the offices of Het Parool, a national newspaper that was started in 1941 as the resistance newspaper. In The Hague, where she now lives, she says the scars of the war are deep. Walking through Bezuidenhout, a neighborhood in the city where her grandparents lived and where her grandmother barely survived a devastating bombing, she passed the house where her grandfather was in hiding while he worked for a resistance newspaper. Her former neighbor was the son of a Holocaust survivor. He told her that at the end of the war a train full of prisoners coming from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was left abandoned by the Nazis in the middle of a forest. His mother and grandmother were on that train. They managed to survive by eating berries until Allied troops finally found them. For his mother, leaving Bergen-Belsen at that moment meant that she survived the war. Anne and Margot Frank, who were kept behind in the same concentration camp, did not.
Several other young historians—Christine Hoste, Circe de Bruin, and Anna Foulidis—undertook much of the research work in the city’s archives, including at the NIOD Institute for War, Genocide and Holocaust Studies and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. They pored over thousands of files, took notes and wrote reports, set up appointments, and prepared the interviews. When asked how their research into the Holocaust had impacted them, they said it had been painful to enter that past but at least they had been focused on the Netherlands, for instance, Westerbork transit camp (now a museum), where they interviewed the museum director. Christine said she didn’t believe she could have coped with the camps inside Germany and Poland.
Thijs invited his friend Jean Hellwig, a guest professor of public history at the University of Amsterdam, to join the team as project manager. It was a natural follow-up to his earlier project, Warlovechild, which had collected stories, films, and photos about children of Dutch soldiers abandoned after the colonial war in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949.* “With my own eyes I saw the healing potential of finding historical truth,” he said. Jean then invited eleven students to help with the search, allowing them to do their university internship with the Cold Case Team.
The final addition to the team was Brendan Rook, a detective who’d served as an infantry officer in the Australian Army and spent more than ten years with the International Criminal Court in The Hague investigating war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide around the globe. While Vince was still with the FBI, he’d worked closely with the Dutch National Police Corps, and one of his principal contacts from that time introduced him to Luc Gerrits. Vince mentioned to Luc that he needed someone to bounce his ideas off, a fellow investigator able to isolate and focus on the facts that might lead to solving the crime. Luc met Brendan in The Hague and, after learning about his investigative background, mentioned the Cold Case Team to him. Brendan was extremely interested and soon arranged for a leave of absence from his work to join the team.
Vince and Brendan are kindred spirits. They share a unique way of seeing things. Whereas the Anne Frank House is a museum where hundreds of visitors line up outside, for them it was a crime scene. They pictured the events of August 4, 1944, and exactly where they took place on that pitiful morning.
Brendan said that each time he visits a crime scene, he discovers new details. Standing in front of the building today, looking at its four floors, its front attic, the windows, he knows one thing for sure: a professional policeman would certainly have deduced the existence of the back Annex, and it wouldn’t have taken him long to find the secret entrance.
4
The Stakeholders
In this increasingly complex cold case investigation, Vince was an outsider watching, as it were, from the periphery and having to figure out things that were self-evident to the Dutch. The upside of this was that he could remain dispassionate in the face of developments that drove the others crazy. The first shock to the group was the degree of acrimony among the various stakeholders of the Anne Frank legacy.
Thijs described the first meeting he and Pieter had had with a man he referred to as “from the world of Anne Frank,” namely Jan van Kooten, a former head of education and presentations (1983–2004) at the Anne Frank House.1 Thijs had asked Van Kooten if they could meet to discuss the organizations devoted to the story of the Franks. He wanted to know how the various groups worked and how they collaborated.
On Friday, March 4, 2016, Thijs and Pieter visited the office of the National Committee for May 4 and 5, the Dutch institution responsible for the annual Remembrance Day and Liberation Day celebrations.2 Van Kooten, currently the director, sat behind his large desk, looking rather intimidating. Thijs and Pieter were somewhat anxious, as it was the first official conversation in which they had to explain their idea: an investigation into what is popularly called “the betrayal of Anne Frank.” Their first question was cautious: What do we need to know when we start?