The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(29)

Part II


Cold Case Investigation


Courtesy of Shutterstock/Bardocz Peter





17


The Investigation


In April 2017, Vince Pankoke traveled to Amsterdam to meet the Cold Case Team; his only contact with them so far had been via Skype. Thijs Bayens wanted to launch the investigation with a pilot video to determine if there would be any media interest in the project. He proceeded to film Vince as the team created testimonial reconstructions of the investigation with Dutch actors.

Vince used his time with Thijs, Pieter van Twisk, and Jean Hellwig to tour the Amsterdam City Archives; the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and the Anne Frank House, which they’d been invited to visit alone in the early morning before the crowds arrived. For Vince, who was already so steeped in Anne’s story, contemplating what took place within those walls was a powerful experience. Also important at that stage was his meeting with the scientists at Xomnia, an Amsterdam-based data company that had offered to provide the foundation of the artificial intelligence (AI) program that Microsoft then agreed to develop for the team’s research. Everyone knew that AI would change the investigation into the raid; it would enable the team to marshal the millions of details surrounding the case and make connections among people and events that had been overlooked before.

When Vince committed to the endeavor in 2016, he realized that he’d taken on not just a cold case but the ultimate cold case. By their nature cold cases like this one remain unsolved due to a lack of evidence or because evidence was overlooked or misinterpreted. Therefore, the team had to develop a plan blending proven cold case methodology with a historical research model, since they would be working primarily with historical accounts of what had happened. Upon joining the team, Vince reached out to a colleague, the retired behavioral scientist Dr. Roger Depue, the legendary pioneer in the field and later chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Over numerous long lunches in Manassas, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, he and Vince discussed how to approach the investigation. Both men knew that Vince was going to get only one chance at solving this case, and he needed to do it right.

As the Cold Case Team was aware from the beginning, there had been only two official police investigations into the betrayal of Anne Frank. The first had been done in 1947–1948 by the PRA and the second in 1963–1964 by the Dutch police. No other official police investigation into the betrayal had ever been undertaken.

But speculation about and sometimes serious investigations into the arrest had never stopped. Over the past several decades, many people had come forward with theories, and to this day, according to an employee of the Anne Frank House, the question most asked by visitors is: Who betrayed Anne Frank?

In 1998, Melissa Müller published Anne Frank: A Biography. Based on her research, she decided that Lena Hartog, the wife of Lammert Hartog, the assistant of the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren, was most likely the betrayer. Four years later, Carol Ann Lee published The Hidden Life of Otto Frank and offered the theory that a shady character named Anton “Tonny” Ahlers was the culprit. Of course, both theories could not be correct, and under the pressure of increased public attention, David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom of NIOD decided to investigate the case all over again. They limited their focus to three individuals (Willem van Maaren, Lena Hartog, and Tonny Ahlers) and touched on some other theories only superficially.

In 2015, the biography of the helper Bep Voskuijl was published by her son Joop van Wijk and a young Belgian writer, Jeroen de Bruyn. In their research the two learned about one of Bep’s sisters, Nelly, who caused much distress in the Voskuijl family by her involvement with a young Austrian Nazi and later her work in occupied France. The tensions in the family grew so high that she had left the house. Bep’s son believed that she might have reported the secret Annex to the German authorities.

In 2017, the Anne Frank House published its own theory of the raid, based on the research of the historian Gertjan Broek. He concluded that although everyone takes for granted that the Annex was betrayed, the SS might have been looking for illegal goods and weapons and found Jews only by chance. That provided a whole new perspective on the case. Each of the theories had to be examined for their credibility.

As lead investigator, Vince continued to visit Amsterdam—in September 2017 for several weeks to explore archives and a number of times in early 2018 to try to locate lost records. By October 2018, he’d established himself in the city full-time. The team opened a small office on the Herengracht and later moved to an expansive office in northern Amsterdam to which Vince traveled by bicycle, which made him feel, he said, almost Dutch.

Vince was well aware of the monumentality of the undertaking and knew he had to define a strategy for organizing the investigation. The first task was to review and question all of the previous findings, statements, and theories, specifically files from the 1947–48 PRA investigation and those from that of the 1963–64 State Department of Criminal Investigation.

Vince was surprised to find that there wasn’t a central archive where the investigative files were located. Most of the PRA files were found within various CABR files in the Netherlands National Archives, some copies and others originals with no apparent consistency. The State Department of Criminal Investigation files, which were primarily at NIOD, were organized in a more logical fashion. With both investigations, the team was immediately stalled when told by archive officials that they could not have copies of the files due to the recently enacted European General Data Protection Regulation. That was a shock to Vince, who was used to the liberality of US Freedom of Information Act rules. Illogically, the team was permitted to read and hand transcribe the reports, just not to photocopy them. Luckily, many of the research contacts Thijs and Pieter had developed shared the copies they had obtained prior to the adoption of the data protection law. A further delay was the fact that all documents had to be translated from Dutch or German so that Vince and the other English-speaking members of the team could read them.