The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(30)
Once Vince and the team had what they thought were all of the available case files (a false assumption, as they would later learn), the next task was to look for new or overlooked evidence. They’d expected that most of the data would be in the Netherlands or Germany, but it turned out that they were wrong there, too. Because of the circumstances, participants, and outcome of World War II, important records and personal accounts (e.g., diaries, witness accounts, military records) were scattered across several continents. Postwar migration, confiscation of records by the Allies, and the establishment of Holocaust-related repositories had resulted in the vast dispersal of records and witness accounts. The team ended up scouring the globe, eventually finding records in Austria, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Russia, the United States, and, of course, the Netherlands.
“We consulted twenty-nine archives,” Vince explained, “from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Austria to the Library and Archives Canada to the Federal Archives in Germany and the UK National Archives at Kew.” He added, “This was no abstract journey. It was emotionally costly to confront the tragic history these archives preserved.”
Vince said he had been encouraged in his work by many cooperative people. “Our calls to institutions or witnesses were usually greeted by a comment that they’d heard or read about our investigation, wanted to assist, and were cheering for us to solve it.” The only institution that proved to be unhelpful was the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, Switzerland. With his map of the relationships among the various stakeholders of the Anne Frank legacy, Jan van Kooten had been right to warn Thijs and Pieter that they would be entering a labyrinth very difficult to negotiate.
In the end, the search for new or overlooked evidence was not confined to the musty basements and vaults of archives and museums; the team went looking for interview subjects.
Of course, there was not much hope of locating direct witnesses, but they were able to find people tangentially related to the Annex raid. Vince particularly recalled the interview with an elderly Holocaust survivor whose parents and sister had gone into hiding in a house on the Prinsengracht and been betrayed a few months before the residents in the Annex. The raid had been the result of information from a notorious female informant, Anna “Ans” van Dijk. One of the policemen on that raid had also participated in the raid on Prinsengracht 263, and it was helpful to learn about the similarities between the two different operations.
Vince said that the team had searched for secondary witnesses who could have had conversations or first-person contact with direct witnesses or suspects, including relatives, friends, and neighbors. They had come up with a list of thirty people. Expanding outward, they constructed a separate list of nearly seventy informational witnesses, as Vince called them, who needed to be interviewed. They were people who conducted research, wrote for a publication, or were experts in a particular field that related to the investigation. That was the mind, training, and methodology of the FBI agent at work.
Once the flow of information and discoveries started, it was time for the team to employ modern law enforcement techniques that had not been available to the investigators at the time the crime was committed, such as behavioral science (profiling), forensic testing, and artificial intelligence, defined as a computer system able to perform such tasks as visual perception, speech recognition, translation between languages, and decision making.
When Vince sat down with the scientists from Xomnia, they suggested that because the team was working on such an old case with missing data, the puzzle of the August 4, 1944, arrest would almost certainly never be complete. Yet at some point the program’s algorithms should be able to predict what or who was the likely suspect.
To organize the massive amounts of data collected from documents and interviews, Vince developed a number of investigative initiatives. He called them the Residents Project, the Statements Project, the Media Project, the Mapping Project, and the Arrest Tracking Project.* The initiatives required hundreds of human work-hours, done mostly by a group of dedicated researchers, many of whom were volunteers and students. They ranged from teenagers, such as a student from Italy, who translated Italian press articles, to a retired Dutch professional in her seventies.
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.”