The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(32)

In 1945, the collected documents were crated and shipped to the United States, where they were stored in various military facilities. In the mid-1950s, West Germany requested their return and the US government agreed, but not before identifying the records that would be of interest to future investigators. Those were microfilmed in an old torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia. Named the Alexandria Project, it took more than a decade to complete. By March 1968, the US Army had returned thirty-five shipments of captured war records to Germany.1

Most of the records have been available for half a century, though some documents were declassified only in 1999 after legal pressure. However, the collection is so vast that Vince had hopes of discovering useful information others had overlooked. Thinking of the soldiers who had salvaged the documents, he took to calling them “The Documents Men,” after the film The Monuments Men, about the World War II platoon tasked by President Franklin D. Roosevelt with rescuing art masterpieces from active war zones.

Vince was always surprised that the research room at the National Archives, where microfilm readers were available to the public, was invariably full. Looking at the various screens as he walked past, he could see that some people were viewing US Army documents and others were looking at captured German, Italian, or Japanese records. On a few visits, he observed a World War II veteran asking for assistance at the desk. Based on the man’s questions and the collections he was requesting, which dealt with POWs, Vince wondered if he’d been a prisoner in one of the German camps. He thought of his father during the war. Toward the end of his life, Vince Sr. had occasionally talked about a battle in which he’d fired mortar rounds at a German soldier who had been caught in an open field. The soldier had been running toward the shelter of nearby woods but, at some point, he had disappeared in the cloud of dirt and dust kicked up by the explosions. “Of course, at the time I had a kill-or-be-killed attitude,” his father had said. “Now I wonder if that guy made it to the woods. I sure hope he did.”

For Vince, as for all the other people involved in the cold case investigation, their work wasn’t abstract historical research. The evil unleashed by war was self-evident. The people were real, the frustrations and successes palpable. The tragedies were painful.

Vince narrowed his search to documents from the Netherlands. Some of the documents were hardly strategic: there were requests for leave, permission to get married (one such request was from Karl Silberbauer), birthday wishes. But startlingly, there were also files salvaged from the German SD and the Gestapo.

One of the NARA finding guides noted a miscellaneous collection of payment receipts relating to the Netherlands. Loading the roll of microfilm, Vince saw that they were typed forms with the information filled in either by hand or by typewriter and signed at the bottom. The receipts were organized alphabetically by the last name of the payee. As he scrolled down through the 956 frames, Vince recognized a few last names of policemen who’d actively worked for the SD in Amsterdam. He recalled Ad van Liempt’s book, Hitler’s Bounty Hunters, which described how the members of the Henneicke Column received Kopgeld, or payments for Jews they turned over to the SD. The papers in front of him, he suddenly realized, were Kopgeld receipts.

Many of the receipts identified the names of the Jews arrested and a payment of 7.5 guilders ($47 today). The payment was called, euphemistically, “expenses” or “investigation.” But two of the 956 receipts actually identified the expense as a “head bounty.”

Vince searched for the names of the Amsterdam policemen associated with the arrest of the eight residents hiding in the Annex and quickly found several receipts for Detective W. Grootendorst. It was a eureka moment. Vince caught himself saying “Yes!” so loudly that people around him turned and looked.

Then came the letdown. After he entered the basic information from the receipts into a spreadsheet, he discovered that the earliest receipt was dated February 28, 1942, and the last was August 16, 1943. The receipts didn’t cover the period of the arrests in the Annex, and it would seem that whatever was paid to Grootendorst was for other deeds.

Until Vince found the 956 Kopgeld receipts, which shed light on how the Kopgeld system worked, who participated, and who was targeted, fewer than ten such receipts were known to exist. British bombers had conducted a nighttime raid on the SD headquarters on Euterpestraat in Amsterdam on November 26, 1944. It was supposed to be precision bombing, but the damage to the headquarters was light. Sixty-nine Dutch civilians died, and there were only four German casualties. However, the building across the street that held administrative records was totally destroyed. It was assumed that all the documents inside were lost in the bombing.

The Cold Case Team looked in German archives for the missing Kopgeld notes dated after mid-August 1943, but found nothing. Thinking that there might be further information elsewhere, Vince contacted Rinsophie Vellinga, a professor of Dutch language and culture at Moscow State University, who volunteered to go to the Russian State Military Archive in case Russian soldiers had captured the documents. The Dutch Embassy put her in contact with the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which helped her get access to the archive. Unfortunately, Rinsophie also came up empty. Still, considering the German obsession with record keeping, the size of the existing archives, and the extent to which information had been scattered and often incorrectly labeled, Vince was hopeful that the missing Kopgeld receipts from the summer of 1944, which would include the payments made for arresting the eight residents in the secret Annex, might still turn up.