The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(39)

If the raid was indeed caused by a tip from a neighbor, the Cold Case Team had to find out who lived in those houses. That was when Vince came up with the idea of the Residents Project. He tasked three of the researchers with locating and compiling all available information on persons working and residing in the Annex neighborhood in the time period 1940–1945. That involved locating and retrieving thousands of records from five different archives in three different countries.

In Amsterdam, anytime a person moved and established a new residence, he or she was required to file the new address with the city. The Amsterdam City Archives gave the Cold Case Team unprecedented access to those records, which tracked the flow of people—when they arrived in the city and when they moved to a new address. Population registry cards recorded where and when a person was born; the names of their parents, spouse, and children; and all addresses where they lived. One section of the card indicated religious affiliation. On a few cards, the researchers noted that NI, which stood for “Netherlands Israelite,” was crossed out, meaning that the person had somehow managed to get him-or herself “Aryanized” and off the deportation lists.

Once the list of residents and those who worked in businesses in the neighborhood was complete, the next step was to determine who among them were NSB members, collaborators, informants, and/or betrayers.

The team turned first to Yad Vashem in Israel since the institute’s archive indicated that it possessed the records of all Dutch NSB members recovered after the war. NIOD and the Amsterdam City Archives held copies of the Signalementenblad, compiled by the Dutch resistance, regularly updated, and containing incredibly detailed information on known collaborators, their modi operandi, and occasionally a photograph. (As noted above, Tonny Ahlers made the list.) Vince was also able to locate a list of SD informants in the NARA files in Maryland in the same collection where he’d found the Kopgeld receipts.

There should have been proces-verbalen (police reports) that could have provided critical details on collaborators, but according to Jan Out, a policeman working as an archivist for the police, due to lack of space and money, the records from that period were all (one might say conveniently) destroyed. What did survive were the daily police reports kept by every precinct in the city. Anyone who was arrested or otherwise involved in an incident that required police or even came into the precinct to report something was noted in the record book, often together with the officer involved. Twelve-year-old Anne Frank is in one of the books, reporting the theft of her bicycle on April 13, 1942, a little less than three months before the Franks went into hiding.

In the mid-1990s, the archivist Peter Kroesen discovered daily police reports from the period 1940–1945 among a huge batch of files about to be destroyed. He saved them by smuggling them to a safe storage location. (These files, which can be viewed but not scanned, are among the most visited at the Amsterdam City Archives.) The Cold Case Team painstakingly reviewed the police reports for all incidents and calls for service originating from the Annex neighborhood, looking for any clues that might shed light on who or what could have initiated the raid.

The team of researchers assigned to the various portions of the Residents Project entered the information into a database and then uploaded it to the AI platform so they could cross-reference the names on residence cards, NSB membership lists, SD informant lists, known V-Men and V-Women, and daily police reports, as well as purge files and social services files, focusing on Prinsengracht and the surrounding streets: Leliegracht, Keizersgracht, and Westermarkt.

Computer scientists from Xomnia provided the foundation for the Microsoft AI program, which created a virtual picture of where the persons resided in the neighborhood. Complicating the process was the fact that many of the Amsterdam street names had changed since the war. However, the scientists were able to write a program that converted the street names from a current map to a wartime map and then geolocate all of the addresses of the residents and potential threats.1

Xomnia’s offices are in a historic building just off the Prinsengracht, five blocks south of Anne Frank House. The Cold Case Team was invited for a demonstration. The researchers said they were speechless when the visual of the neighborhood appeared on a large wall-mounted monitor. Colored dots representing the various categories of threats, such as NSB members (blue), collaborators/V-people (red), and SD informants (yellow), were so close together that they appeared as one large mass over the greater Jordaan neighborhood. As the visual zoomed in on the streets directly surrounding the Annex, the dots were less dense, but the number of threats was still astonishing. An SD informant named Schuster owned a bike shop a block and a half away from Otto’s business; a collaborator named Dekker, a waiter by profession, whose name the team found on the resistance’s wanted list, lived a few doors down from the Annex; and multiple NSB members resided in the buildings bordering the back courtyard.

After the Cold Case Team’s project was announced publicly at the end of September 2017, Kelly Cobiella, a reporter for NBC’s Today show, traveled to Amsterdam to interview the team. Vince demonstrated the virtual program showing the concentration of threats surrounding the Annex and said that instead of asking what caused the raid, maybe they should be asking how the hiders lasted for more than two years before being captured.

For David Barnouw’s neighborhood theory to be valid, it wasn’t enough that neighbors be fervent NSB members; they would also have to have knowledge that Jews were hiding in the Annex. The team found that some neighbors seemed to know that the Annex was occupied, including those in the businesses in the two buildings on either side of Prinsengracht 263: Elhoek, an upholstery shop at 261, and Keg, a tea and coffee business at 265.