The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(7)
At the first meeting of the team, on June 30, 2016, Leo introduced the so-called FOT sessions: with your “feet on the table,” you start talking, brainstorming, analyzing. Where to start? Leo couldn’t have been clearer—with the suspected phone call that the betrayer made to the SD about Jews hiding in a warehouse at Prinsengracht 263. How probable was it that the phone call actually took place? In Amsterdam in 1944, were there any public phone booths left? Had the copper telephone lines not been turned into weaponry? Was the SD phone number publicly known? And so on.
In this preliminary stage of the investigation, it quickly became clear that the Amsterdam police force during the Nazi occupation had played a questionable role. Like every other official body in the Netherlands, the police had had to collaborate to a certain extent with the Nazis during the occupation, but it seemed that a number of them had gone further in helping the Nazis than was strictly necessary.
So Thijs suggested that it would be good to have an independent outsider, someone non-Dutch, on the team. He asked Luc if he could find an FBI agent to lead the cold case. Betrayal is a nonforensic crime, since there are no physical traces, and the Cold Case Team would need to work with cutting-edge methods of information gathering to make headway. Luc turned to Hans Smit, the head of the National Police Corps undercover branch, who had been trained by the FBI. Smit suggested that Thijs call an old colleague from the FBI undercover unit who had only recently retired. “He’s the guy you are looking for,” Smit said. “His name is Vince Pankoke.”
Soon Thijs and Pieter skyped with Vince, who was living in Florida. Both were impressed by the kind and clearly highly professional investigator, who said he was intrigued by the project.
After eight years as a police officer, Vince had spent twenty-seven years as a special agent with the FBI, working undercover on high-profile cases against Colombian drug traffickers.
He had also worked the case against Sky Capital, whose CEO, Ross Mandell, might be considered to be a bit like the fictional character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. To meet Vince, you would never suspect him of having such a past. He still seems to be living undercover, a mild, anonymous man in a guayabera shirt, until you discover his passion for dangerous motorcycle races or his thirst for new challenges.
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.