The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(71)
Van den Bergh’s case was exceptional. On the one hand, he was able to ask the resistance to hide his children; on the other, he had enough powerful contacts in the Nazi hierarchy to secure Calmeyer status and then to be warned in time when that status was withdrawn. This, to the team, was suspicious.
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Experts at Work
Vince clearly remembers the moment that shifted everything in the ongoing cold case investigation. He was rereading the anonymous note for the hundredth time. It said, “Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported at the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat, by A. van den Bergh.”
He suddenly realized that it didn’t say that Otto Frank’s name was passed on; it mentioned only the address. Whoever wrote the note might not even have known who was hiding at Prinsengracht 263. Furthermore, the note said, “At J.A. was a whole list of addresses he submitted.”
Suddenly Vince began to see things differently. If A. van den Bergh indeed passed on a list of addresses, not names, somehow it made the crime of betrayal, if it was betrayal, seem less personal. At the very least, he did not have to feel he was betraying someone he might have known.
In the forty-page report of his investigation, Detective Van Helden had transcribed the anonymous note, but Vince wanted to know if it was the exact wording or a summary. Was there more to the note? Who was the board member of the Anne Frank House to whom Otto said he’d given the original note? Where was the copy he’d made? Just as Abraham Kaper had kept important files at home, Vince was now betting that Van Helden would have done the same. The Cold Case Team set out to locate Van Helden’s relatives and, with a bit of searching, was able to find his son, Maarten.
When Vince first emailed him, Maarten van Helden did not seem much interested in talking about his father. He claimed that he did not know very much about his work and would be of little help in the investigation. But when Vince asked him if he happened to have any papers that his father had left behind, Maarten said he did. About eight years after his father’s death, he said, he’d come across a number of files relating to the 1963–64 investigation.
Maarten van Helden emailed the Cold Case Team scanned copies of some of the documents he’d located. As he was going through the records, Vince came across a small typewritten note that also contained ink handwriting. The contents and size matched Van Helden’s description of the anonymous note. That couldn’t be the original, Vince thought, not with handwritten comments on it. Could it be the copy that Otto himself had made?
Immediately after the Christmas holidays, Vince set up a meeting with Maarten van Helden. As he walked into Van Helden’s living room, his eyes were drawn to a large stack of papers sitting on the coffee table. He felt a kind of shock. Vince turned to the elderly man, who was extending his hand in greeting. His wife of forty-five years stepped forward and introduced herself as Els. Maarten began talking about his father.
Arend van Helden was eighteen when he joined the army and rose to the rank of sergeant in the military police. After the German invasion in 1940, he was captured and imprisoned in The Hague. After he was released, the Germans allowed him to continue as a policeman, an oversight on their part since he was soon working for the resistance.
Arend used his position to help people in hiding by providing them with food. Because meat was scarce during the war, a policeman needed to be present when pigs or cows were slaughtered to ensure that there was no theft. Since there were always scraps of meat left behind, Arend would gather them and deliver them to homes where he knew people were hiding.
Maarten became the archivist of the war stories his father told him. One story involved his father’s capture of a man he had been ordered to transport to Camp Amersfoort. The prisoner pleaded to be released for one hour so that he could warn others of a pending roundup. He gave his word that he would then turn himself in. Maarten’s father complied with his request, and the man kept his word and returned for transport. Another story was about a confrontation between his father and a Nazi officer. In September 1944, Arend was involved in the investigation of the black-market activities of a particular SS officer in the town of Elst. He picked up the officer for questioning. As they were driving, the officer ordered Arend to hand over his pistol. He complied, and the SS officer made him pull off the road. He was preparing to shoot Arend but heard the sound of approaching footsteps. When he lowered the gun, Arend took off like a deer, running through ditches and meadows to escape.
After the war Arend van Helden remained a policeman and was eventually promoted to the rank of inspector in the Amsterdam police force. Maarten was twenty years old in 1963 when his father was assigned to the investigation of the Annex raid. When the elder Van Helden was frustrated or blocked at work, he occasionally brought up the case at home. Maarten recalled that his father had traveled to Vienna to meet Simon Wiesenthal and during that same trip had gone on to Basel to interview Otto Frank.
When the two men turned their attention to the stack of papers on the table, Vince recalled that he tried to hide his excitement. Here were dozens of originals and carbon copies of almost every page from the 1963–64 investigation, including the original Criminal Investigation Department file folder cover. He said his hands began to shake.
At the bottom of the stack of papers, he found what he was looking for: an approximately five-and-a-half-by-nine-inch page of bonded stationery, slightly yellow in color, with a typewritten message below which were handwritten sentences in ink. The note appeared to be original and not photocopied or reproduced. The ink handwriting also appeared to be original. No wonder the copy of the anonymous note was not to be found among Van Helden’s papers filed with the State Department of Criminal Investigation—because it had been here all these years in his private collection!