One such scenario came to the team from a Dutch psychiatrist. A patient had told him the story of a youthful memory she’d had in which the arrest of a Jewish couple hiding in Utrecht had ultimately led to the Annex raid. The couple, who knew the Frank family, emerged from hiding every month and traveled to Amsterdam for food. During one of their trips, they were arrested by a well-known Dutch SD detective at the Utrecht train station. While in custody they fell victim to a cruel trick by a V-Frau （informant） named Ans van Dijk, who, posing as a fellow Jewish prisoner, asked them about the location of other Jews in hiding whom she could warn to move on in case the couple gave away their addresses under torture.
The team’s interest was piqued partly because of a detail: the couple was known to bring bags of ground spices back from their monthly trips to Amsterdam. Otto’s business ground and sold spices. Was there a possible connection? But when the team located reports and confirmed the arrest of the couple, they discovered that it had actually taken place in mid-August 1944, weeks after the Annex raid and with no mention of a female informant. The theory was placed in the “highly unlikely” category.
Vince believed that some theories were like rabbit holes: you went headfirst into the tunnel, which took dips and turns, never seeming to end, and you had no idea where you’d pop up. Yet a good investigator took the plunge anyway. “Such is the way with most investigations,” he said. Finally, the list was narrowed down to roughly thirty theories, some of which were then combined because they had common connections or themes. Applying the team’s hybrid law enforcement axiom of knowledge, motive, and opportunity to the remaining theories allowed the team to eliminate even more. Simply put, if the investigators couldn’t prove that a suspect had ample knowledge to commit the crime, motive to commit it, and the opportunity to do so, he or she would most likely not remain a suspect.
By the fall of 2018, the final investigative team was in place and had started to work full-time. Before then, work had been done on a volunteer basis. By the spring of 2019, the Cold Case Team had reduced the thirty theories to twelve scenarios, including a well-known informant, a local businessman, and a relative of one of the helpers. It would take another year before they landed on the likeliest scenario of all. All in all, the investigation lasted some five years.
18
The Documents Men
Before he went to Amsterdam in the spring of 2017, Vince had already begun research into the cold case at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. He knew that the National Archives and Records Administration （NARA） holds millions of captured German documents related to the war. As it liberated country after country, the US Army designated a special unit to search for documents that could be exploited for intelligence purposes such as troop strength, weapons depots, and battle plans. The soldiers were told not to overlook burned and bombed-out buildings in the search for such records.
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.”