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.
19
The Other Bookcase
From its very early days, the Cold Case Team managed to collect an enormous number of documents, photos, film material, interviews, and other pieces of information, but the information was scattered, uncategorized, and unfit for archiving. When Monique Koemans joined the team in October 2018, she determined that an electronic filing system was needed for the vast amount of information that had been gathered. She turned to an IT expert to set up a system capable of handling the volume and types of files and designed what came to be called “the Bookcase.”
By the end of the investigation, the Bookcase held more than 66 gigabytes of data in the form of more than 7,500 files. Every piece of information was filed under the name of a person of interest; the files included pictures, personal certificates, official documents, transcripts of interviews, the CABR files, scanned diaries, investigation reports, and eventually scenario folders and much more.
Each week Monique gathered the young researchers under her guidance at the evidence board. She’d established three panels: one to identify the research problem to be solved; one to name the individual to do the research; and one to post the job done. Once every two weeks they discussed whether newly gathered information should lead to changes in the scenarios/hypotheses. Monique’s style was collaborative. It wasn’t obvious, except in retrospect, how she posed tasks in such a way as to ensure the independence of each researcher. But in the end, the tasks were like puzzle pieces that eventually cohered to make a full picture.