It occurred to Vince that he should follow up with Rolf Wolfswinkel. Maybe he’d had personal conversations with Miep about the Annex raid. After a few computer searches he located Wolfswinkel at New York University, where he was a professor of modern history. Vince reached out to him and had a long conversation with him regarding the Cold Case Team’s project and his relationship with Miep. It turned out that he was a close friend of Miep’s, often accompanying her to lectures and helping with translation.
Wolfswinkel told Vince that his father, Gerrit, had been an Amsterdam policeman during the war. His father claimed that he’d accompanied the SD on a few arrests but would only stand outside the location to guard the door. For those actions he was found guilty of collaboration and served a jail sentence. Rolf’s mother divorced his father while he was incarcerated, and he had only limited contact with him after that.
Later in his life he reconnected with his father and inquired about his wartime activities. Strangely, his father, who had previously been a mainstream Christian, said that he’d become a Jehovah’s Witness and could confess anything done during the war only to God. At the time, Rolf’s statement about his father’s unexplained change of religion meant nothing to Vince, and since he didn’t seem to know much more about Miep, Vince didn’t think much more about Rolf.
But Wolfswinkel is a hard name to forget, and Vince had the feeling he’d seen it somewhere before. The name Gerrit Wolfswinkel kept swirling in his head. Prior to the Microsoft AI program, the Cold Case Team had been relying on printed records and crude spreadsheets to keep track of information. Vince pulled up the spreadsheet for the nearly one thousand Kopgeld receipts he’d found and did a quick name search for Wolfswinkel. There in black and white was Professor Wolfswinkel’s father. He was much more than a policeman who guarded the door during a raid; he was a member of the IV B4 Jew-hunting unit. Vince wondered if Rolf knew that about his father. How incredible was it that the man who was a friend of Miep Gies was also the son of an IV B4 member, the same SD unit that conducted the Annex raid? At the time Vince thought: You just can’t make this stuff up!
It got even stranger. While examining the Kopgeld receipts chronicling the elder Wolfswinkel’s work, Vince found one that was not for arresting Jews. A receipt dated March 15, 1942, showed that he was paid a bounty of 3.75 guilders for the arrest of a Jehovah’s Witness. Had Gerrit Wolfswinkel felt so guilty about the arrest that he converted to his victim’s religion? Or was the conversion expedient, since Jehovah’s Witnesses can confess only to God?
The last of the strange coincidences was that Rolf had also told Vince that he was remotely related to Tonny Ahlers, who had blackmailed Otto Frank in 1941 with the Jansen note. Rolf’s grandmother had married several times, and one of her husbands was Tonny Ahlers’s father. Wolfswinkel has the wedding ring given to his grandmother with “ACA 1925” engraved inside.
32
No Substantial Proof, Part II
Vince concluded that it was now time to turn the Cold Case Team’s attention to the second investigation into the Annex raid, conducted by Arend Jacobus van Helden, a veteran detective of the Dutch police force. The first question the team faced was: Why, suddenly, in 1963–1964, did the Dutch government authorize the investigation? It didn’t seem to be the result of any new information. Most likely it was a response to Simon Wiesenthal’s search for Silberbauer that had generated so much international press attention. The Dutch wanted to take back control of the case.
Vince noted that the second investigation was conducted in a more professional manner than the one in 1947–1948, although it, too, had its weak points. Not only had memories faded in the twenty-year interval, but evidence had been lost and witnesses had died, including Johannes Kleiman （on January 30, 1959）， Lammert Hartog （on March 6, 1959）， and Hartog’s wife, Lena （on June 10, 1963）。
The problem with the second investigation was that it, too, was narrow. The focus was once again only on Willem van Maaren. That was in part due to Silberbauer’s remark in Vienna that a warehouse employee of Otto Frank made the call to the SD. Though he would later retract that, Silberbauer claimed that when he arrived on the scene, he witnessed a Dutch detective ask the warehouse manager, “Where are the Jews?” The man pointed toward the upper floor, which led Silberbauer to conclude that Van Maaren had phoned in the tip about the Jews and had been waiting for the raid team.
Detective Van Helden was methodical. He tracked down and questioned the two Dutch policemen, Willem Grootendorst and Gezinus Gringhuis, who assisted Silberbauer in the raid. Grootendorst was released from prison in 1955 on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands. Gringhuis, whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison, was released in 1958. Both claimed that they could not recall having taken part in the Annex arrest. But Gringhuis went further, claiming that he was not there because he would have remembered the arrest of eight Jews, a crafty obfuscation.1