Notary v.d. Hasselt, 702 Keizersgracht （230047）
（234602）
By mail receiving in Basel whether or not via Foundation
Personal details
Likely
Already more years
Given to me on 16/12-63—
Mr. Heldring,
1 has been a member of Jewish council
among others society of nursing & care
2.Department Lijnbaansgracht （？？？？ &）
????）
These were Detective Van Helden’s jottings to himself. The first sentence clearly states that the original note was in the possession of a notary named Van Hasselt at Keizersgracht 702, followed by two six-digit numbers. A search of the 1963 Amsterdam telephone directory confirmed that those were the address and phone numbers of Notary J. V. van Hasselt.
The words following this are not as clear but mention Basel, where Otto was living in 1963. The team interpreted the next full sentence, “Given to me on 16/12-63,” to mean that Detective Van Helden received the copy of the note on December 16, 1963, approximately two weeks after he interviewed Otto.
The team believed that “Heldring” referred to Herman Heldring, an original board member of the Anne Frank Stichting. The last portion of the note, “has been a member of Jewish council among others society of nursing & care,” appeared to be about Van den Bergh and the organization he joined after the liberation. The “Department Lijnbaansgracht” was the street location where the Jewish Council’s Central Information Office was located during the war. The translator has used “？？？？” to indicate that two words, separated by &, followed but they are completely unintelligible.
The Cold Case Team members were now certain that they had the copy that Otto had made of the original note, but they were left with some puzzling questions: Who was this notary, Van Hasselt? Why did he end up with the original note? And why hadn’t they heard of him before?
38
A Note Between Friends
Jakob van Hasselt was about to become an important figure in the investigation. It turned out that he knew Arnold van den Bergh quite well. Before the war, they were two of only seven Jewish notaries in Amsterdam, and they conducted many business transactions together.1 During the war their lives went in different directions: Van Hasselt was asked to be a member of the Jewish Council but declined. Van den Bergh accepted. Van Hasselt and his family went into hiding; he and his wife eventually made it to Belgium, while his two daughters remained behind in the Netherlands.* After the war, their lives intersected again. Van Hasselt returned to Amsterdam and became deeply involved in Jewish relief work, appointing Van den Bergh to a board position on the Jewish Social Work organization （Joods Maatschappelijk Werk）。
Van Hasselt was also very close to Otto Frank. He was the notary who established the Anne Frank Stichting, the foundation originally formed in May 1957 to protect Prinsengracht 263 from demolition. He served as a founding board member along with Otto, Johannes Kleiman, and several others. Van Hasselt also prepared the prenuptial agreement for Otto and his second wife, Fritzi, before their November 1953 marriage.2 He even supported Otto when people began questioning the authenticity of Anne’s diary; in 1954, he notarized a statement that he’d examined the diary and declared it to be authentic.3
Otto and Van Hasselt had something else in common: Van Hasselt also lost his two young daughters （ages six and nine） in the Holocaust. The callousness of what happened is shocking. To avoid paying a fine for violating the blackout curtains order, a woman reported an elderly Jewish woman in hiding who happened to be the grandmother of the two Van Hasselt girls. When the grandmother was taken, the arrest team found letters from her granddaughters with the return address of the place they were hiding on the envelope.4
The two men’s tragic loss bonded them in a way that no one but a person who’d experienced such loss could know. Otto and Van Hasselt must certainly have discussed the contents of the anonymous note, but they seemed unsure as to what to do with it. Otto clearly felt the note was important enough to copy it and give the original to his friend, presumably for safekeeping.5
The name Van Hasselt came up in many documents the Cold Case Team found through the Statements Project, including a March 1958 letter from Kleiman to Otto Frank. In the letter, Kleiman referred to the anonymous note, saying:
I have read the anonymous letter that was sent to me by notary van Hasselt. The latter knew notary van den Bergh, who lived nearby, but the latter has long since passed. He did not know any better than that the latter was “good” at that time. Dr. de Jong would inform the justice department, but both gentlemen found it better not to ascribe too much value to such anonymous notes. Question 1 arises immediately, why does such a person only now come forward with such an accusation? Dr. de Jong will report to me further when he finds out something.6