It would be several months before investigators looked into Ancol (spelled Antjol before the 1972 orthography reform), a swampy area that had been used as a field of execution and mass grave by the Japanese occupiers.

When personnel of the Graves Service of the Royal Netherlands Army first visited the site in June 1946, a rudimentary cement gravestone topped by a wooden cross stood on a neglected piece of land.

In preparation of the trials against the staff of the Kempeitai headquarters in Batavia, some of the accused were transferred from prison to Ancol and interrogated on-site by a special committee.

[2] The extracted statements remained limited to summary information: between 400 and 600 executed prisoners had allegedly been buried near the cement stone.

In a stroke of luck, the elderly and deaf-mute guardian of an old Chinese temple was able to provide important information and pointed out the locations of many executions.

Mansergh (the British Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces, Netherlands East Indies), and consular representatives of the United States, France and China.

During the oppressive moment when the Dutch flag was lowered to half-mast, the military band played Chopin's Marche funèbre.

This Ailanthus excelsa seemed to show a gesture of desperation and, according to the deaf-mute guardian of the Chinese temple, a number of women had been executed under this tree.

After some time, the tree died off and a rescue operation was mounted by the then-director of the Netherlands War Graves Foundation R. Smagge, his wife, and a team of experts.

A copper plate was then affixed to the concrete collar that was placed around the tree, inscribed with a few lines from the poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon: They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.