The 10th of May, 1940, World War 2, the Netherlands. Nazi Germany invades Holland
and the German Air Forces – the Luftwaffe – use paratroopers in the capture of tactical points and
to assist in the advance of ground troops across the country. The invasion is accompanied by heavy
aerial bombardment of Rotterdam and culminates on the 14th of May with the destruction of its entire
historic center. Because the Germans threaten to bomb the city of Utrecht in the same way,
the Dutch forces surrender one day later. Soon after the Nazis start to occupy the whole country
and pass new anti-Jewish laws which are designed to exclude Jewish people from society and restrict
their livelihood. The systematic deportations of Dutch Jews to death camps start in July
1942. However, because some Dutch citizens cannot bear to see what is happening to their country
and people, they resist the occupation and join the resistance. Among them is Willem Arondeus.
Willem Johan Cornelis Arondeus was born on the 22 of August 1894 in Naarden, the Netherlands as
the youngest of 6 children. His father was a fuel trader and his mother ran a tavern in the summer.
Soon after Willem’s birth, the family moved to Amsterdam, where his parents started a costume
rental company for stage actors. In 1907, Willem was accepted at
the Quellinus School in Amsterdam where he studied decorative painting.
Willem refused to suppress his identity as a gay man and when he was 17, he fought with
his parents about his homosexuality. He soon left home and severed contact with his family.
In the 1920s, Arondeus became involved in the Dada movement and was an active member
of the Amsterdam Dadaists. After graduation, he found work as a commercial artist and soon
became one of the Netherlands’ most successful illustrators. He was given
commissions for calendars and posters and his biggest commission came in 1923,
when he was asked to paint a large mural for Rotterdam City Hall.
During this time, living in poverty and loneliness, Willem wrote:
'Friendship is so rare in my life. I hardly know any people other than my intellectual friends,
and they hardly fulfill my desire for affection.'
However, this changed in 1933 when he was 38; Willem, then living in Apeldoorn,
met Jan Tijssen, the son of a local greengrocer. They got to know each other,
fell in love and later moved to Amsterdam. However, alongside living in poverty,
he also struggled to find housing due to his refusal to hide his sexuality. In his
diaries he wrote about being kicked out of apartments because he was gay.
Although Willem was a struggling painter,
he refused to go on welfare and around 1935, he gave up visual arts and became an author.
In 1938 Arondeus began writing a biography of Dutch painter Matthijs
Maris, and after the book was published, Willem's financial situation improved.
In late 1930s, when the German threat grew, Willem wrote to a friend:
'I have suffered so much in recent years that the misery that is yet to come no longer deters me.'
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939. On the 10th of May 1940 Germany invaded the
Netherlands. Soon after a civil administration was installed under
the SS auspices and Arthur Seyss-Inquart was appointed Reich Commissar of the Netherlands.
Among his first step were a series of laws posing economic discriminations against the Jews.
Soon after the occupation, Willem joined the resistance.
During 1940, the German occupation authorities banned Jews from the
civil service and required Jews to register the assets of their business enterprises.
In January 1941, the German authorities required all Jews to register themselves as Jews. A total
of 159,806 persons were registered, including 19,561 persons born of mixed marriages. The
total number included some 25,000 Jewish refugees from the German Reich. A Jewish
council was established in February 1941. Arondeus realized that the German requirement
that all Jews register was not for their own safety as they had claimed but to enable their
future deportation. At that time, some were already making efforts to have Jews go into
hiding with the local population and the main task of Arondeus resistance unit was
to falsify identity papers for Dutch Jews so that the Nazis could not track them down.
On the 22nd and 23rd of February 1941, German forces raided the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam,
arresting and deporting more than 400 Jewish men to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration
camps. The Dutch people’s reaction was unique among the Nazi-occupied Europe: they organized
the February Strike, a two-day general strike, which started on the 25th of February 1941.
German officials brutally suppressed the strike. This action was followed by a hardening in Nazi
policy. The German authorities as well as collaborating Dutch authorities and civil
services segregated Jews from the general Dutch population, and incarcerated 15,000 of them
in German-administered forced-labor camps. The Germans then ordered the concentration of Jews
in Amsterdam and sent foreign and stateless Jews to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast
part of the country. Some of the remaining provincial Jews were sent to the Vught camp.
The sign ‘Forbidden for Jews’ appeared on the doors and gates of cafes, swimming pools,
sports fields, museums, zoos, libraries, theatres, markets and many other public places.
Jews had to hand over their valuables, and their businesses were confiscated.
Regulations which forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing as
a means of identification were announced in the Netherlands on the 29th of April
1942. Those caught without the badge after the 5th of May, when they came into effect,
were arrested, and detained for a six-week period to serve at
Mauthausen. In the Netherlands everyone knew that this was a death sentence.
Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands began in July 1942. The last train left Westerbork
for Auschwitz on the 3rd of September 1944. During these two years, the Germans and their
Dutch collaborators deported some 107,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor,
where they were murdered. Only 5,200 survived. In addition, 25,000-30,000 Jews went into hiding,
assisted by the Dutch underground and two-thirds of those managed to survive.
During all this time, Arondeus and other members of the resistance focused on defending
the safety of the Jews living in the country. They created about 70,000 false identification
cards of Dutch Jews — preventing them from being tracked down by the Nazis.
Yet over time, the Nazis began to catch on more and more to the forged documents,
which could be double checked at the Amsterdam registry building and determined to be fakes.
As a result, in 1943, Arondeus and his associates developed a plan which would become the greatest
act of their resistance: bombing the registration office in Amsterdam and destroying those records.
The goal of the attack was to destroy all of the identity cards that had been issued by the Nazis.
On March 26th, 1943, a group from the Dutch Resistance Movement consisting of a number of
artists, students, two young doctors and Arondeus who led them, entered the Registration building
in Amsterdam disguised as Dutch policemen. The doctors anesthetized the security guards
with injections and placed them outside on the sidewalk. They chose a late hour while
the Registration Office was empty, so no innocent people would be harmed, They destroyed as many
papers as they could and planted a bomb in the building. Next morning on March 27th, the bomb
exploded but it was only partially successful in destroying the civil registry as only 15% of the
records were completely destroyed. The reason was that they were difficult to burn. In total,
800,000 identity cards were destroyed which saved the lives of thousands of people.
Because Arondeus and all his people managed to escape that night, the Nazis promised a
large sum of money for anyone who could uncover the culprits. On April 1st, an
anonymous source informed the Nazis about the Dutch Resistance Movement’s involvement,
and Arondeus was arrested the same day. He took full responsibility for bombing the Registration
Office and refused to give up his comrades’ names. However, the Nazis found his notebook,
which included all the names of the participants in the operation. While some of them managed to
escape, Arondeus and twelve more members of the Dutch Resistance Movement did not.
In June 1943, Arondeus and twelve more members of the Dutch Resistance Movement were tried and
sentenced to death. In the end however,
two young doctors of the group received clemency and were given custodial sentences instead.
The reason was that Willem Arondéus pleaded guilty and took the full blame.
In his farewell letter Willem writes to a friend: 'Just now the commander brought paper,
ink and an envelope. That means we have to die in the morning. (…) Greet all my
friends. I think of them all with love and friendship. Farewell!'
On the 1st of July 1943, the day of his execution, Arondeus, then 48 years old,
made a point of ensuring that the public would be aware that he and other men in the group,
were gay asking his laywer: "Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards”.
Arondeus lived his life by these words until his last moment.
The resistance’s counterintelligence, domestic sabotage and communications networks helped to
provide key support to the Allied forces throughout the liberation of Holland.
Members of the resistance, if discovered, were immediately sentenced to death.
The action of Arondeus unit, which saved lives of thousands, was also
a source of inspiration for resistance groups in other parts of the country.
The Germans officially surrendered all their troops in the Netherlands on the
5th of May 1945, three days before the general capitulation of Germany.
Willem Arondeus left his small fortune to Jan who survived the war and exactly
as post-war society expected of him then married and had children.
Due to homophobia, in the 1950s and 1960s gay war heroes did not
get the recognition they deserved, and only in 1984 Arondeus finally
received the Resistance Memorial Cross from the Dutch government.
In 1986 Yad Vashem recognized Willem Arondeus as a Righteous Among the Nations,
Israel's highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
When in 1990, his sexuality was revealed in a TV program,
and the Dutch public finally learned the true extent of his bravery,
it forever cemented his efforts as a symbol of heroism for the LGBT community.
As Frieda Belinfante who fought alongside Arondeus in the resistance later said:
“Willem was a great hero who was most willing to give his life for the cause”.
There were many tears shed for Willem Arondeus.
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