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. Many Jews go into hiding
but the possibility of their survival is reduced by the presence of “Jew-hunters”
who are tempted by the lure of monetary rewards. One such Jew-Hunter is Ans van Dijk.
Ans van Dijk was born on the 24th of December 1905 in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Jewish parents Aron van Dijk and Kaatje Blik.
Ans was a difficult child and was under the care of a pediatrician from the age of five.
In 1919, at the age of fourteen, she lost her mother.
In 1927, Ans married Abraham Querido who like her was of Jewish descent. The marriage remained
childless, and they separated in 1935. Soon after van Dijk began a lesbian relationship with a woman
named Miep Stodel whom she employed in her shop named 'Maison Evany' on the Nieuwendijk, which is
a major shopping street in central Amsterdam. The two women lived together in an apartment above the
store, liked to go out in cafes and Van Dijk made numerous friends in the Amsterdam lesbian scene.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939.
The same year Ans’ father died in the psychiatric institution.
On the 10th of May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. Soon
after a civil administration was installed under 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.
During 1940, the German occupation authorities banned Jews from the civil service and required
Jews to register the assets of their business enterprises. On the 3rd of
October the same year, Ans van Dijk and Abraham Querido were officially divorced.
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.
On the 22nd and 23rd of February the same year,
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. Such was
also a case of a shop owned by Ans van Dijk who had to close it in November 1941.
After that, in order to conceal herself, she dyed her hair blond and managed to
obtain a false identity card in the name of Alphonsia Maria Annie de Jong.
Her friend Miep Stodel fled to Switzerland in July of the following year.
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. Because some Dutch citizens couldn’t bear to see
what was happening to their country and people and resisted the occupation, they joined the
resistance. 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.
Van Dijk initially helped the resistance by supplying her fellow Jews with hiding places,
identity papers, and necessities. Between 25,000-30,000 Jews went into hiding in the
Netherlands and Ans Van Dijk was one of them. Hiding in the Amsterdam’s Marco Polostraat,
she had accommodated two Jewish ladies at another address in the same street. However,
those ladies were betrayed and in turn told that the hiding place had been handed to
them by Van Dijk who was arrested on Easter Sunday 1943 by Pieter Schaap – a detective of
the Office of Jewish Affairs of the Amsterdam police. At the office, Ans was given a choice:
either go to the East or work together with the Nazis. She decided to team up with the
SD – the German Security Police, and from that moment on her life took a dramatic turn.
Prenteding to be a member of the illegal resistance organization “Free Nederlands”,
she offered to help Jews find hiding places and obtain false papers. Van Dijk convinced dozens of
Jews that she sought to help them. Instead, she betrayed their hiding places to Schaap,
who in turn had the Jews arrested. Her house at Jekerstraat street in Amsterdam served as a trap.
The previously rather shy woman with little self-confidence blossomed through her work
for the bureau. In addition, she received praise and recognition for every person who
got caught by the Germans with her help. Within a couple of months of making her
arrangement with Schaap, van Dijk found herself at the head of a group of women hunting Jews.
Among these women were Rosalie Roozendaal, who tried to protect herself and her mother
from deportation and Branca Simons as well was given the choice by the SD to be deported or
to help track down Jews in hiding. Both Ans van Dijk and Simons were regularly placed
in a cell with arrested Jews and thus obtained further information from them.
However, the most fanatical of the group was Ans van Dijk whom Peter Schaap,
her Nazi superior, described as the best of his ten employees.
She developed what the prosecutor later described as a "satanic hunting instinct." She betrayed
anyone who got in her way - friends, her own brother, his wife, and their three children as
well as the family of her own girlfriend. Abraham Querido, her former husband, died on the 30th of
June 1944 in the Blechhammer concentration camp. However, a connection between his deportation and
the activities of van Dijk is not confirmed. Van Dijk also tried to make an appointment
with Louis Stodel, the brother of her friend Miep who had fled to Switzerland. Fortunately,
Louis did not trust the case, did not show up and survived the war.
Together with her accomplices, Ans van Dijk betrayed 145 people, 107 Jews and 38
non-Jewish Dutchmen, in the period between May 1943 and August 1944. Only a small proportion
of these people survived the concentration camps. However, she may have been responsible
for the deaths of as many as 700 people.
In his book, “The Backyard of the Secret Annex,” author Gerard Kremer claims that van Dijk was
responsible for betraying Anne Frank and seven other Jews in hiding behind Otto Frank’s office
building at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. According to Kremer, his late father — also
named Gerard Kremer — occasionally spotted van Dijk during her visits to a Nazi office building
where Kremer worked during the war. There, she supposedly met with handlers and made phone calls.
But despite independent and police studies, this theory has neither been proved nor disapproved.
After the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944, the Western Allies rapidly advanced in
the direction of the Dutch border. The invasion and the growing certainty that
Germany would lose the war did not dampen the zeal of Ans van Dijk and her colleagues.
After they came into contact with a resistance fighter and hinted that they themselves were also
involved in the underground, they won his trust and traced a number of hiding places through him.
On the 18,th of August 1944, the Germans raided various places in the Dutch town of Zeist and
arrested thirty to forty people, including twelve Jews. Only a few of those twelve survived the war.
In the Netherlands, between
25,000-30,000 Jews went into hiding during the war. Two-thirds of those managed to survive.
The Germans officially surrendered all their troops in the Netherlands on the
5th of May 1945, three days before the general capitulation of Germany.
After the end of the war, van Dijk moved to The Hague where she was arrested at
her girlfriend’s home on the 20th of June 1945. Charged with 23 counts of treason,
van Dijk appeared before a special court in Amsterdam and confessed to all the counts
against her explaining that she had only acted out of self-preservation adding her enormous fear of
the SD as an explanation for her traitorous role. During her trial, which began in February 1947,
van Dijk admitted to helping the Nazis capture at least 145 Jews, including her relatives.
Her ex-lover, whose relatives had been betrayed by van Dijk as well,
referred to her as “a devil in human form.” Requests to have her psychologically examined
were rejected by the presiding judge, who asked her: “How can you still sleep? Don't you always
see all those people in front of you?” Ans Van Dijk was sentenced to death for treason.
She filed appeals to both the court and the Queen Wilhelmina but both were rejected.
Van Dijk’s accomplices Rosalie Roozendaal and Branca Simons were arrested as well.
Roozendaal was released from prison in 1947, Simons in 1959.
The day before her execution, in a final, desperate attempt to save her life, Ans
van Dijk had been baptized and joined the Roman Catholic Church. However, nothing could save her.
Ans van Dijk was 42 years old when she was executed by firing squad on the
14th of January 1948. Pieter Schaap, Van Dijk’s former superior jointly
responsible for the arrest of 10,000 Jews, was executed the same way one year later.
After the war, a total of 39 people were executed in the Netherlands because of their war past.
Of those 39, van Dijk, who has become synonymous
with treason of the Jews in the Netherlands, was the only woman.
There were no tears shed for Ans Van Dijk.
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