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” tempted by the lure of monetary rewards. They are headed by a sadistic Dutch
police officer working for Nazi intelligence agency the SD. His name is Pieter Schaap.
Pieter Schaap was born on the 18 June 1902 in Zandvoort, the Netherlands. In 1926, at the age
of 24, he became a police officer in Amsterdam and rose to the rank of Detective Sergeant.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in Germany in January 1933. The Nazi regime quickly
began to implement radical racial, political, and social policies which restricted the civil
and human rights of the Jews who according to the census of June 16, 1933, accounted for less than
0,8 percent of the total population of 67 million. During the first six years of Hitler’s rule,
German Jews felt the effects of legislation that transformed them from “citizens” to “outcasts” and
by early 1939, only about 16 percent of the Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind.
While in January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany,
approximately 304,000 of them emigrated during the
first six years of the Nazi dictatorship. 15,000 of them fled to the Netherlands.
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.
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. The
Germans claimed that the requirement that all Jews register was for their own safety, but the truth
was that it enabled their future deportations as the Nazis could easily track them down.
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.
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. Transports regularly left the transit
camps of Westerbork and Vught. 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.
In 1943, Pieter Schaap became a member of the Office of Jewish Affairs of the Amsterdam police
which arrested and interrogated Jews in hiding. The department was under the leadership of the
SD - a Nazi Party intelligence service. In his position Schaap, who soon acquired
a reputation as a fanatical persecutor of the Dutch Jews, was jointly responsible for
the arrest of 10,000 Jews who were subsequently deported to the concentration camps in the East.
Some of them however were not transported, as they did not survive his sadistic interrogating
methods. He would often beat and whip his victims or have their fingernails pulled out.
Some of the captured Jews were also given a choice - either go to the East or work together
with the Nazis. The procedure went as follows: the so-called V-Women or V-Men, who were collaborators
secretly working as a kind of agent provocateur for the Germans, in this case the SD, contacted
intended victims, gained their trust and extracted as much information as possible. Subsequently,
Schaap was informed and made the arrests. People who went into hiding were punished or extorted.
As long as they performed well, these V-agents did not have to fear deportation,
did not have to wear a yellow star and also received good monetary rewards.
At first, Schaap used heavy threats, but soon he managed to manipulate them into doing their
work with enthusiasm. Those who did not 'deliver' enough were again threatened by him with transport
to Nazi camp. Schaap’s most famous Jewish agent was Ans van Dijk who together with her
accomplices, 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.
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 steady girlfriend.
Another his agent was Jeanne Valkenburg who worked in Amsterdam as a prostitute and brothel madam.
As a former Amsterdam police detective with many contacts in the underworld, Schaap knew her well.
She was not a Jew, but she had been married to a Jewish man for a while,
and then had a relationship with a Jewish market vendor. She therefore had good contacts in Jewish
circles and helped Jews with false identity cards and hiding addresses.
However, she was caught by the Nazis and then became active as Schaap’s
agent who used her to hunt Jews. She betrayed about fifty of them.
During the raids, Schaap appropriated money as well as valuables from the Jews. During one such
raid, he was seen putting a box of jewelery and a briefcase of silver cutlery into his pocket.
The valuables worth around 10,000 guilders belonged to a Jew named Martin Cohen, who ended up
in Westerbork transit camp and was then deported to Auschwitz where he died on 6 September 1944.
On another occasion he arrested Frits Stibbe, a Jewish man who before the war had earned
his living as a sales representative. In 1942 he went into hiding but was betrayed,
and on May 2, 1943 he was arrested by Schaap at his hiding place in Amsterdam. When his friend
and colleague Mozes Velleman visited him, he was also taken along. Stibbe died in Sobibor on
May 14, 1943 and Mozes Velleman was murdered in the same extermination camp one week later.
Though Schaap was married, he had a number of affairs and had no problem with having sexual
relations with Jewish collaborators which under the “Law for the Protection of German
Blood and German Honor” was punishable by severe imprisonment or even death.
However, at the time, it was a common practice that both Dutch and German
SD members of the Office of Jewish Affairs had affairs with Jewish women.
In 1944, together with his boss Abraham Kaper and 8 others,
Schaap was sent to a German police station in Groningen, to strengthen the local police team.
Their expertise with investigative methods gained in Amsterdam and the fact that they were not known
in Groningen meant that they could easily go undercover among the population to make numerous
arrests there. In the process, Schaap gained a reputation as an increasingly cruel interrogator
and executioner. Often, during interrogations in his office, Kaper calmly asked the questions, and
Schaap stood behind the detainee, fiddling with a whip. When the friendly approach was not working,
Kaper left the room and Schaap began the beatings. Although he captured significantly fewer Jews than
in Amsterdam, that had little or nothing to do with his effectivity. The reason was that
most of the Jews in Groningen had already been arrested and deported by mid-1944.
One of Schaap’s most outstanding collaborators was Leopold David
de Jong who lived in Heemstede and was married to a German, non-Jewish woman.
He was a Jew, but the status of a mixed marriage gave him some protection against deportation.
During a check by Schaap, he pretended to be a 'half Jew' but Schaap found out quite quickly that
this was not true. He then put heavy pressure on de Jong who succumbed, went to work for Schaap and
betrayed about fifty Jews, including his brother. Over time, De Jong became afraid that he would be
exposed as an accomplice of the SD and on the advice of Schaap, De Jong voluntarily allowed
himself to be transported to Westerbork transit camp. There, too, he passed on incriminating
information about other Jews to the local Nazi leadership as well as to Schaap. As a result,
he received all kinds of privileges in Westerbork, such as being allowed to go on leave to Groningen
where on one occasion De Jong, aware of the fact that his role as traitor would be heavily held
against him, asked Schaap to arrange for him to move to Switzerland but he did not want to take
his wife because she was cheating on him. After Schaap had told him that a flight
to Switzerland would not work, de Jong revealed to Schaap that he had a plan to
kill his wife. Schaap, who was sleeping with his wife, ensured that De Jong was
arrested and when the later tried to escape, he shot him putting two bullets in his head.
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. This resistance’s counterintelligence,
domestic sabotage and communications networks helped to provide key support to Allied forces
throughout the liberation of Holland. Members of the resistance, if discovered,
were immediately sentenced to death. Schaap was the one who tortured the captured members
of the resistance and gave the 'yes' to shoot at the executions of these members.
On 10 April 1945, Schaap personally shot and killed 10 members of the Dutch
resistance in Bakkeveen after first torturing them. According to Schaap,
though he had been instructed by his superior to order them to lie down in a pit dug by themselves,
where they were to be killed with hand grenades, he found this inhuman and shot them instead.
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.
During his flight in April 1945, Schaap carried a bag full of valuables belonging to his victims.
What did not fit in the bag, he had given to his wife and stepdaughter for safekeeping. After the
war, numerous witnesses - both victims and former colleagues - confirmed that stealing, extorting
and looting were part of Schaap's normal behavior. While Schaap’s wife Maria Hendrika was charged
after the war for taking stolen property from victims from him, Schaap himself was captured,
tried and sentenced to death for crimes he had committed during the war.
In a desperate attempt to save his life, Pieter Schaap, who during his reign of terror had no
mercy with his victims, made an appeal for clemency. However, his request was rejected.
Schaap was 47 years old when he was executed by a firing squad on
29 June 1949 in Groningen. He was executed together with his former boss Abraham Kaper.
There were no tears shed for Pieter Schaap.
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