After Adolf Hitler approved Anton Mussert as "Leider van het Nederlandse Volk" (Leader of the Dutch People) in December 1942, he was allowed to form a national government institute, a Dutch shadow cabinet called "Gemachtigden van den Leider", which advised ReichskommissarArthur Seyss-Inquart from 1 February 1943. The institute consisted of a number of deputies in charge of defined functions or departments within the administration.[2]
On 4 February 1943, Retired General and Rijkscommissaris Hendrik Seyffardt, already head of the Dutch SS volunteer group Vrijwilligerslegioen Nederland[nl], was announced through the press as “Deputy for Special Services”. As a result, the Communist resistance group CS-6 under Dr. Gerrit Kastein (named after its address, 6 Corelli Street, in Amsterdam), concluded that the new institute would eventually lead to a National-Socialist government, which would then introduce general conscription to enable the call-up of Dutch nationals to the Eastern Front.[2] However, in reality the Nazis only saw Mussert and the NSB as a useful Dutch tool to enable general co-operation, and furthermore, Seyss-Inquart had assured Mussert after his December 1942 meeting with Hitler that general conscription was not on the agenda.[2] However, CS-6 assessed that Seyffardt was the most important person within the new institute who was eligible for an attack, after the heavily-protected Mussert.[3]
After approval from the Dutch government in exile in London,[citation needed] on the evening of Friday 5 February 1943, after answering a knock at his front door in Scheveningen, The Hague, Seyffardt was shot twice by student Jan Verleun who had accompanied Dr. Kastein on the mission. A day later Seyffardt succumbed to his injuries in hospital.[2] A private military ceremony was arranged at the Binnenhof, attended by family and friends and with Mussert in attendance, after which Seyffardt was cremated.[2] On 7 February, CS-6 shot fellow institute member “Gemachtigde voor de Volksvoorlichting” (Attorney for the national relations) Hermannus Reydon and his wife. His wife died on the spot, while Reydon died on 24 August of his injuries.[2] The gun used in this attack had been given to Dr. Kastein by Sicherheitsdienst (SD) agent Anton van der Waals, who after tracking him back through information, arrested him on 19 February. Two days later Dr. Kastein committed suicide so as not to give away Dutch Resistance information under torture.[2]
Activity
Plaque in Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden to commemorate teachers and pupils who died in World War II. One of them was Operation Silbertanne victim Christiaan de Jong.
Seyffardt and Reydon's deaths led to massive Nazi Germany reprisals in the occupied Netherlands, under Operation Silbertanne, supported by various German officers. Silbertanne was intended as reprisal for the attacks made on predominantly Dutch collaborators and German occupational forces by the Dutch resistance.
SS General for the Netherlands Hanns Albin Rauter gave order to retaliate by assassinating civilians presumed to be in some way connected to the resistance or to be orange-minded, meaning Dutch patriots, or anti-German.[4] The task of perpetrating the killings was first assigned to especially formed death squads, though killings were later carried out exclusively by SonderkommandoFeldmeijer, a special unit consisting of 15 SS-members.
Rauter immediately ordered the murder of 50 Dutch hostages and a series of raids on Dutch universities.[5] Later in the war, the Dutch resistance attacked Rauter's car (6 March 1945), which led to reprisal killings at De Woeste Hoeve, where 117 men were rounded up and executed at the site of the ambush, and another 147 Gestapo prisoners executed elsewhere.[6]
The commander of the Security Police and SD in the Netherlands, Erich Naumann, assisted the perpetrators of Operation Silbertanne. He approved of executions carried out by Feldmeijer and Feldmeijer's death squad.[9]
Prosecution
After World War II, some of the members of the death squad and those responsible for giving the orders were put on trial. The commander, Henk Feldmeijer, however, had been killed on 22 January 1945, when his car was strafed by an Allied aircraft.
Maarten Kuiper and Pieter Johan Faber were executed in 1948. Hanns Albin Rauter was executed in 1949. Others, however, managed to flee the country and went into hiding outside the Netherlands. Sander Borgers died in 1985 at the age of 67 in Haren, Germany. Klaas Carel Faber lived until his death on May 24, 2012, in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt.[10] In July 2009 it was reported that the German government wanted to prosecute Faber after all.[11] Daniel Bernhard died in 1962. Lambertus van Gog fled to Spain but was extradited to the Netherlands in 1978. Heinrich Boere, who has been living for decades in Germany, was found fit to stand trial for the murders committed between 1943 and 1944, by the Provincial Court of Appeal in Cologne on 7 July 2009, and subsequently was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in March 2010. Boere died in a prison hospital on December 1, 2013.[1]
In 1947, Erich Naumann was a defendant of the Einsatzgruppen trial. In 1948, he was found guilty of unrelated atrocities during his time as an Einsatzgruppen commander in Belarus and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison in 1951.[12]
Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was a German lawyer and SS-Brigadeführer in Nazi Germany. He was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was originally planned. After the war, Schöngarth and six others were tried for murdering an American pilot, Americo S. Galle, who was shot down over the Netherlands in November 1944. They were all found guilty. Schöngarth and four others were sentenced to death and executed in 1946.
Anton Adriaan Mussert was a Dutch politician who co-founded the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB) in 1931 and served as its leader until the party was banned in 1945. As such, he was the most prominent Dutch leader of the National Socialism movement before and during World War II. Mussert collaborated with the German occupation government, but was granted little actual power and held the nominal title of Leider van het Nederlandsche Volk from 1942 onwards. In May 1945, as the war came to an end in Europe, Mussert was captured and arrested by Allied forces. He was charged and convicted of treason, and was executed in 1946.
Despite Dutch neutrality, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 as part of Fall Gelb. On 15 May 1940, one day after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Dutch government and the royal family relocated to London. Princess Juliana and her children sought refuge in Ottawa, Canada until after the war.
The Volunteer Legion Netherlands was a collaborationist military formation recruited in the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II. It was formed in the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union and fought on the Eastern Front in the Waffen SS alongside similar formations from other parts of German-occupied Western Europe. It was the largest Dutch SS unit.
The Dutch resistance to the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II can be mainly characterized as non-violent. The primary organizers were the Communist Party, churches, and independent groups. Over 300,000 people were hidden from German authorities in the autumn of 1944 by 60,000 to 200,000 illegal landlords and caretakers. These activities were tolerated knowingly by some one million people, including a few individuals among German occupiers and military.
Johannes Hendrik Feldmeijer was a Dutch Nazi politician and a member of the NSB. He was the commander of the Sonderkommando-Feldmeijer death squad during Operation Silbertanne.
Johann Baptist Albin Rauter was a high-ranking Austrian-born SS functionary and war criminal during the Nazi era. He was the highest SS and Police Leader in the occupied Netherlands and therefore the leading security and police officer there during the period of 1940–1945. Rauter reported directly to the Nazi SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, and also to the Nazi governor of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. After World War II, he was convicted in the Netherlands of crimes against humanity and executed by firing squad.
Herbertus Bikker, also known as The Butcher of Ommen, was a Dutch war criminal. He was a member of the Waffen-SS. In this function, Bikker served as a guard at the prison and work camp Erika near Ommen. He received his nickname due to his brutal behaviour at the prison camp.
The Reichskommissariat Niederlande was the civilian occupation regime set up by Germany in the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II. Its full title was the Reich Commissariat for the Occupied Dutch Territories. The administration was headed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, formerly the last chancellor of Austria before initiating its annexation by Germany.
Florentine Sophie Rost van Tonningen was the wife of Meinoud Marinus Rost von Tonningen, the second leader of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB) and President of the National Bank during the German occupation (1941–1945). Because she continued to support and propagate the ideals of Nazism after World War II and the death of her husband, she became known in the Netherlands as the "Black Widow".
Heinrich Boere was a convicted German-Dutch war criminal and former member of the Waffen-SS. He was on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals.
De Woeste Hoeve is a hamlet in the Netherlands between Apeldoorn and Arnhem, which is remembered for an incident in the Second World War when, during the night of 6 March 1945, Dutch resistance fighters shot the Nazi Chief of Police, SS General Hanns Rauter.
Klaas Carel Faber was a convicted Dutch-German war criminal. He was the son of Pieter and Carolina Josephine Henriëtte Faber, and the brother of Pieter Johan Faber, who was executed for war crimes in 1948. Faber was on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals. Faber died in Germany in May 2012, having never been extradited.
Hendrik Alexander Seyffardt was a Dutch general, who during World War II collaborated with Nazi Germany during the occupation of the Netherlands, most notably as a figurehead of the Volunteer Legion Netherlands, a unit of the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front.
Dr. Gerrit Willem Kastein was a Dutch communist, neurologist and resistance fighter and leader during World War II.
Siert Bruins, also known as Siegfried Bruns and nicknamed the Beast of Appingedam, was a Dutch member of the SS and SD during World War II.
Hendrik Evert Koot was a Dutch collaborator with the German occupying forces during World War II. A member of the WA, the paramilitary wing of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB), he was beaten up by members of a local knokploeg in Amsterdam on 11 February 1941. His injuries were so severe that he died a few days later. His death was seized by the German authorities to start raids in the Jodenbuurt, the Amsterdam Jewish quarters, which in turn led to the February strike. Another element of Nazi retaliation was the installation of a Judenrat in Amsterdam: the Jewish Council of Amsterdam.
Wilhelm (Willi) Friedrich Adolf Ritterbusch, was a Nazi Party political functionary. Among other positions, he was the German Generalkommissar zur Besonderen Verwendung, directing the political affairs and propaganda in the occupied Netherlands from the middle of July 1943 until 7 May 1945, the end of World War II.
Events in the year 1944 in the Netherlands.
Hermannus Reydon was a Dutch journalist and Nazi collaborator. He served as the second Secretary-General of the Department of Public Information and the Arts, which had been established by the civilian regime installed in the Netherlands by Nazi Germany during the occupation.
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