Andries Jan Pieters

Andries Jan Pieters

Andries Jan Pieters (* 1916 in Leksula , Dutch East Indies ; † March 21, 1952 in Scheveningen ) was a Dutch war criminal who voluntarily joined the Waffen SS during World War II and fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front . Towards the end of the war, he led an SS command in his home country that tortured and murdered suspected members of the Dutch resistance and Jews. He was sentenced to death for his actions and executed as one of the last two people in Dutch history.

biography

Early years and military service

Pieters was born in 1916 on the island of Buru , then part of the Dutch East Indies colony , where his father was a Protestant missionary . He was brought up in a strictly Christian way by his parents, and his childhood was largely isolated from the locals. Among other things, he was not allowed to play with Indonesian children. In 1924 the family returned to the Netherlands, as the father had been recalled from Buru due to unsuccessfulness. Instead, he opened a furniture store in Groningen , which, however, soon went bankrupt. After the war, Pieters stated in an interrogation that "Jewish people" were responsible for this. After finishing his school education, he joined the Dutch armed forces .

In 1941, about a year after the German occupation of the Netherlands began, Pieters joined the Vrijwilligerslegioen Nederland to fight against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front as part of an SS unit . The reason he cited was his Christian upbringing, which would oblige him to “fight against Bolshevism ”. During the fighting there he was wounded and was awarded the Wound Badge in black. Little is known about his other experiences and services. At the beginning of 1945 he came with the rank of SS-Untersturmführer to the Jagdverband Nordwest in Neustrelitz in today's Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania .

War crimes in the Netherlands

In Neustrelitz he was given command of a thirty-man squad that he was supposed to train for "secret combat duties". Such units under the command of foreign SS officers were set up towards the end of the war on the direct orders of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler with the purpose of waging a guerrilla war against the advancing Allies in their respective home countries . To this end, the commanders were given a largely free hand in choosing their means. Pieter's unit, called “Kommando Zeppelin” or, after Pieter's pseudonym , “Kommando Steinbach”, moved to the Netherlands and requisitioned Groot Engelenburg Castle in Brummen in Gelderland as its headquarters on April 6 or 7 . There they immediately began to take massive action against local resistance. Following tips from other SS units and the security service , Pieter's men arrested several dozen alleged resistance fighters within a few days. They were taken to the cellar of the fort, which had been converted into a prison, for questioning, where they were severely tortured by the SS men. Among other things, methods such as beating with a rubber club, tying the genitals, pressing out burning candles on the body or rape were used. In one case, Pieters himself drove a nail about nine centimeters long under the nail of a man's big toe. On Friday, April 13th, the unit left Brummen in the face of advancing Canadian troops. Before they left, they executed eight prisoners who were shortly afterwards found floating in the moat of the fort by the Canadians.

Meanwhile, Pieters led his men to Loosdrecht , where they seized the restaurant Het Witte Huis . In the area around the village, the unit picked up a total of 33 people, including a Jewish family who had gone into hiding. In the Witte Huis there was further torture, whereby the Jews were treated with particular cruelty. For example, the spouses were tortured in the presence of the other, and they were also forced to lick blood spilled from the floor. The family's 19-year-old son died after being thrown upside down in the basement of the restaurant. The Dutch Justice Minister Hendrik Mulderije described the events in Brummen and Loosdrecht after the war with the words: “The deeds at issue here are among the very worst that were committed in this country during the war.” Karl Eberhard also received reports on Pieter's actions Schöngarth , commander of the security police and the SD in the Netherlands and Willy Lages , head of the SD in Amsterdam. Schöngarth then gave Pieters several orders to cease his activities and dissolve his unit, which he ignored and relied on the power of attorney granted directly by Himmler. Only two weeks later, on May 3, 1945, either Schöngarth or Lages had Pieters arrested. It is very certain that he would have been executed by the Germans for deserting , but the liberation of the Netherlands a few days later came before that.

Trial and Execution

After the end of the war, Pieters came before one of the newly established special courts, which sentenced him to death for his war crimes. Like many others, he petitioned the new Dutch Queen Juliana , who was considered an opponent of the death penalty . He referred to his difficult childhood and stated that he had joined the Germans out of a misplaced sense of duty, because he had thought he would have to fight against Bolshevism. He cited an "angry psychosis " as the trigger for the torture . Although about two-thirds of all original death sentences were later overturned, the Queen refused to overturn Pieter's case because his crimes were too serious to show mercy in the case. The death sentence was then carried out on March 21, 1952 on the Waalsdorpervlakte in the coastal town of Scheveningen. This execution, in which the German SS officer Wilhelm Artur Albrecht was executed alongside Pieters , was the last one ever carried out in the Netherlands.

literature

• Stijn Wiegerinck: Het commando-Pieters: Hollandse SS-ers in Brummen en Loosdrecht April – May 1945. Aspect, Soesterberg 2014, ISBN 978-94-6153-425-5 .

Web links

• De laatste doodstraf at geschiedenis24.nl ( archive link, Dutch)
• De nazi's hadden hem ook gedood at nos.nl (Dutch)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Pieters, Andries Jan. In: tracesofwar.com. Retrieved February 28, 2020 .