Betje Wery

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Elisabeth "Betje" Wery , also Bella Tuerlings , (born August 26, 1920 in Rotterdam , † October 16, 2006 in Ede ) was a Dutch collaborator during the occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans in World War II and a "Jew hunter".

biography

Young years and first marriage

Betje Wery was born the oldest of two children in her family; the father was " half- Jewish", the mother Jewish. She grew up in Rotterdam, where she attended a household school and a secondary Mulo school (special type of school in the Netherlands) for two years . In 1939 she worked as a nurse for a few months, when she proved to be clumsy. In December of that year, she was given a two-week suspended sentence for shoplifting. She then became a shoe seller in a Bata store.

In January 1940 Betje Wery met Frans Tuerlings, a sales representative for gloves, whom she married on September 17, 1941. For this she converted to the Roman Catholic faith, since Tuerlings was Catholic. Despite this, she was arrested in August 1942 for not wearing a Jewish star and taken to the Amersfoort transit camp . Thanks to an influential German relative of her husband, she was released after a day and given a ban , which meant that she was initially protected from deportation . She was declared "half-Jewish" and no longer had to wear the star.

In the meantime, alcohol consumption and money issues led to serious problems in the Tuerlings' marriage. At the end of 1943, Frans Tuerlings was killed in a car accident; documents were found showing his wife's involvement in the black market. Thereupon Betje Wery served the foreign exchange protection command (DSK), which hunted down black marketeers and the assets of Jews, as an undercover woman . It got the number 196.

Employee of the SD

At the beginning of 1944, Betje Wery, who was certified by contemporary witnesses as "irresistible beauty", moved to Amsterdam and moved into an apartment on Rubensstrasse. 26, in close proximity to the headquarters of the security service (SD). As Bella , she organized roulette evenings and betrayed well-funded players, who owed their prosperity to the black market, to the SD, such as its employee Dries Riphagen .

In May 1944 Wery met Gerhard Badrian , who confided in Bella that he was active in the resistance. On June 30, 1944, she lured Badrian, his girlfriend and two other men into her apartment with the promise that the resistance group Persoonsbewijzencentrale (PBC) could use it as a new headquarters for their activities. There the SD was waiting for the resistance. Badrian was shot in front of the house and his friend Charly Hartog was arrested. Through this action the SD succeeded in smashing the PBC, which produced forged papers for the persecuted. Wery received a reward of 1,000 guilders from the SD ; she was declared “outlawed” by the resistance. She had to go into hiding and hid in various apartments for several weeks, where she received regular visits from SD chief Willy Lages .

On Lages' advice, Wery went to Belgium at the end of August 1944. She settled in Antwerp as Elisabeth Stips . Again she had a lot of dealings with German occupiers and worked again for the DSK. After the liberation of Brussels, she stayed there and had a liaison with the Dutch secret service officer Oreste Pinto , who certified her “political reliability”, since thanks to her the double agent Chris Lindemans had been arrested. On December 24, 1944, Betje Wery was arrested anyway and interned in a monastery in Valkenburg. In August 1945 she was moved to the Amsterdamse Huis van Bewaring I , where she shared a cell with two other collaborators, Ans van Dijk and Jeanne Valkenburg .

After the war

At the beginning of May 1948, the Bijzonder Gerechtshof opened the trial against Betje Wery. The prosecutor certified that she was a "thoroughly bad" woman and ordered the death penalty . On May 15, 1948, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Although this judgment was upheld by the Bijzondere Raad van Cassatie , she was released after a few years.

On November 14, 1949 Betje Wery married Mijndert Vonk, who had previously been convicted of murder and had worked for the SD in Groningen. The two had met in prison and the couple had two children. Together they successfully founded a marriage agency in Ede . At the end of 1979, Betje Wijndert appeared on television to initiate marriages in a show. This made the couple's history public and the show canceled. Wery reacted with incomprehension: Competitors tried to make life difficult for her out of envy. She defended herself and her husband that they were in their early twenties at the time of their actions and had served their sentences.

In October 2016, the Dutch film Riphagen came out about the life of Wery's accomplice Dries Riphagen, in which Betje Wery is also portrayed.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Marie-Cécile van Hintum: Wery, Elisabeth. Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland, July 13, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 .
  2. ↑ April: Gerhard Joseph Badrian. In: niod.nl. April 29, 1944, accessed October 4, 2016 (Dutch).
  3. ↑ Sytze van der Zee: Vogelvrij. De jacht op de Joodse onderduiker . De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2010, ISBN 978-90-234-5432-8 , pp. 306 .
  4. ↑ a b Sytze van der Zee: Vogelvrij. De jacht op de Joodse onderduiker . De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2010, ISBN 978-90-234-5432-8 , pp. 315/16 .
  5. ↑ Leidsch Dagblad. November 2, 1979, p. 7.
  6. ^ Marc Nicolai: Riphagen (2016). In: imdb.com. October 1, 2016, accessed October 6, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Wery, Betje
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wery, Elisabeth (full name); Tuerlings, Bella (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch collaborator
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Rotterdam
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 2006
Place of death Ede