Esmée van Eeghen
Esmée Adrienne van Eeghen (born July 7, 1918 in Amsterdam , † September 7, 1944 in Noorddijk ) was a Dutch resistance fighter against the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II .
Origin and personality
Esmée van Eeghen came from respected Dutch families on both his mother's and father's side. Her father Reginald Hendrik van Eeghen (1889–1936) was the director of the Amstel brewery . Her parents divorced when she was eight, and her father moved to the United States , where he died in 1936. In 1930 her mother married Minette Adrienne "Miesje" van Lennep (1892–1975) Alphert Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (1880–1943), the former mayor of Maarn and Doorn . She had a brother, David ("Dave"), and a younger half-brother, Sander.
Van Eeghen was a sophisticated young woman with an ambivalent character. She is described as spontaneous, loving and sensitive, but also as tough, brutal and self-centered. As a teenager she was treated by a Swiss psychiatrist. She had been raised by a governess, spoke fluent English, German and French and traveled extensively, thanks in part to her stepfather, who was chairman of the Dutch National Olympic Committee and a member of the IOC . She played the piano, was a good singer and also blond, tall and slim, "een knappe verschijning die bij mannen niet onopgemänke bleef" (Eng. "A beautiful appearance that did not go unnoticed by men").
In resistance
Although Esmée van Eeghen was financially independent, she took up a job as a nurse in the Amsterdam Burgerziekenhuis . In spring 1943 she entered into a love affair with the medical student Henk Kluvers. When he was supposed to sign the declaration of loyalty for students in the spring, he went to Leeuwarden to evade this signature. Van Eeghen followed him and supported him and his friend Pieter Meersburg about to Jewish children on behalf of the Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers to hide (LO) in the north of the country. They saved the lives of at least 100 children. She wanted a family herself, but Kluvers was still in education and also had tuberculosis , so that marriage was out of the question for him and he ended the relationship.
Esmée van Eeghen then worked for the Frisian resistance ( Friese knokploegen ) as a courier; their aliases were Elly and Sjoerdje . She is said to have had a liaison with the married Krijn van der Helm , a leading member of the resistance and the LO. Van Eeghen obtained false IDs and food cards for people in hiding, transported weapons and ammunition, and participated in armed robberies. Together with van der Helm, she brought Allied pilots to safety. On the train to Amsterdam, she is said to have had a German officer with whom she had flirted before carry a suitcase with weapons through the controls.
From the beginning of 1944, van Eeghen was increasingly seen in the company of members of the German Security Service (SD). This is said to have happened after consultation with van der Helm in order to spy on them. According to another version, she should have tried in this way to get information about her arrested brother David, who had belonged to the resistance group Ordedienst . There were rumors that her “sexual instinct” was the reason for dealing with the Germans. In 1986 she was described in the magazine Vrij Nederland as follows (quoted in Die Zeit ): “She could drink like a Templar, swear like a heretic and shoot like no one else; she was moody and disloyal, flighty, hysterical - and nymphomaniac. "As a" beautiful swan among strange ducks "she was a foreign body in the conservative-reformed Friesland and therefore also the target of gossip and envy:" De boerenmensen will be confronted with een stadse, duur klede en opgemaakte jonge vrouw die bovendien nog stevig rookte en agile dronk. Een exotic bloem in de Friese klei. ”(German:“ The peasants were confronted with a young, cosmopolitan woman who was dearly dressed and made up, who also smoked vigorously and loved to drink. An exotic flower on Frisian soil. ”).
In the spring of 1944 Esmée van Eeghen fell in love with the German Wehrmacht officer Hans Schmälzlein, who was opposed to the National Socialists and with whom she is said to have contacted on instructions. She made no secret of this affection - there was talk of marriage - but withheld the fact that she was already living with him. The Vote Court of the Frisian Resistance threatened her with death when this became known. At the instigation of van der Helm, she was ultimately only ordered to leave North Holland ; then she went back to her family in Baarn. In the summer of 1944, the situation came to a head for them, because now the SD also became suspicious. On August 9, she was arrested at Amsterdam Central Station - allegedly on the advice of her friend An Jaakke, who was jealous of Schmälzlein - and taken to Groningen, where she was interrogated in the notorious Scholtenhuis , the seat of the SD and the security police.
The assassination
The Dutch investigative journalist Arnold Karskens describes the following events in his book Het beestmensch : Esmée van Eeghen was forced by the head of the SD Groningen, Ernst Knorr , to write a letter to Krijn van der Helm, who had gone into hiding in Amersfoort . The letter was addressed to van der Helm's parents and van Eeghen may not have known that he was there at the time. The brothers Pieter and Klaas Carel Faber were supposed to deliver the letter. While Klaas Carel Faber was waiting in front of the house, there was a fight inside, in which van der Helm was shot by Pieter Faber. Since this source had now dried up - they had wanted to catch van der Helm alive - and Esmée van Eeghen did not reveal any further information, it was decided that she would be dead.
On September 7, 1944, Esmée van Eeghen and another prisoner, 24-year-old Luitje Kremer, were brought out of town in a car and shot. Their bodies were thrown into the Van Starkenborgh Canal. Ernst Knorr and Pieter and Klaas Carel Faber were involved in the act.
According to a statement by Klaas Carel Faber in September 1945, only Knorr (who was found dead in prison in July 1945 under unexplained circumstances) should have shot. Karskens doubts this information because the woman's body was hit by 13 bullets and an autopsy in the Pathological Anatomical Laboratory in Groningen revealed that these were three different calibers. In Kremer's body there were four bullets of two different calibers. In 1954, Klaas Carel Faber described Esmée van Eeghen to the German judiciary as "the only female leader in a terrorist organization in the Netherlands" who lured members of the Wehrmacht into hotels to shoot them. During the interrogations in Groningen alone, she confessed to five murders. Karskens also considers this statement to be “beyond the truth”.
Esmée van Eeghen's body was found in the canal the day after her death. She was initially buried in Norddijk, and in August 1945 her mother had her reburied in the Baarn cemetery. Her brother David died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 , a few days before the liberation .
Hans Schmälzlein was also arrested and brought back to Germany. His further fate is unknown. Pieter Faber was executed in 1948 for 27 murders in Groningen; his brother Klaas Carel died in Ingolstadt in 2012 after the German judiciary had refused extradition to the Netherlands for decades because he had acquired German citizenship due to his work for the SD.
Posthumously
During the Holland Festival in 1995 the opera Esmée by Theo Loevendie and Jan Blokker was premiered. Previously there was sharp criticism of the work from former resistance fighters. Loevendie received an indignant phone call from Henk Kluvers, who complained that the opera did not correspond to historical truth and that Esmée was portrayed too negatively in it. Pieter Meerburg regretted the performance of the opera while those involved were still alive. Loevendie and Blokker argued that the opera was fiction.
On October 29, 2001, Prince Bernhard unveiled a plaque on the war memorial at the train station in Baarn, on which are the names of 31 citizens of the city who lost their lives in the war against the Germans in World War II. In addition to the name of Esmée van Eeghen, there is also the name of her brother David. On March 15, 2003, the play Der Dames Verzet premiered, in which the female characters, including van Eeghen, look back on their role in the resistance.
In 2006, the film Black Book by director Paul Verhoeven came out, whose main character Rachel Stein is partly based on the person of Esmée van Eeghen.
literature
- Ageeth Scherphuis, Anita van Ommeren: De oorlog van Esmée van Eeghen . Sijthoff, Amsterdam 1988, ISBN 90-218-3863-X (not used here).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Elias van der Plicht / Anja Marbus: Eeghen, Esmée Adrienne (1918–1944). Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland, January 13, 2014, accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ↑ Esmée van Eeghen; ten prooi aan de leads. (No longer available online.) AFVN, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; Retrieved December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ^ The Courageous Student: Pieter Adriaan Meerburg. Yad Vashem, accessed December 24, 2014 .
- ↑ Henk Kluvers later settled as a doctor in Bussum and, like Pieter Meersburg, was honored in 1997 as Righteous Among the Nations . See: Kluvers Henk. Yad Vashem, accessed December 24, 2014 .
- ↑ a b 1940-1945. Leeuwarden: A Cadillac ziekenwagen in de illegiteit. De geschiedenis van UMCG, accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ↑ Heinz Josef Herbort: Resistance in Art. Zeit Online, July 9, 1995, accessed December 24, 2014 .
- ↑ a b Ben Havemann: Femme fatale is Fryslân ontstegen Opera Esmée van de historical werkelijkheid released. de Volkskrant , May 26, 1995, accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ↑ a b c Pim de Bie: The Count van Esmée van Eeghen. (No longer available online.) Stichting Dodenakkers.nl, June 27, 2009, archived from the original on December 24, 2014 ; Retrieved December 24, 2014 (Dutch). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Harry van Wijnen: De geur van verraad. (No longer available online.) Nrc boeken, March 11, 1995, archived from the original on December 24, 2014 ; Retrieved December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ↑ a b Arnold Karskens: Het beestmensch. 2012, pp. , Accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ↑ a b Cold Case van de Eeuw. (No longer available online.) Arnold Karskens, archived from the original on December 24, 2014 ; Retrieved December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
- ↑ Information on the memorial ( Memento from January 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Howard Feinstein: "Black Book" Director Paul Verhoeven. Indiewire, April 2, 2007, accessed December 25, 2014 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Eeghen, Esmée van |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Eeghen, Esmée Adrienne van (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch resistance fighter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 7, 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Amsterdam |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 7, 1944 |
| Place of death | Noorddijk |