Herman de Vries de Heekelingen

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Herman de Vries (second from the right among the gown wearers, 1923 in Nijmegen)

Herman de Vries de Heekelingen (born June 18, 1880 in Groningen ; died July 27, 1942 in Yvorne ) was a Dutch-Swiss anti-Semitic publicist.

Life

Herman de Vries grew up in an upper-class, Calvinist merchant family and initially became the owner of a securities office in Utrecht . In 1908 he converted to Catholicism. He studied history at the University of Friborg and received his doctorate in 1917 with a dissertation on "Geneva as the birthplace of Dutch Calvinism". De Vries received Swiss citizenship in 1921 . In 1923 he was appointed associate professor at the newly established Catholic University in Nijmegen , where he taught palaeography and diplomatics and was director of the university library. After a political dispute with the university administration, he returned to Switzerland in 1927. He was now called Herman de Vries de Heekelingen.

In 1927 he founded the “Center International d'Études sur le Fascisme” (CINEF) in Lausanne, which was supposed to research and document the development of fascist ideology and for this received covert money from the Italian state. For the advisory board he was able to win, among others, Giovanni Gentile , James Strachey Barnes (1890–1955), Marcel Boulenger (1873–1932) and Lord Sydenham of Combe (1848–1933). Since funds from Italy failed to materialize after 1930, a “Center International de Documentation sur les Organizations Politiques” (General Central Office for Research into Political Movements) was founded in Yvorne in 1932 . The institute was supported financially by the British fascist Viscountess Lady Dorothy Downe (1876–1957). In 1932 de Vries published a treasure trove of quotations from National Socialist ideology under the title From farming to breeding .

De Vries had contact with various fascist and anti-Semitic organizations in the 1930s. He was a versatile organizer of anti-Semitic activities in Switzerland and Europe and had several audiences with Benito Mussolini . He promoted the efforts of Georg de Pottere and Edwin Josef Cooper (1872-1942) to found a "Pan-Aryan Union", had contact with Princess Mary Karadja , who had founded the "Christian Aryan Protection League" in Locarno , and to the world service that Ulrich Fleischhauer had set up in Erfurt in 1933 under the eyes of the Nazi regime. He gave lectures on "the Jewish threat" and wrote, among other things, in Ernest Jouin's anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes . The differences between Jews and Christians were incompatible for him. De Vries supported plans to deport the Jews of Europe to Palestine. In Les Protocoles des sages de Sion constituent-ils un faux? Even after the Bern Trial , he rejected doubts about the authenticity of the Jewish plan for world domination contained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion .

In 1938 and 1940 he appeared as a defense witness in a criminal case in Lausanne as a Talmud expert , although he had no such language skills. The perpetrators had distributed a treatise by Philippe Lugrin in which allegedly anti-Christian passages from the Talmud were quoted. De Vries consulted with Augustin Bea in Rome before giving evidence .

Fonts (selection)

  • Genève pépinière du Calvinisme hollandais . 1918
  • Het fascisme en zijn results . 1920
  • (Ed.): Correspondance de Bonaventura Vulcanius pendant son séjour à Cologne, Genève et Bâle (1573–1577): précédée de quelques lettres écrites avant cette époque . The Hague: Nijhoff, 1923
  • (Ed.): Quelques poésies de Jacques Arminius composées pendant son séjour en Suisse . The Hague: Nijhoff, 1925
  • Il fascismo ei suoi risultati . 1927
  • University libraries en instituutsboekerijen: answer aan Prof. Dr. W. Mulder . 1927
  • The National Socialist Weltanschauung: A Guide through National Socialist Literature; 500 distinctive quotes . Ed. General Central Office for Research into Political Movements, Yvorne (Switzerland). Berlin-Charlottenburg: Pan-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1932
  • De Joden in de Christelijke . 1936
  • Israel. Son passé. Son avenir . 1936
  • De joodsche hoogmoed . 1937
  • L'orgueil juif . Paris, 1938
  • Les Protocoles des sages de Sion constituent-ils un faux? Lausanne, 1938
  • Juifs et Catholiques . Paris, 1939
  • Le Talmud et le non-juif: une expertise préparée pour le Tribunal d'Oron siégeant à Lausanne les 15, 16 et 17 janvier 1940 . 1940
  • The Jewish question in Italy . 1940
  • L'Antisémitisme italy . 1940
  • Het Joodsche people . 1942

literature

  • Michael Hagemeister : The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in court. The Bern Trial 1933–1937 and the «Anti-Semitic International» . Zurich: Chronos, 2017. Short biography on p. 579 f.
  • Michael Hagemeister: Vries de Heekelingen, Herman de. In: Handbook of Antisemitism . Vol. 8, 2015, p. 143 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Claude Cantini: Lugrin, Philippe. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
personal data
SURNAME Vries de Heekelingen, Herman de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vries, Herman de; De Vries, Herman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch-Swiss anti-Semitic publicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Groningen
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1942
Place of death Yvorne