Jan Dieters

Jan Dieters (born January 31, 1901 in Slochteren , today part of Midden-Groningen , † October 9, 1943 in Scheveningen ) was a Dutch politician and resistance fighter during the Second World War . He was one of the leaders of the Communist Partij van Nederland (CPN), which was banned at the time and operating from underground, and was executed by the German occupiers in 1943 for his resistance activities.

biography

Early years

Dieters was born in 1901 as the son of the building contractor Jan Dieters senior and his wife Alberdina Henderika Zwarts. The mother died when Dieters was nine years old, and the father remarried shortly afterwards. After graduating from school, he began to work in his uncle's hardware store in Hoogezand and attended evening school on the side. Due to disputes with his stepmother, Dieters left home at the age of 19 and went to Amsterdam , where he married Maria Sophia Regina Roos in October 1924, with whom he had four children. The family moved to Groningen shortly afterwards , where Dieters worked as a warehouse manager in the hardware industry until 1928, before he lost his permanent position and only found work as a representative in a radio shop for a short time. An attempt to start his own business with his own shop also failed, and from 1930 he was permanently unemployed. This also broke up Dieter's marriage, his wife left him with the children in 1938, but the relationship was never officially divorced.

Promotion as a party official

As an unemployed, Dieters began to be interested in politics and soon afterwards came into contact with the Werklozen Strijd Comités (WSC), founded by the Communist Party - in German something like "Unemployment Fight Committees", founded to support the unemployed found no representation by the large trade unions of the time - with which he became involved in political agitation within a short time . In 1931 he joined the CPN and a year later he was responsible for the management and organization of the WSCs. In the same year he was appointed to the party executive committee consisting of 30 members, which at that time was headed by the politicians Cornelis Schalker and Ko Beuzemaker . During his early years as a politician, Dieters lived exclusively on unemployment benefits. It was not until 1934 that the CPN officially decided to offer him a paid post as a propagandist at De Tribune , the daily newspaper published by the party. From now on he received a regular income of 25 ƒ . In 1935 he was also part of the delegation that represented the CPN at the 7th Congress of the Communist International in Moscow .

From 1935 Dieters rose steeply within the party hierarchy. He initially belonged to the ten-member Politburo and was appointed to the new party secretariat in 1938 alongside Schalker, Beuzemaker, Paul de Groot and Lou Jansen . Furthermore, in the same year he became director of the party newspaper, which has since been renamed Het Volksdagblad . Dieters was considered the protégé de Groots, who was to shape the politics of the CPN for several decades, and consequently took over his decidedly pro-Soviet political views. In 1939, for example, Dieters published an article in the magazine Politiek en Cultuur in which he - as de Groot had done shortly before - resolutely defended the non-aggression pact between the German Reich and the Soviet Union . This article was Dieter's only political writing, which was most unusual for a leader of the CPN, and especially the head of the party magazine.

Occupation time

Immediately after the surrender of the Netherlands and the beginning of the German occupation of the country, the CPN leaders initially hoped that their party would be able to remain legal on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Dieters and other party functionaries entered into negotiations with the Germans about the continued legal publication of Het Volksdagblad , which, however, did not produce any positive results. Since the CPN representatives did not want to go into the conditions of the occupying power - among other things, "an absolutely loyal attitude" and a substantive focus on criticism of the Dutch pre-war social democracy - it remained with a single legal edition on June 26, 1940, before the paper was finally banned. Shortly after its party newspaper, the CPN was declared illegal as such and thereupon took on a new role as one of the first Dutch underground resistance movements. Dieters took over the management of the CPN together with de Groot and Jansen and operated mainly from the province of Noord-Brabant . While Jansen was responsible for the capital Amsterdam , the coordination of CPN activities in the rest of the country fell into Dieter's area of ​​responsibility. He was supported above all by the two liaison officers Piet Vooren and Joop Geerligs

After the CPN was able to record successes as a resistance organization at the beginning of the occupation, such as the triggering of the February strike of 1941, the German SD brought the organization more and more into distress, primarily through a series of arrests. Since de Groot, Jansen and Dieters had to hide more or less isolated in the east of the country, the CPN decided to transfer the leadership of a new leadership team, which also included the Amsterdam communist Piet Vosveld . Vosveld had the task of keeping in touch with the previous leadership trio of the party, if possible, but was soon captured. On April 1, 1943, he took the SD to a restaurant in Apeldoorn , where Dieters had regularly met Joop Geerligs. The present Dieters was arrested here by the Germans and then interrogated by the SD. He was finally executed on October 9, 1943 together with Lou Jansen, who had been arrested two days after him, in the coastal town of Scheveningen in southern Holland.

literature

• Ger Harmsen: Jan Dieters . In: Biographical Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbewegung in Nederland . tape 3 . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 1988, ISBN 978-90-6861-027-7 , pp. 41-43 ( handle.net ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sjaak van der Velden: Links: PvdA, SP en GroenLinks . Aksant, Amsterdam 2010, ISBN 978-90-5260-375-9 , pp. 91-92 .
2. ↑ Jan Willem Stutje: De man the de wees away - Leven en werk van Paul de Groot 1899-1986 . De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2000, ISBN 978-90-234-3908-0 , pp. 200-201 .