Jan Mekel

Jan Mekel

Johannes Antonius Alphonsus "Jan" Mekel (born December 22, 1891 in Bedum ; † May 3, 1942 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was a Dutch university professor and resistance member against the German occupation during World War II .

biography

Jan Mekel came from a strictly Catholic family. In 1910 he graduated from the Canisius College in Nijmegen and then began his studies, first in medicine in Groningen , then engineering at the TH Delft . Eventually he started studying mining in Delft. From 1916 he worked as an assistant at the TH, the following year he worked for the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (BPM), for which he went to Switzerland in 1918 to study with the geologist Paul Arbenz at the University of Bern . He then stayed from 1918 to 1921 for the BPM in the United States and Mexico , where he examined areas for possible oil deposits. Back in the Netherlands, he worked for BPM at their headquarters in The Hague , but also made other trips to the USA, Mexico, Venezuela and Curacao . In 1928 he received his doctorate and in 1929 was appointed professor of historical geology and paleontology at the TH.

In addition to his professional activities, Mekel was very interested in history, music, literature and worship teaching. In his house he gathered a circle of intellectuals for regular meetings. He also wrote articles for De Tijd magazine on the Spanish Civil War , with his sympathies on Franco's side .

In 1939, when the Second World War broke out , Jan Mekel was in Persia to negotiate oil concessions for Algemene Exploratie Maatschappij . He was only able to return to the Netherlands after an arduous journey through several countries. Shortly after the occupation of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht in May 1940, he founded a resistance group, the Mekel-groep , which concentrated on espionage and the transmission of information about the government in exile to England. Mekel was in contact with Professor Richard Schoemaker's group .

The groups were exposed to treason in the summer of 1941, and Jan Mekel was arrested on July 4, 1941 and imprisoned in the Oranjehotel prison in Scheveningen . In April 1942 he was taken to the Amersfoort transit camp , where he and 86 other resistance members were tried in the Hotel De Witte , which was next to the camp. Mekel and other defendants, including Schoemaker and Olympian Pierre Versteegh , were sentenced to death. On May 3, 1942, he and 71 men and women were executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . The resistance groups are said to have been betrayed by a 19-year-old man who was killed by escaped members of the Ordedienst group in August 1941 by knocking him unconscious, putting him in a sack and throwing him into a pond.

Honors

On May 9, 1946, the widow of Jan Merkel received the Verzetskruis (German = Resistance Cross ) from Queen Wilhelmina as a posthumous honor . Streets in Bedum and Delft are named after him.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} O.J. Nienhuis: Mekel, Johannes Antonius Alphonsus (1891–1942). November 12, 2013, accessed on November 28, 2014 (First published in: Biographical Dictionary of the Netherlands , Volume 1, The Hague 1979, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW )). 
2. ^ Delftsche Courant: Delft had moorden in alle soorten en maten. (No longer available online.) April 2, 2006, archived from the original on December 2, 2014 ; Retrieved November 28, 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.