Joop Wolff

Joop Wolff

Johan "Joop" Frederik Wolff (born March 14, 1927 in Velsen ; † January 7, 2007 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch politician ( Communist Partij van Nederland (CPN) and GroenLinks ) and journalist. He was a member of the Dutch lower house and editor-in-chief of the party newspaper De Waarheid .

Life

Wolff was born in a poor family, his father was a civil servant and died before he was born, his mother was a nurse. Together with his older brother Jaap, he was already part of the communist resistance in his home town of Haarlem at the age of 15 during the German occupation in World War II . There he was active with Hannie Schaft , an icon of the resistance movement. After the war he headed the CPN youth organization ANVJ, which he had founded during wartime, together with the later CPN parliamentary group leader Marcus Bakker . the ANVJ stood in opposition to the appearance of the Netherlands in the Indonesian War of Independence ; Wolff was a contact for the Communist Party of Indonesia PKI, for a time also under cover names from Beijing .

In 1945 Wolff also became a reporter for the party newspaper De Waarheid and was promoted to the party leadership in 1947, to which he was to belong until 1982. In 1956 he became a correspondent in Moscow and two years later he was appointed editor-in-chief as successor to Bakker, a position he would keep for 20 years until 1978. At that time the paper had already lost a lot of its importance, only in Wolff's last years at De Waarheid there was a slight upward trend before the newspaper was finally discontinued in 1990. His brother also worked as a journalist for the newspaper.

In 1967 Wolff became a member of the Dutch House of Commons and remained so with a brief interruption from 1977 to 1982. During this time he was involved in the dedication of May 5th as a national day of remembrance and campaigned for the preservation of Hotel De Wereld in Wageningen , in which the Germans signed their surrender. This gave him friendly contacts with Prince Bernhard . After the fall of the CPN and its departure from the House of Commons in 1986, Wolff followed other members of his party into the electoral alliance GroenLinks, in which the CPN was finally completely absorbed in 1991.

Wolff was honorary chairman of the COVVS (Centraal Orgaan Voormalig Verzet en Slachtoffers, German central organ of the earlier resistance and the war victims). He was also a member of the “Raad voor de Kunst” (Art Council).

Works

• Uit het rijk der 1000 eilanden: Indonesië zoals het is: het verhaal van een reis door Indonesië. , Pegasus (Amsterdam), 1954 (translated into four languages)

literature

• A bijzonder friend. Over Joop Wolff by Marisca Milikowski, Pegasus (Amsterdam), 1982

swell

On-line

• Joop Wolff on parlement.com (Dutch)
• Portrait on the website of the Amsterdam Resistance Museum ( Memento from 11 May 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (Dutch)

literature

• Jan van de Plasse: Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagblad- en opiniepers / seed gesteld by Jan van de Plasse. Red. Wim Verbei , Otto Cramwinckel Uitgever, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-75727-77-1 . (Dutch; earlier edition: Jan van de Plasse, Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagbladpers , Cramwinckel, Amsterdam 1999, ISBN 90-75727-25-9 )