Karel Johannes Frederiks

Karel Johannes Frederiks (born February 10, 1881 in Middelburg , † February 18, 1961 in The Hague ) was a Dutch lawyer and official state secretary in the Dutch Ministry of the Interior during the German occupation in World War II .

Life

Frederiks had studied law and written a dissertation on hunting law. From 1931 he was a permanent secretary general in the Dutch Ministry of the Interior. On the first day of the German occupation of the Netherlands , May 10, 1940, the Dutch Foreign Minister van Kleffens and the Colonial Minister Charles Welter fled into exile in London. Frederiks then became one of the most influential Dutch people in the Dutch administration. The department he headed was responsible for the entire Dutch administrative apparatus, including the police and mayor. Frederiks believed the administrative order to have to maintain, so that the bureaucracy is not completely under the control of the Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart was led occupation regime and thus also to the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB) from Anton Mussert , the latter made he becomes his main adversary. In addition, he was in opposition to the Dutch resistance movement in the country and the Dutch government in exile in London.

Frederiks misunderstood the scope of the National Socialist extermination policy and claimed the privilege of being able to do something for a select group of Jews.

After the deportations of Jews had started in the Netherlands, some Dutch Jews turned to Frederiks for protection. He then went to the HSSPF Hanns Albin Rauter , who immediately rejected his request, as the “ Jewish question ” was a “purely German matter”. Thereupon Frederiks turned to Fritz Schmidt , the "General Commissioner for Special Use" and the highest-ranking NSDAP representative in the occupied Netherlands. Schmidt associated with Rauter, who was the highest-ranking SS leader in the Netherlands, a rivalry for influence and authority. So he treated Frederiks' intercession for the Dutch Jews benevolently, probably simply because his competitor Rauter was against it.

Frederiks was initially able to put two Jews on his list, but by autumn 1942 word had got around among the Jews that the State Secretary could offer protection from German attacks. Therefore, many letters reached the Dutch Ministry of the Interior at this time. The list grew from a handful to several dozen and later to several hundred. Although Frederiks left the maintenance of the list to his employees, who also took care of the correspondence , his list went down in history as the Frederiks list . At first it offered the Jewish elite - civil servants, industrialists, university professors - a certain protection, later more average people also came onto the list. The placement usually depended on personal contacts with Frederiks and his environment.

In order to protect the listed citizens from accidental raids , Frederiks had the people on his list housed in Schaffelaar Castle in Barneveld in December 1942 . However, he himself could not prevent most of the castle's residents from being deported on September 29, 1943, first to Westerbork and then to Theresienstadt .

At the end of 1944 he left his post and went into hiding. He wrote a justification that was printed in 1945. Frederiks was arrested after the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, interrogated by a purge commission and then dishonorably dismissed from office because he had become a symbol of a failed understanding of the essence of German occupation policy.

Fonts (selection)

• Op de bres 1940–1945: overzicht van de werkzaamheden aan het Departement van Binnenlandsche Zaken gedurende de oorlogsjaren , The Hague, van Stockum 1945
• Maximes de Napoléon, from Napoleon, Emperor of the French . La Haye, M. Nijhoff, 1922.

literature

• Peter Romijn: No room for ambivalences. The head of the Dutch internal administration KJ Frederiks . in: Gerhard Hirschfeld / Tobias Jersak (eds.), Careers under National Socialism: Functional elites between participation and distance. Campus, Frankfurt 2004, pp. 147–172, ISBN 3593371561 .
• Loe de Jong : Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog , 1969–1991, SDU-Verlag, The Hague.

Web links

• Frederiks, Karel Johannes , Writings at WorldCat