Ko Beuzemaker

Nicolaas "Ko" Beuzemaker (born December 6, 1902 in Amsterdam , † January 13, 1944 in Scheveningen ) was a Dutch politician of the Communist Partij van Nederland (CPN). He was the last official party leader of the CPN before it was banned by the German occupiers in July 1940. At the end of 1943 he was arrested as a well-known communist and member of an illegal resistance group and executed shortly afterwards.

biography

Beuzemaker grew up as one of four children of Nicolaas Cornelis Beuzemaker and his wife Anna Maria Leistenschneider in Amsterdam. The father owned a small shop in orthopedic goods and was politically inclined to anarchism . Nicolaas Cornelis urged his children to take up the teaching profession, a request that Ko was the last of the children to follow. As early as the end of the 1910s, Beuzemaker joined various communist youth organizations one after the other, first in the relatively moderate juggling Geheelonthoudersbond , before switching to Communist Jeugdbond (CJB) like many others in 1919 under the influence of the Russian Revolution . Beuzemaker quickly took on management positions at the CJB, and in 1922 he finally became a member of the main board. During this time he began to publish his first texts in communist publications such as De Jonge Communist and Klassenstrijd .

Exactly when Beuzemaker joined the Communist Partij van Holland, the forerunner of the CPN, is not precisely documented, but his entry should have coincided with his entry into the CJB. In the mid-1920s he increasingly took on leadership roles in the party, and from 1926 he coordinated the agitprop actions of the CPH. Beuzemaker campaigned within the party for a consistent implementation of the resolutions of the Communist International of 1928, which gave the affiliated parties a revolutionary line and called for a fight against social democracy . After this current prevailed against more moderate influences, Beuzemaker was appointed to the party secretariat in 1930, where he remained a member until 1940. Furthermore, he was elected to the provincial parliament of North Holland in 1931 and to the municipal council of his hometown Amsterdam in 1935 , where he was considered an expert on education policy. He held both seats until the party was banned in 1940. Beuzemaker enjoyed a high reputation within the CPN, which culminated in his election as party chairman in 1935 . During his term of office, the party made two significant changes of course: First, the rapprochement with the social democratic parties of the Netherlands as part of the “ Popular Front policy” against Hitler's Germany prescribed by the Soviet Union following the Soviet accession to the League of Nations . This was followed in 1939 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was propagated neutrality towards the German Reich and thus a radical change in the party line.

From 1938 onwards, Beuzemaker stepped increasingly into the background within the party secretariat in favor of a new management trio consisting of Paul de Groot , Jan Dieters and Lou Jansen . A few months before the start of the German attack on the Netherlands, his party chairmanship was withdrawn, but this was not made public. After the change of the CPN from a party to an underground resistance organization , Beuzemaker initially only played a minor role and was kept away from leading tasks. This happened ostensibly “because of his high profile”, but since this also applied to other people working in the leadership, the actual reason is assumed to be rather disagreements between him and de Groot, who increasingly dominated the leadership of the CPN. Beuzemaker went into hiding one after the other in Amsterdam, Zandvoort and Leersum during the first years of the war . It was not until 1943 that Jan Postma brought him back into a new “leadership trio”, which was supposed to replace de Groot, Dieters and Jansen, who were increasingly troubled by the German SD . On November 10, 1943, Beuzemaker was found by chance at his current hiding place and arrested by the Germans. Shortly thereafter, he was sentenced to death by shooting , the sentence was carried out on January 13, 1944 on the Waalsdorpervlakte in the coastal town of Scheveningen.

Web links

• Biography Beuzemakers im Biografisch Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbewing in Nederland (Dutch)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Annette Jacoba Mooij: De strijd om de Februaryistaking . Querido Fosfor, Amsterdam 2014, ISBN 978-94-6225-108-3 , pp. 4-6 .