Louis Einthoven
Louis Einthoven (born March 30, 1896 in Surabaja , Dutch East Indies ; † May 29, 1979 in Lunteren , Gelderland province ) was a Dutch lawyer, police chief of Rotterdam and co-founder of the Nederlandsche Unie , a political movement at the time of the Second World War in the Netherlands.
biography
Training and activities in the Dutch East Indies
Einthoven was born in Surabaja in 1896 as the son of the regional administrator Johan Einthoven and his wife Wilhelmina Cornelia Louise van der Kemp. The mother died shortly after his birth, which is why he soon had to move to Utrecht to live with his uncle Christiaan Eijkman's family , who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine . There attended Einthoven high school and graduated after the local university to study law . After graduating in 1918, he studied further in Leiden , this time in Dutch-Indian law. In 1925 he married Angenis Jeannetta Reiniera Willemina Schuil, and the relationship resulted in three sons.
From 1920 Einthoven was entrusted with various administrative tasks in his country of birth, the Dutch East Indies , including a position in the administration of the Buitenzorg region ( Dutch Landraat te Buitenzorg ) and as a clerk at several courts in Batavia . In 1926 he returned to Europe, where he initially lived in the Netherlands for a year before moving to Geneva in 1927 . There he was engaged in comparative studies in the field of colonial administration for the League of Nations , taking into account Dutch-Indian labor law. In 1929 Einthoven returned to the Dutch East Indies , where he worked as a lawyer and primarily dealt with crisis legislation and the abolition of the so-called poenale sanctie . This was a form of contract work that allowed plantation owners, among other things, to punish their coolies for their alleged "misconduct" at their own discretion and without prior proceedings. This also included physical punishment or an extension of the contractually agreed working hours.
Police chief in Rotterdam
In 1933 Einthoven moved again to the European Netherlands. There he was appointed police chief of the city on December 29 by Pieter Droogleever Fortuyn, the mayor of Rotterdam who was personally friends with him , even though he had no experience in police work. In this role he doubled the number of investigators in the city's police intelligence service , with the aim of tracking down communists and other political leftists and keeping them under surveillance. Furthermore, Einthoven dealt intensively with the rather high number of Chinese immigrants in Rotterdam, whom he held responsible for the rampant, illegal trade in opium in the city . In the Katendrecht district in particular , a Chinese community had formed around the 1910s, the majority of which were employed as dock workers or seafarers. In the wake of the global economic crisis of 1929, many of them became unemployed and often quickly slipped into poverty due to a lack of language skills. In 1936 the sociologist Frederik van Heek published a study in which he divided the Chinese immigrants into the categories "economically valuable" and "superfluous". Einthoven, who was already a thorn in the side of the Chinese in Rotterdam, took this study as an opportunity to have a large number of Chinese immigrants deported from Rotterdam . To this end, he convinced some of the city's shipping companies to take these people first to Java and from there to Singapore and Hong Kong at a reasonable price . The swift implementation of these measures ensured that only a very small number of those affected could defend themselves against their deportation by legal means . A total of around 1000 Chinese were expelled from Rotterdam in this way, only around 200 Chinese immigrants remained in Katendrecht.
During his tenure as chief of police, Einthoven sought better training for Rotterdam police officers. For example, educational films were introduced under his leadership, the contents of which the officers then had to write as detailed reports as possible. Furthermore, he had lectures organized by specialist staff, in which, for example, dealing with mentally disturbed people was discussed. Under Droogleever Fortuyn's successor, Pieter Oud, Einthoven's relationship with the city's political leadership deteriorated noticeably. Overall, Einthoven's dissatisfaction with the verzuilten (in German "pillar") Dutch politics increased more and more during his time as police chief. In 1939 Einthoven belonged to a group of 18 high-ranking Dutch police officers who were classified by the Gestapo as "German-friendly" in a document that appeared in 1997. This could indicate that he had contacts with Germany and the Gestapo during this time.
Nederlandsche Unie
Out of this dissatisfaction with politics and out of concern about a completely Nazi future in the Netherlands, Einthoven founded the so-called Nederlandsche Unie on July 24, 1940, a few days after the Dutch surrender, together with the two politicians Johannes Linthorst Homan and Jan de Quay . This was supposed to be a political mass movement, which in its manifesto provided for cooperation with the German occupiers, but also aimed to preserve the Dutch “popular identity” and national sovereignty, including loyalty to the exiled royal house of Orange . In addition, the Unie was intended as a more moderate alternative to the openly fascist Nationaal-Socialistische Bewegungsing (NSB). In 1940 the Unie developed into the largest political movement in the history of the Netherlands , with 200,000 Dutch members joining within a week. At its peak, the Unie even had a membership of up to 800,000 people. Many Dutch people joined the movement less out of conviction for its goals than out of protest against the NSB and thus also against the German occupying power.
There was increasing disagreement within the management trio about the extent of the cooperation with the Germans, and Einthoven in particular felt that the course that had been taken was increasingly too "pro-German". While the Nederlandsche Unie was tolerated by the German administration in the first few months of its existence, tensions intensified after the German attack on the Soviet Union began in 1941 , as the Unie's management trio refused to invite the Dutch to support the “fight against the Bolshevism ”. The end of the movement was finally heralded by an article in the weekly De Unie , published by them, in which Einthoven, de Quay and Linthorst Homan distanced themselves from National Socialism and made the sovereignty of the Netherlands a condition of the country's participation in the said fight against Bolshevism. This led to the Unie being banned on December 31, 1941.
Captivity and the rest of the war
Shortly after the dissolution of the Nederlandsche Unie, its management trio was arrested by the Germans. Einthoven, who the Germans regarded as the most dangerous of the three, was first taken to the Sint-Michielsgestel internment camp on May 4, 1942, where many prominent Dutch people were held hostage during the war. The German Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands , Arthur Seyß-Inquart is said to have commented on Einthoven's imprisonment with the words " He will never come free." When the inmates of Sint-Michielsgestel were to be transferred to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp in September 1944 , he managed to hide in a previously prepared hiding place. After his escape he went into hiding in The Hague for the rest of the war . After the south of the country was liberated by the Allied forces shortly afterwards, Einthoven moved there and began to work with Prince Bernhard , the commander in chief of the newly formed Dutch armed forces there. During this time, Prime Minister Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy asked him repeatedly to accept a ministerial post , but he refused.
post war period
After the end of the war, Einthoven did not return to his old position as police chief of Rotterdam. Instead, he was appointed head of the newly established Dutch secret service Bureau Nationale Veiligheid . This was dissolved again on December 31, 1946 and reorganized as the Centrale Veiligheidsdienst , also under Einthoven's leadership. In 1949 he supervised a further restructuring of the service, at the end of which was the Inland Sea Veiligheidsdienst . Until his retirement on April 1, 1961, Einthoven held the leading position of this secret service.
Einthoven died on May 29, 1979 in his last place of residence in Lunteren in the province of Gelderland.
Works
In 1973 Einthoven wrote in response to the publication of the fourth and fifth volumes of Loe de Jong's monumental work Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, which deal intensively with the Nederlandsche Unie and Einthoven's role during the war, a counterstatement of the events that took place at the Semper publishing house Agendo appeared:
Heeft de afwezige ongelijk? Apeldoorn 1973, ISBN 90-6086-586-3 .
One year later, Einthoven's memoirs were published by the same publisher:
Tegen de stroom in: levende vissen zwemmen tegen de stroom in, alleen de dooie drijven mee . Apeldoorn 1974, ISBN 90-6086-596-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Einthoven, Louis (1896-1979). In: huygens.knaw.nl. November 12, 2013, accessed October 17, 2018 (Dutch).
- ^ Mark van Dongen: Een man met een opdracht. In: groene.nl. March 6, 1996, accessed October 16, 2018 (Dutch).
- ↑ Openbaarheidsmaand 2018: de lotgevallen van Yeh Yen Go tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (1942). In: stadsarchief.rotterdam.nl. Stadsarchief Rotterdam, January 11, 2018, accessed on October 16, 2018 (Dutch).
- ↑ Jan Jacob Mekes: Louis Louis Einthoven 1896 - 1979. In: politieacademie.nl. Retrieved October 16, 2018 (Dutch).
- ↑ Huib Goudriaan: Latere BVD boss Einthoven op namenlijst Gestapo. In: trouw.nl. December 18, 1997, accessed October 17, 2018 (Dutch).
- ^ Manifest Nederlandsche Unie - 1940. In: amstelveenweb.com. Retrieved October 17, 2018 (Dutch).
- ↑ Francia Slits-Swinkels: "Verzet" ontstaan uit de "Nederlandse Unie". In: heemkundekringgemert.nl. Retrieved September 26, 2018 (Dutch).
- ^ Johannes Koll: Arthur Seyß-Inquart and the German occupation policy in the Netherlands (1940-1945) . 1st edition. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-205-79660-2 , p. 235-239 .
- ↑ Loe De Jong: Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de tweede wereldoorlog 1939 - 1945 . tape 5 . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1974, ISBN 978-90-12-00323-0 , pp. 218 .
- ^ G. Chr. Kok: Rotterdamse juristen uit vijf eeuwen . In: Historische publicaties Roterodamum . 1st edition. No. 172 . Lost, Rotterdam 2009, ISBN 978-90-8704-090-1 , pp. 274 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Einthoven, Louis |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch lawyer, police chief and founder of the Nederlandsche Unie |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 30, 1896 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Surabaja |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 29, 1979 |
| Place of death | Lunteren |