Pierre Versteegh

Pierre Versteegh medal table
1935
Dressage riding
Netherlands
1928 Summer Olympics
bronze	dressage	team

Pierre Marie Robert Versteegh (born June 6, 1888 in Kedungbanteng , Java ; † May 2, 1942 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was a Dutch dressage rider , soldier and resistance fighter .

Pierre Versteegh was trained as a soldier at the Koninklijke Militaire Academie in Breda from 1906 . In 1909 he was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the Third Division in Ede . Before and after the First World War he was active as a dressage rider and won numerous local competitions. In 1928 he took part in the Olympic Games in Amsterdam on His Excellence II and won the bronze medal together with the Dutch dressage team (Versteegh, Jan van Reede , Gerard le Heux ); in the individual, he finished ninth. In 1925 he became a captainpromoted to major in 1936 , and in 1931 he was awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau as a knight. In 1936 he took part again in the Olympic Games and was fifth in the team (Versteegh, le Heux, Daniël Camerling Helmolt ) and eighth in the individual on Ad Astra in Berlin .

When the Germans the Netherlands in May 1940 occupied , Versteegh, who was married to a Jew, the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Royal Netherlands held. He joined the Dutch resistance and worked with the Ordedienst (OD), an association of several underground groups. On May 2, 1942, after his membership in the OD had been discovered by the occupiers, Pierre Versteegh was arrested, imprisoned in Scheveningen prison ( Oranjehotel ) and brought to trial in Amersfoort in March 1942 . He was sentenced to death along with 70 other defendants . The prisoners were transported to Sachsenhausen , where they were shot by an execution squad on May 3, 1942 , in groups of twelve. The OD group is said to have been betrayed by a 19-year-old man who was knocked unconscious by escaped members of the OD in August 1941, put in a sack and thrown into a pond.

Pierre Versteegh's brother Willem was the first member of the Dutch army to hold a pilot's license. Posthumously he was awarded the Dutch Verzetskruis honored.

Web links

• Pierre Versteegh in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Tony Bijkerk: Just a name. (PDF; 20 kB) library.la84.org, January 7, 2011, accessed on August 30, 2014 (English). 
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 August 30, 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.