Willem Arondeus

Willem Johan Cornelis Arondeus

Willem Johan Cornelis Arondeus (born August 22, 1894 in Naarden , † July 1, 1943 in Haarlem , known under the name Arondéus ) was a Dutch painter , writer and resistance fighter against National Socialism in World War II . He directed the arson attack on the Central Residents' Registration Office in Amsterdam on March 27, 1943 and was executed for it .

Origin and youth

Willem Arondeus was the youngest son of the Naarden fuel dealer Hendrik Cornelis Arondeus and his wife Catharina Wilhelmina de Vries. Shortly after he was born, the family moved to Amsterdam with their seven children to set up a costume rental business for actors. Two of his brothers later emigrated to Canada.

In 1907 Willem Arondeus was admitted to the Quellinusschool , the later Gerrit Rietveld Academie for Art and Design in Amsterdam, where he trained as a painter. When Arondeus was 17 years old, he confronted his parents with his homosexuality and left home after an argument. He should never have any more contact with his parents.

He settled in Rotterdam, where he began to write and paint, but had great difficulty selling anything. In 1922 he was commissioned to create a monumental mural for the Rotterdam City Hall, which temporarily gave him some financial freedom. But there were no follow-up orders at first. It was not until 1926 and 1927 that he was able to sell a picture again, and his works were even briefly mentioned in the press.

In 1928, Arondeus turned away from painting and decided to devote himself only to writing. Here, too, there were initially no material successes. In 1932 he moved to the countryside near Apeldoorn , where he met Jan Tijssen, the son of a greengrocer, with whom he lived for seven years. The couple lived in difficult financial circumstances. In 1938 he made his debut with the novel Het uilenhuis (The Owl's House), which won a novel prize advertised by the Kosmos printing company and was well received by the critics, but sold poorly. His follow-up work In de bloeiende Ramenas (Blooming Winter Radish), which appeared shortly afterwards, was also received not unfriendly, but also developed into a slow-moving company .

Years earlier, Arondéus had begun an art-historical biography of Matthijs Maris , who fought alongside the Communards on the barricades in Paris in 1870 and whom he regarded as a kindred spirit. In order to be able to do thorough archive studies, he moved back to Amsterdam with Jan and worked for almost two years on the book, which was finally successfully published and had several editions, so that his financial situation improved noticeably. With this work, Annie Romein-Verschoor , a contemporary historian very well known in the Netherlands, placed Arondéus in line with the great Dutch historians Abraham Kuyper , Johan Huizinga and Pieter Wiedijk .

Nevertheless, Arondéus, who was called Tiky by his few friends , always saw himself as an outsider:

“First of all, there was my middle-class background, which only ever knew one thing: Earning money! Second, my homosexuality, which I have to guard against for my entire life. And third, being an artist, which has made me self-centered. I believe that over the years being an outsider has become my true self. "

- Arondéus 1934

In 1941 his last book Figur en problemen der monumentale schilderkunst in Nederland (Figures and Problems of Monumental Painting in the Netherlands) was published, which again was only granted moderate success.

Occupation and World War II

After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, the deportations of Jews to the German extermination camps in Poland began in July 1942. Around 25,000 of the 140,000 Jews originally living in the Netherlands went into illegality and hiding, where they are looked after by the Dutch population active in the resistance.

Through his contacts with the publisher Emanuel Querido , Arondéus had met people with political commitment. Immediately after the German invasion, he joined the resistance group of artists around the sculptor Gerrit-Jan van der Veen . From 1941 he published a small resistance magazine - the Brandarisbrieven (Brandaris-Briefe) - which was absorbed in 1942 in the more widely used De Vrije Kunstenaar (The Free Artist).

Some artists of the Persoonsbewijzencentrale resistance group focused on designing forged identity cards for the persecuted. One danger with these false IDs, even if perfectly forged, was that there was a duplicate of each ID at the Dutch registration office - so it couldn't withstand a check there in any case. So the plan arose in the resistance group to raid this register and set it on fire in order to destroy as many index cards as possible.

The attack

The attack on the residents' registration office Amsterdam (NDL .: Bevolkingsregister ) took place on Saturday evening, March 27, 1943 instead. Koen Limperg , the architect of the building at the Kerklaan plantation in which the office was located at the time, had provided the resistance fighters with detailed floor plans, and the poet Martinus Nijhoff drew the places where the bombs were to be placed in order to make the greatest possible To achieve effect. Here he was able to fall back on his experience as a pioneer officer . The Hispanist Johan Brouwer obtained a revolver for Arondéus, who was the leader of the attack.

“On the deliberate Saturday evening, a group of nine men in police uniforms gained access to the office. The guards were injected ... with sleeping pills and placed ... in dreams. Unfortunately, the compactness of the tabs did not catch fire very well, which meant that only around 15 percent burned unrecognizable. The effect of the attack, however, was much greater. The fire and the extensive extinguishing work by the fire brigade had turned the rooms into chaos, which made it easier for the employees to 'mess around' on a larger scale. ”(From a speech by Rienk Hoff on the occasion of the commemoration in 2007 on the anniversary of the arson attack on the Amsterdam residents' office )

The group was revealed by whom, it was never clarified, but it was suspected that talkativeness among the group members was the cause. Arondeus was arrested on April 1, 1943 and sentenced to death together with the other assassins by a German court martial in Amsterdam . On July 1, 1943 Arondeus was together with 12 other resistance fighters shot .

Arondéus bequeathed his estate of 300 guilders to his friend Jan, who survived the Nazi era. It was not until 1984 that he was awarded the Verzetsherdenkingskruis (resistance memorial cross ) posthumously.

reception

Badge in Amsterdam

To commemorate the execution, a plaque is attached to the building of the former Amsterdam residents' registration office in Plantage Kerklaan 36, on which WJC Arondéus, K. Groeger , Coos Hartogh, ESA van Musschenbroek, ACJ Reitsma, Henri Halberstadt, Dr. Johan Brouwer , Koen Limperg, Sjoerd Bakker, CL Barentsen and Cornelis Roos are named. The inscription reads: "Zij streden en viel voor de vrijheid" (They fought and fell for freedom)

There is also an Arondeusstraat in Amsterdam and a Willem Arondeusstraat in Middelburg . After the Second World War, Café Arondéus in Amsterdam was built in his memory and is still there today.

Since Toni Bouwman's 1990 Dutch documentary, which showed the "whole Arondeus" for the first time, there have been several follow-up works that have also traced his biography without hiding his homosexuality. His resistance to the Nazis, for which Arondéus had to pay with his life, is one of the few testimonies to the participation of homosexual men in the fight against fascism and their role in the opposition.

The Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem presented Willem Arondeus with the Righteous Among the Nations award in 1986 .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ [1] Article in Trouw "Het tragische lot van een homoseksuele held".
3. ↑ [2] on the website of Yad Vashem ; Retrieved May 2, 2014

literature

• Lutz van Dijk , Günter Grau: I was never lonely - gays under the swastika 1933–1945 . Querverlag 2003, ISBN 3896560972 .
• Rudi van Dantzig : Het leven van Willen Arondéus 1890-1943. A documentaire. Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers 2003, ISBN 9029514035 .

Web links

• Holocaust Encyclopaedia (English)
• Arondeus, the forgotten resistance fighter
• Literature by and about Willem Arondeus in the WorldCat bibliographic database