May 1940, Germany invades the Netherlands.
Downloaded from YTS.MX
Five days later, the Dutch surrender.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
United by their hatred of the Nazis,
a struggling artist and an accomplished cellist
take on the might of the German army.
Using their artistic skills,
they save thousands of Jews
from the death camps.
To me, people like this should be celebrated as heroes.
Yet Willem Arondeus and Frieda Belinfante
are barely known in the Netherlands, let alone around the world.
I've come to Amsterdam to find out why.
First they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews.
And I didn't speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no-one left to speak for me.
That poem was written by Martin Niemoller,
a Lutheran pastor imprisoned in Dachau
for his opposition to Hitler.
He urges us all to speak out against injustice.
When the Germans occupied the Netherlands in 1940,
Jews were forced into hiding all over the country.
They were called onderduikers
literally under divers.
Here in ARTIS,
Amsterdam's famous zoo,
250 Jews spent the war hidden in storage lofts,
smuggled in by staff who used animal rations to feed them,
rations, ironically enough,
provided by the Nazis who loved the zoo.
It takes real courage to speak out for groups that you don't belong to.
Hypothetically, we'd all love to believe that
we'd stand up and be counted.
But for the Dutch, it was more than hypothetical.
Before the war, they opened their arms to thousands of Jews
fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany.
And as the German grip on Europe tightened, hundreds of thousands
of Jews were deported to concentration camps in the east.
Members of my own family were taken from their home in Vienna and sent
to Riga and Auschwitz,
never to be heard of again.
But, thousands of ordinary people risked their lives to help the Jews,
sharing their food, hiding them in cellars and attics.
And the question that I often ask myself
is would I be brave enough to do as they did?
I'd like to think so, I'd hope so, but would I?
Would we?
Would you?
This is the story of people who were brave enough,
brave enough to risk everything.
By 1940, there were over 140,000 Jews
living in the Netherlands.
40,000 survived.
That means over 100,000 lives
were wiped off the face of the earth
with mechanical, industrial efficiency by Hitler.
The man who called them "unter mensch",
subhuman.
Willem Arondeus was one of those unter mensch.
He was born in 1894.
His parents ran a theatrical costumier's,
not that the family business was ever of much interest to Willem.
No, all he ever cared about was his art.
When he was just 17, Willem announced that he was gay.
His father promptly threw him out.
Willem never spoke to him again.
Here in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour
the walls are lined with paintings by the great Dutch masters.
Vermeer, Hals, Jan Steen.
And, of course...
..The Night Watch.
How wonderful, Niels, to be in the presence of some
Arondeus works here in the Rijksmuseum.
I don't suppose he ever guessed he would have pieces of his here,
along with Rembrandt and Vermeer.
I can see his signature, there we are.
Very, um, homoerotic, isn't it?
And it's called Les Amis, the friends.
But very much the boyfriends because it's...
Definitely boyfriends. Yeah.
Would it have been regarded as pornographic almost by some people?
Possibly, yeah.
I think, like, he drew it after a book,
which was called Escal-Vigor.
It's a book by a Flemish author. Right.
And that's a book with a homoerotic theme?
A very homo... A very homoerotic theme.
That's quite rare for that period. No, yeah, it's true.
It was like one of the first novels in which homosexuality
was discussed in a very open, positive way.
Right, so it didn't end in the usual suicide and all that.
I'm sorry to tell you, but, like, the book ends in tragedy. They always did.
But despite... As usual.
Despite the suicide... Despite all that, yeah.
Oh, dear, that's ever the way.
But he would have read this and, of course, like that whole generation
he would imagine his life would end miserably as the heroes of the novel.
But at least it had its tender moments and it's a very tender work.
Yeah, and it's just like the first moment they declare their love
for each other. Oh.
THEY CHATTER SOFTLY
I'm really excited about this. Yeah.
This is, like, the newest acquisition of the museum.
Oh.
Look at this.
Oh!
That's so Aubrey Beardsley. Yeah.
Now, I know that he was a fan of Oscar Wilde.
Like, he read most of his books.
And, of course, Oscar's most famous illustrator was Aubrey Beardsley.
And they have a hint of that sort of style, didn't they?
The books by Wilde were translated into Dutch in the 1910s.
Is that right? Yeah.
Interesting.
And, of course, he'd been a very young man when the scandal
of Oscar Wilde and Oscar Wilde going to prison would have happened,
which would have cast a dark shadow on his sense of self.
I mean, when I was a teenager, I read about Oscar Wilde,
and it made me think, because I knew that I shared his nature,
and it made me think this is the fate of gay people.
This is what will happen to us, we will be outcasts,
we will be exiled,
we will be, you know, sneered at and mocked.
And, um...
..and he must have felt that even more back then.
But, nonetheless, he was able to celebrate this same style.
Like, we know that Willem created a lot of illustrations for books... Mm.
..but they were never published.
Right, poor soul.
So he's a bit miserable, perhaps, about his future as an artist at this stage, do you think?
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Perhaps it isn't wrong to say that he was somehow waiting
for a chance to shine
and that chance came from the most unlikely quarter,
the Nazis.
It turned him into a hero.
In 1932, money troubles forced Willem to move
to a small town called Apeldoorn
and there his world was turned upside down.
Willem fell in love.
He fell for a young market gardener
called Jan Tijssen
and afterwards, nothing would ever be the same again.
Desperate to provide for the man he loved
Willem started writing,
working on a biography of his hero,
the Dutch artist Matthijs Maris.
One person determined to bring Willem's story to a wider public
is Dutch politician and gay rights campaigner
Boris Dittrich.
It's quite a story, the story of Willem and Jan.
Exactly, exactly.
It's, um...
I know that he came from Appeldoorn, is that right?
Well, they met in Appeldoorn and then they lived in Appeldoorn.
But because Willem Arondeus was an artist,
a painter, a writer,
he actually felt, "I need to go back to Amsterdam
to do research on my books
and my paintings and stuff like that."
So they moved back to the big city, Amsterdam,
but then the Germans and the Nazis
invaded the Netherlands and took over.
And then nobody cared about books any more, but about survival.
On the 10th of May 1940, the Germans invaded.
The very next day, Willem and Jan
were enjoying a lie-in
when bombs jettisoned from a stricken German plane
literally blew them out of bed.
Any closer and there wouldn't be a story to tell.
On the 14th of May,
the Luftwaffe flattened Rotterdam.
The Dutch surrendered.
Hitler installed his own Reich's commissar to lead the country,
an unwavering anti-Semite called the Seyss-Inquart.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
Within months, Seyss-Inquart had introduced
an insidiously devious piece of legislation
called the Aryan Declaration,
which obliged all civil servants to declare their religion.
All Jews, of course, were immediately dismissed.
APPLAUSE
Willem wasn't Jewish,
but he was incensed,
incensed enough to publish a pamphlet calling on everyone
to resist the Nazis in any way they could.
He called it the Brandarisbrief,
after the oldest lighthouse in the Netherlands,
a beacon of hope and a warning of danger.
Willem became very much involved in the resistance movement,
and he wrote his papers against the Germans and the Nazis.
But he got afraid for Jan
and he thought, "Well, if I will be arrested, then Jan will be arrested."
So Willem was afraid that it could really risk Jan's life.
So at the end of several conversations,
they decided to split up
and Jan went back to Appeldoorn, where he came from.
And Willem stayed because he wanted to
continue his fight against the Germans.
So he basically sacrificed the love of his life
for something greater
to fight against the German occupiers.
Because they didn't meet again.
They never met after that, which is horrible, actually,
because they really loved each other.
And we ought to have a picture, really,
of what...what the German view of gay life
and gay identity and practice was.
Exactly, they took about, I think,
50,000 German gay men to the camps,
and they had to wear this pink triangle.
This was even before they started to go after the Jews. Really.
They started with the gays
and there were no protests. That's interesting.
Do you think that's because it was like getting a foot in the door
of...of what was to become
this transporting of hated minorities
into the death camps as they were?
Some historians explain it
like, um, nobody was really speaking up for gay men
because they were considered perverts and abnormal.
So it was really the weakest link, more or less, in Dutch society,
so it was very easy to target them and to separate them
and to make them illegal.
And I guess as a as a gay man and an artist,
he made the connection with Jewish people,
although he wasn't Jewish himself.
Exactly, because you recognise injustice,
because minority groups always have to fight
for their place in society against a majority.
And so he said, "I feel some kind of inter-solidarity
"with other minority groups.
"We have to stand up and we have to show
"that we do not accept injustice."
Seyss-Inquart's
next move was to ensure that everyone in the Netherlands
carried an identity card.
To his delight, he discovered that the Dutch already had
Persoon Beweis,
the most sophisticated identity card system in the world.
The Nazis were able to turn this into a lethal bureaucratic
weapon when they realised that all they had to do was stamp
Jewish cards with a large black letter J.
And the cards marked with a J represented a ticking clock
for every Jew in the country.
Besides Willem Arondeus, there were other artists in the city
who had found innovative ways to resist the Nazis.
One of them was a woman called Frieda Belinfante.
Freida was an accomplished cellist.
Her father was Jewish, her mother Catholic.
Like Willem, Frieda
had also known from an early age that she was gay and never hid
the fact, she simply thought it was her business.
I never even mentioned it.
Because it doesn't, it doesn't make any difference to me.
I have always met every human being like, like an equal.
I think a human being is a human being, however he's born, is...
That's how he's born.
And thus has to live with it.
Frieda became the first woman in Europe to lead her own orchestra.
The Klein Orkest was based here at the Concertgebouw, the home
of classical music in the Netherlands. In the years
leading up to the war,
Henry Heineken, the head of the famous brewery,
was the chairman of the Concertgebouw.
I've come to meet his granddaughter, Charlene.
Brilliant.
And of course, Frieda performed here at the Concertgebouw.
And obviously the Nazis came because they liked to pretend
they were cultured, even if they weren't!
Yes, they made their own rules.
But one evening, they had
Arthur SeyssÐInquart come for a concert.
My grandfather had to shake the man's hand.
And after he did so, he turned to one of his guests and said,
"Now I've got to wash my hands," loud enough for everybody to hear.
And it's not necessary to say, he didn't stay
in his position for long. They got rid...
They got rid of him. Exactly.
And Frieda - she joined the orchestra,
which was about 17 or 18.
She was very young. And became the principal cellist, but she, yes,
she had that post, but of course she was Jewish, and - at least,
her father was Jewish. Uh-huh.
And almost all the Orkest,
the little orchestra, was Jewish too. Exactly.
So she, to use a pun, disbanded the band.
I said to the orchestra, "Boys, there is no orchestra."
"We have never existed."
And I just completely disappeared from the musical life.
And immediately started to prepare myself to do other things.
Is that when she started, when she joined the Resistance
and was at the...
Well, this is a sweet thing.
She, she had a lover earlier, who was Russian, who had escaped
from the revolution, who was called Ellen Schwartz.
And she'd come to the Netherlands.
And then she wanted to go back to Russia, but she didn't have a
visa and the Dutch wouldn't give her one.
This was before the Nazis.
It's a long time before the Nazis.
And so Frieda with that deep sense of "This is wrong,
"I'm going to, that's unfair..."
Said, "I'm going to make her a visa."
The Dutch government made the wrong decision.
Do not give a person her papers because she was originally Russian.
So I took the law in my hand
and changed it and create, of course,
a danger for myself.
It was always on the edge, but I liked that.
Then, during the occupation, she started to forge documents
to make life easier for the Jewish side.
And she had plenty of non-Jewish friends, of course, and she asked
them to "lose" their official documents.
So they had to reapply.
And she kept...
And so she was able to alter them for friends.
It was amazing,
her, her, her really strong feeling about unfairness and a hatred
of... Really, she was so brave standing up for these...
Because I think... ..for these principles. That's what you need, isn't it,
to be this kind of a hero that she was, that Willem was,
is you need more than just, "I hate the Nazis."
You have to have a kind of fury inside you. Yeah.
You need that?
Definitely had that. Yeah.
Next, Seyss-Inquart
made every artist sign up to what he called the
Kultuurkamer, the Chamber of Culture.
Those who didn't sign, were unable to work.
It meant that artists were forced to produce work with the Nazi
seal of approval.
It was collaboration by any other name.
As a result, artists like Willem and Frida were driven underground.
This is rather a lovely cafe.
Is it a typical kind of artists' cafe? Yeah.
And so characters like Willem would come to a place like this?
Frieda Belinfante went to a place called - a club called The Circle.
The Kring.
That was a cafe where you could have all the magazines and go
in the afternoon, when you're still working and where you found
each other and when you take a little drink or find
the newspapers and read.
I really led a little bit of a different kind of life,
something that was really up my alley.
There she visited and read books there and met people.
And she was approached by Willem Sandberg, who knew her as the
conductor of a chamber orchestra.
Sandberg was the curator
of the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art.
Just before the occupation,
he had had the foresight to have a huge bunker dug in the coastal dunes
to hide the country's great works of art from the Nazis.
In fact, this is where The Night Watch spent the war.
And they became friends, and she became friends
with the friends of Sandberg, Willem Arondeus and Gerrit van der Veen.
Gerrit van der Veen was a sculptor.
He, too, was doing his bit to fight the Nazis.
Like Willem, he published an underground pamphlet -
De Vrije Kunstenaar, the Free Artist.
He and a group of friends would meet late at night and in a
party-like atmosphere fuelled by booze and amphetamines,
would stay up until dawn,
forging identity cards.
I was told what they were doing and I was telling them
what I was doing.
And so we got all acquainted.
So circle is the right word.
It was a circle of - that met like ripples, kind
of intersecting. For Willem,
it also gave him a sense of family that he'd never had, really,
since his father kicked him out when he came out as gay to him. Yeah.
He was called Ticky.
We all called him Ticky.
And he was very shy.
Very shy and a kind of an inferiority complex.
He didn't think he was good enough for this or that.
And I was not a close friend of his before, but in that group
we became very close.
So close, in fact, that Frieda recognised that Willem was a man
she could trust.
This was William's chance to make a real difference.
He had the artistic skills and meticulous eye she needed
to speed up the forging process.
We worked as a team and went out together or had people come
to my house.
And they would - I would take the fingerprint and he would
do something else.
He felt no longer an outcast, and he felt no longer excluded
from the real society.
He was no longer useless, he thought. Yeah.
So it was a bunch of friends.
Because he'd been doubly lonely, hadn't he?
Because he had no real family? No.
And also he had sent his - the love of his life, Jan, back to Apeldoorn.
In the benefit of Jan.
He loved Jan.
And he didn't want Jan to live in hiding.
Didn't want Jan to live in danger.
One time we had a conversation about the danger
that was over our head.
And I said, or, he said,
"Do you think that we see the end
"of this war?"
And I said, "I don't think so."
He said, "I don't, either."
And he said, "Do you mind?"
And I said, "No, I don't."
He said, "I don't, either."
So I knew exactly that I had a partner who had the same point of
view that I had.
And Jan lived the rest of his life without ever seeing Willem again.
And what happened to him, exactly?
Do you know? He married. Yeah. Had children.
He had a family.
And I spoke to his family.
He was already dead, then.
And I told his eldest, eldest daughter, do you know your father
lived with a man for several years?
How did she respond?
She was not surprised.
Really? She told me that her father was a quiet, silent man
and that every year when the commemoration in Holland
of the victims of the war were commemorated...
Yes.
..then her father became in that period nervous, distracted
and very sad.
Every year.
So we imagine he was thinking of Willem.
Yeah. How extraordinary. Yeah.
Unsurprisingly, there were plenty of people who welcomed
the Nazis. Just like Mosley's Blackshirts in Britain,
the Dutch National Socialists, Anton Mussert's NSB,
had thousands of supporters.
Seyss-Inquart was smart enough to use Anton Mussert's paramilitary
units to do his dirty work.
Things began to escalate.
Jews started to fight back, and that led to a general strike.
Seyss-Inquart's response was savage.
The Reichskommissar immediately slapped even more restrictions
on the Jews.
Now they were barred from restaurants
and their businesses were closed.
Finally, every Jew in the Netherlands was forced to wear
the Yellow Star of David, so that they could be openly identified.
Willem Sandberg, the man who had saved those artworks
from the Nazis, formed the Artists Resistance.
He realised that in order to mass-produce fake identity cards,
Willem, Frida and van der Veen had to work together.
But making more fake IDs is more than a question of simply
cranking-up the printing presses.
So this is one of the original pieces they used during the war.
And that's a photograph and a stamp and two sorts of stamp,
like a postage stamp.
There were a lot of security measures to make sure
it was very hard to forge identity cards.
Oh, it's the other side. Fingerprints?
Yes. It's a real thing, isn't it?
They have two fingerprints, one on the paper and one on the back
of the photograph.
And on top of the photograph, they would place a seal.
So it would...
You would have your last name, your first names and date
of birth, place of birth, your nationality,
who you were married to, what your occupation
was when it was issued.
And an autograph of the city clerk who issued your identity cards.
All kinds of numbers here.
So every city has its own unique number.
So, for example, A35 would be Amsterdam.
And the number after 835 would be your personal ID number.
So this is number 10,000 from Amsterdam.
The Dutch identity card was one of the only ones that used
watermarks, so it would be very hard to forge these watermarks.
Can we see them?
This... Issue...
Hold it.
Oh, there's the light.
You can see... Just like a banknote.
Yes. Yes, the three lions.
So they are. With a sword and a crown.
So the Resistance had a hard time to forge these cards.
Yeah, they were artists, not scientists. Exactly.
So they had to use the perfect type of paper.
Perfect type of ink. And that was nearly impossible.
Did they try? I mean, they must have.
Yes, they did try.
Yeah. And some succeeded.
And some forgeries are better than other ones, of course.
This is one of the earlier forgeries, the Resistance made.
Done by the artists?
Yes. The Resistance.
These were made by the Resistance group of Gerrit van der Veen.
You can clearly see why this is one of the worst.
Oh, there's no... Is that...? There's no watermark that I can see.
No. So...
ah, so that's a dead giveaway, because the patrolman would...
They would hold it up against the light
and have a look at the lions, if they were there or not.
So this would be one of the earliest.
So the Resistance probably didn't know how to make
the watermark yet.
At first, they tried to cut out lions and place them between two
sheets of paper. Ah.
So if you would hold it up against the lights, you would still see
the three lions.
But the thickness in paper... A bit of a giveaway.
It was a giveaway.
You could feel there was something wrong with it.
So Sandberg understood immediately that a new approach was needed
because the forgeries they made were good, but they were not good enough.
So Sandberg brought in another friend, a professional printer
called Franz du Vere.
And Franz and Sandberg, with the others, tried
to perfect the watermark by experimenting with different paper
slurries and different cut-outs of the lion for the watermark.
So they would use a printing press? Yes.
The paper still had to go through the press six times
and it was a lengthy process to perfect the watermarks
in the forgeries, and eventually it worked out.
This is one of the better forgeries the Resistance made.
If you hold it...
On the back...
Yes. ..see the watermark?
Yes, yes, I can.
Yes. There are the lions.
Wow.
Marvellous.
So they really managed to get there.
They started to produce superb imitations, fakes. Yeah.
And some German officials even told Sandberg, for example,
that these forgeries that Franz in his group, with van der Veen,
made during the war, were the best they had ever seen.
Wow.
What a fabulous thing for Sandberg to hear.
He must have been very pleased.
It was a great, a great vindication of all that work and all
that effort. And especially to hear that from an enemy.
Yes. That's the most astonishing part. Isn't it?
That's, that's remarkable.
Oh, I don't like that. What's that?
That can't be what I think it is.
I thought you might be interested in seeing this.
This is one of the original Stars of David
the Jews had to wear during the war.
That's an ugly thing, isn't it?
Gosh, I've seen it in film, obviously,
who hasn't? And archive. And never actually seen the real one.
That's a horrible thing.
You know, that's one of the stains on human history, isn't it?
Yes, it really is. Grotesque. Grotesque.
Golly.
It's quite extraordinary what the Artists Resistance
were doing. Although du Vere and Sandberg
were both professional printers,
it was still a monumental task to make fake IDs
at that sort of scale.
I'm in awe of them.
Not so much their skills as the fact that they were prepared
to put their lives in danger for the sake of people
they didn't even know.
Pure altruism.
See, all the time that I was still working in Holland, I had contact
with Sandberg.
And one time he asked me, he said, "We are very short of money,
"can you - do you have any, any source that you can help us with money?"
And I said, "Well, I have some people that I know are very wealthy."
I don't think I've seen so much copper outside a police station.
It's amazing. It's beautiful, isn't it?
It's wonderful.
And Frieda came here, risking everything.
I know, because don't forget, the brewery was really watched
very carefully by the Germans, and they liked the idea
of the brewery continuing.
And I think Nazis drink beer too.
Yeah. But my grandfather was very strictly observed, and...
And Frieda took her life into her hands going to
the senior industrialist, who might have informed on her.
I went to see Mr Heineken.
And asked him,
could he help us financially,
And he said, "How come you trust me?"
I said, "Well, I go by faces.
"That's all I have."
But she had to obviously take that step and walk into the office.
And I suppose we have to put our minds into the period
and the area of distrust that must have settled like a pall of smoke
over all Occupied Europe. Yeah.
Obviously, I guess the whole life was a risk in those days,
and I think you just kind of had to go with your instincts.
I didn't know him well, but I knew he was a music lover,
and I had an instinctive feeling that he was on the right side.
But, you know, you have to go by how you feel, I didn't know him.
In the end, that's it, isn't it?
It's the human impulse that - I think I can trust that face.
And they came to this extraordinary bargain.
He said, "You're right."
He said,
"But, you know, I have a problem because I have my office riddled
"with Germans, looking over my shoulder, breathing down my neck,
"wanting to know everything about where the money comes
"from that is spent."
He said, "I'm not my own boss any more.
"Unless," he said, "you have an idea."
I said, "Maybe I do."
He said, "You do?"
I said, "Yes.
"I have an idea - buy my cello."
The cello was not worth very much, but he ended up managing to pay,
I think, the equivalent of 125,000 euros, today, for a cello,
which was probably worth a thousand.
So I brought my cello and he gave me the money.
And that money could be used...?
Well, they kept the printing presses rolling
for, for the, for the documents that they were falsifying.
And they also supported people who were keeping people hidden.
I think it was, I think it made a huge, big difference.
And your grandfather, Henry. Harry...?
Yeah, known as Henry.
But at home, he was Harry.
Right! Did you speak to him? You knew him? I knew him.
Did you speak about the war?
Not really, no.
I think people didn't.
Not nearly as much as people might have assumed.
And I think that it was a lot of - wonderful things were done
during the war,
he wasn't exceptional.
It was, it was many people who gave what they could and did
what they could, but they didn't talk about it much, afterwards.
With the Artists Resistance now working with master printer Franz du Vere,
they were able to produce identity cards on a vast scale,
saving thousands of Jewish lives.
But this created a huge problem.
The serial numbers on the cards
didn't match the duplicate records held in the population registry.
A simple cross-check by the Nazis condemned anyone carrying
a false ID card to deportation.
Or worse.
Willem, Frieda and Gerrit met at Sandberg's house
to discuss the problem.
And that night, they came up with a quite extraordinary idea.
They would blow up the population registry.
And this the main entrance.
And there were 20 filing cabinets. Right. And here were the cards.
Koen Limperg, an architect,
he made this whole plan of this.
Where are the cupboards? Where is the stairs to
upstairs? What is upstairs?
The building was guarded by the Germans inside and outside.
I know, it was guarded.
We all knew that. They were
expecting all kinds of things from the Dutch.
They make a plan, they should disguise as policemen.
That was the best, they thought, the best opportunity to get inside.
We had to have a tailor make two police uniforms.
Sjoerd has to make uniforms.
Sjoerd? Sjoerd Bakker.
Willem asked him, "Sjoerd,
"would you make the uniforms immediately?"
They couldn't make the police caps properly.
So Rudi Bloemgarten knew Cornelius Roos,
a policeman! A policeman!
Dutch policeman.
And he borrowed caps to make them to imitate.
Arondeus was the captain, van der Veen
was the lieutenant, and there were four policemen.
The leader of the attack actually was, was Arondeus, and the next man
to him was Gerrit van der Veen. So...
..and is Frieda one of the nine?
No, Frieda is a woman.
So Sandberg said, "We don't want a woman in the group."
And I think that is the superiority of the men.
That is not quite dealt with in this world.
I think eventually it will be.
Hoogsteder was a friend and courier of Arondeus.
He fetched the explosive.
And they had benzole.
Benzole is like a fluid...?
Like a fluid...
Arondeus and Frieda said, "We don't want to kill anybody."
No violence, no deaths, no injuries.
"We are not like them."
That's beautiful. "We are not like them."
And if there were guards, how would they deal with them
if they couldn't be hurt?
The injections. Oh, inject them.
With, with some sort of sedative to send them to sleep?
Yes.
And how would they get hold of that?
Well, a friend of a friend of a friend.
And they knew how to do the injection.
See, we couldn't be as selective because we needed so many special
things that nobody could provide without asking
maybe an acquaintance.
It was - there were too many people involved,
in other words. There were so many people involved that it
became very dangerous.
So the group of artists turn themselves
into a group of saboteurs. Yes.
I like to think of the raid as a bit like a heist movie.
The gang has gone over the plans again and again.
Contingencies and variables have been taken into account.
But then, by the 12th of March, 1943, they're finally ready.
So there it is.
The objective.
Since before the war, this had been the population registry.
And now it was the target of Willem's ambitious plan.
Captain Arondeus and Lieutenant van der Veen have a clever cover
story prepared just in case they're challenged.
They have arrested five men carrying explosives and benzole.
However, all this proves unnecessary because as the registry office comes
into sight, they hear gunshots and screams coming from the
Jewish Quarter just across the road.
The streets are suddenly swarming with troops.
And Willem realises there's nothing for it but to abandon the raid.
But they've learned a lot.
There's too much to carry and they need more uniforms.
Willem asks Joop Hoogsteder to find extra police caps.
Joop asks his friend, van der Leg, who asks another
friend, Peter Tijnesen.
But what he doesn't know is that Tijnesen is a member
of the National Socialist Party, a fascist.
March the 22nd, and they're ready again.
But this time they're better prepared.
They now have four extra men in uniform, and Joop is waiting
outside the population registry with the benzole.
But then, just as they're crossing the bridge, they see Joop
racing towards them.
He says he's seen some cleaners arriving at the registry.
And of course, Willem won't let innocent people get hurt,
so they have to call it off again.
March the 27th, third-time lucky.
As they cross the bridge, the target is once
again within sight.
There are two guards on duty outside the population registry.
"Captain" Arondeus draws a deep breath and marches over.
He informs them that he has received a tip-off that there
are explosives hidden upstairs.
The guards escort them into the building, but as soon
as they're inside, Willem draws a gun.
Willem keeps the guards covered while the gang drugs them, strips
them, and trusses them up.
Two of the gang dress in the guards' uniforms and take up position
outside, in case a German patrol arrives.
And then the Germans do show up.
Four of them.
Willem takes control.
He holds them at gunpoint.
But the medics have only got enough sedative for three of them,
so they're forced to truss the fourth one up un-sedated.
And as they're carrying them all out into the garden, the last one
struggles like mad.
And then Willem realises that it's only a matter of time
before the Germans' comrades notice that the patrol hasn't returned.
So they slosh the benzole all over the piles of record cards,
and light the fuse wire.
Willem had one more trick up his sleeve.
He had friends in the fire brigade.
He told them to take their time.
And when they did finally arrive, they discovered that Willem had hung
signs outside that read Danger Of Explosion, Do Not Enter.
The perfect excuse to stand back and let the building burn for hours.
As news of the bombing spread, the people of Amsterdam placed
single flowers in their windows.
Their little way of giving the Nazis the finger.
Showing solidarity with that defiant act of sabotage.
Ah-ha. We see...
Oh, yes.
..some of the pictures of the damage.
That's very pleasing. Yeah.
Thought it was an enormous success.
And it was. Was everything destroyed?
No, unfortunately not.
In the end, it turned out that only 50% was definitely destroyed.
Right.
And the rest could be restored.
And there was a shadow archive in The Hague.
But all the same, it took five months to restore everything
and to put a registry office in operation again.
But most important effect was that it really gave
all of the Netherlands enormous moral boost.
Everybody was excited.
So it was also an enormous inspiration for people to resist.
Then they announced a reward.
This was published in all the newspapers.
There was a reward of 10,000
guilders for any information that led to the...
That was quite a lot of money. Yes.
You could say it's about 70,000 euros nowadays.
That is a lot of money, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Huge. Oh, that's such a temptation.
And did that work?
Did they get results from that?
Yes, unfortunately, yes.
You know, Tijnesen...
He... Peter... Peter Tijnesen. Yes.
I've come across his name.
He was a Dutch Nazi and he mentioned the name of Joop...
Joop. ..Hoogsteder.
Yes, I remember him.
Yes. He was the one who talked too much.
And....
So Joop was arrested and taken in and questioned?
Yes.
And he was terribly tortured.
Oh, my goodness. And he couldn't held out.
He was only older... Just older than a boy.
He was. Yes. Yes. 21, I think.
And he gave - he knew a lot.
And he, he gave up...
He mentioned a lot of names and addresses.
And Willem, did they capture Willem straight away?
Willem Arondeus. Yes.
Willem was in hiding. Right.
And Hoogsteder did mention the address.
So on April 1, he was arrested there.
His attitude was absolutely heroic.
When he was arrested,
they came in and they say, "In the name of Hitler,
"we arrest you..." Follow us, or something.
And he said, "In the name of the Queen of Holland,
"I will follow you."
I mean, he was not even startled.
And then he turned to the policeman and he said,
"I will warn you,
"there will be a curse on you and your family members
"for seven generations..." Wow!
"..because of this criminal act of collaboration."
Something marvellous happened to Willem Arondeus, didn't it?
He became such a... He became,
really, yes,
he was always in doubt.
And during the Occupation,
yes... It gave him a purpose. Gave him a purpose.
And he became very courageous.
And so they started to raid addresses?
Yeah, they started.
And one by one, most of the people involved were arrested.
They were put into solitary confinement first,
and they were treated very badly.
They were chained to the bed and not allowed to, to go
to the toilet or anything. Oh!
Only once a day, they were, they were shortly released.
So it was a terrible, terrible situation. Really humiliated.
They came to arrest Sandberg, but only his wife was at home.
And she was able to warn him.
And he was into hiding.
He went into hiding.
Van der Veen was in a place and nobody knew where he was,
so he couldn't be betrayed.
Later on, with another action,
to release prisoners...
Really? He tried to spring them, as we say, did he?
Yes. He was caught and he was also shot.
Ah, right. Later on.
Frieda also was informed in time that they were looking
for her.
I knew something was wrong, so I better disappear.
And that's why I wasn't arrested.
Because they had my address, but they didn't get
to my house early enough.
And first of all, she disguised herself as a man.
Ah, yes, I've got a picture, actually, I remember. OK.
I came across it somewhere and I put it in my folder here.
You know the picture? Yes.
It's rather wonderful, isn't it?
Yeah. Look at that.
Yeah, I know the picture.
For three months, I was disguised as a man, and very successfully
so, because I lived near... At number 64 and my mother
lived at 44.
And I passed my mother several times during that time,
and she never recognised me.
I also didn't take my hat off for her, but she wouldn't
have recognised me anyway.
Frieda escaped to Switzerland.
She returned home briefly after the war to collect her cello
from Henry Heineken, then sailed to America, where she lived
for the rest of her life.
Once again, she rose to lead her own orchestra.
Just before she died, in March 1995,
she wrote, "To all my friends
"and students, as I leave this Earth,
"I hope, rather than being sad,
"you can share my gratitude for a beautiful life.
"Of which you have all been a part."
It was here on the 18th of June, 1943, that the trial of
Willem Arondeus and his fellow conspirators took place.
The first words I can see on this page are Waffen SS. Yeah.
Sends a bit of a chill through the spine, doesn't it?
My goodness. And there he is. Yes.
Number one. Willem JC Arondeus,
"Kunstmaler" - artist, painter. Yeah.
All the people on the list, they didn't know who was Willem Arondeus.
They know, they hardly knew each other. Aside
from the central gang... No.
..the others of the 28 were not connected enough. In the
trial, they see him for the first time, and they didn't know his name.
Yes.
And he set the tone for the trial.
He was fearless.
He stand up, he mocked...
He was brutal to the judge. Really?
Yes. What had he to lose?
Oh, that's true. Yeah.
He knew he was going to die. Yes. Yeah.
So did he encourage the others to behave like that as well, do you think?
No.
He took all the blame on him.
Really?
He said, "It was my idea for this."
"All right?
"And I invited the others to help me."
"But they're not guilty.
"I'm the one...
Wow, that's astonishing.
I guess there was no chance that any of them would really get
off, was there? No-one. No. No.
And so how long did the trial last? Just...
Just one day.
At the end of the day, the verdicts were spoken.
And how many of them were sentenced to death?
12. 12.
Yes.
Right, gosh.
I have one last witness from Anje Roos.
Anje Roos.
She was the sister of Cornelius Roos.
He was sentenced to death.
You can... Maybe you can read it.
Oh, good, It's in English!
"Arondeus was very impressive.
"A beautiful speech.
He described the lawlessness and injustice that people
"were suffering and how he could not go along with that and that
"he did not stand alone.
"He was very calm, but he would address the Germans in a mocking
"tone of voice."
I think that's, that's magnificent.
What a man, really. Yes. To be defiant like that to the end,
and yet to be calm when he needed to be,
and to speak directly about why
you should stand up to such a tyranny. Yeah.
He was a real hero.
It's very moving.
As the day of their execution approached, the men
were all allowed one final request.
Sjoerd asked for a pink shirt to wear for his execution.
His favourite colour.
Willem wanted a meringue pie,
to share with his friends.
Willem left 500 guilders to Jan, the love of his life.
Willem would never know that Jan had named his son after him.
Surprisingly, the mood in the cells was upbeat.
They were telling stories and singing songs.
And Willem was their inspiration, their leader, their hero.
Lau Mazirel,
a lawyer sympathetic to the Resistance cause,
was Willem's final visitor.
Lau said later that Willem gave her the impression
that he was truly happy.
Willem said something to Lau that day that gives me goose bumps.
He said, "Tell the world that homosexuals are not cowards,
"that they are no less courageous than anyone else."
And to me, Willem's life exemplified courage.
Living openly as a gay man, coming out when he was 17, and refusing
ever to hide who he was.
Willem needed the world to understand that being gay was no
impediment to acting like a true hero.
The men were marched to gunpoint for almost a mile across the dunes,
before they reached the place of execution.
Wherever in the dunes
the shot sounded that ended Willem Arondeus' life,
the field where it happened is a field of honour.
Willem Sandberg spent the remainder of the war in hiding, using his time
working on what he called his "Experimenta Typographica".
Essentially, it was a new typeface.
But if you look closely, you can see initials,
and they are
Koen Limperg.
Johan Brava.
Gerrit van der Veen.
Franz du Vere.
And Ticky Arondeus.
It's a coded memorial to his friends, to the ones
that he lost.
To the fallen.
Amongst my research pictures,
I've got somewhere, I think,
yes, here we are, look, here's Willem's gravestone.
Gravestone. Yeah.
But he, he doesn't seem to be as remembered as
Gerrit van der Veen.
And admittedly, van der Veen is a more famous artist, as an artist,
but they both died young, before they'd finished their life's work.
Both executed. Both executed.
And van der Veen is everywhere.
Oh, yes, I live in Amsterdam, very close to the Gerrit Van Der Veen Street.
There is a Gerrit van der Veen school, and not only in Amsterdam,
everywhere in the country, but Willem Arondeus, I think,
has only one alley in Amsterdam,
and there are no schools, no street names.
But it can't be because he was gay, surely?
Well...you cannot really prove that.
There is no minutes of meetings
where people say, "Well, because he's gay, we will not
"mention him," or whatever.
But it was right after the Second World War when they started
to commemorate the Resistance heroes,
that being gay was not a plus.
You would think having had a hated ideology and a hated conqueror
like the Nazis in Netherlands, everything they stood for,
you would oppose.
This is a very painful part of Dutch history because the Jews who came
back from the camps to Amsterdam to the Netherlands,
they were not welcomed warmly.
They wanted to go to their own houses.
And then the city government said, "Well, you have to pay tax
"for the years that you were in the camps." What?!
Yes, unfortunately, that's true.
Even knowing what those people have been through in the camps.
Exactly.
They charged them money for their absence!
Yeah. Wow.
And it's only quite recently that the city of Amsterdam
really said, "Well, we have to do something about this."
Was there a movement amongst the early gay liberation,
as it was called?
Of course, within the gay community, people knew about Willem Arondeus,
about Sjoerd Bakker, about Frieda Belinfante,
but it was not common knowledge to the big public.
And for instance, each year in Amsterdam there's
this national commemoration,
and I remember that in 1970 there was a group of young gay men
who wanted to show the public that also gay men and lesbian women
were, were part of the Resistance movement, and they wanted to put
a wreath next to the monument.
And they were arrested and the wreath was taken
away and destroyed.
The general public doesn't know the story and doesn't know
about how important these figures were in the Resistance movement.
And for me, it's interesting that the Jewish Memorial
for ALL the dead of the Holocaust is called the Yad Vashem. Ah, yes.
Which means the memorial and the name.
You give a name to everyone who suffered, if you can.
And Yad Vashem has spent the last decades trying to trace the name
of every single victim, because it's important,
and this is what that first gravestone did,
but you have done with your work, and many of the people
I've been seeing have done, is give a name. In history,
you see that gay people are forgotten.
Yeah.
And the first thing to do is remember their name.
Exactly.
Willem Johan Cornelius Arondeus.
CHURCH BELL TOLLS
The Pink Triangle was once a symbol of Nazi oppression.
Homosexuals were forced to wear it, just as Jews were forced to wear
the Yellow Star of David.
The triangle was reclaimed in the 1980s by the gay rights
movement and is now a symbol of pride.
This is the first monument ever to honour every victim
of gay persecution.
This is the Homomonument.
Past, present and future, in one.
The past.
A warning from history.
The present.
Where we are now.
The future.
Where, for the sake of humanity,
I hope history never repeats itself.
This is how I believe Willem and Frieda should be remembered.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media