Title: Onbekwaam in het compromis: Willem Arondeus, kunstenaar en verzetsstrijder (Unable to Compromise: Willem Arondeus, Artist and Resistance Fighter).
Hello Nicole, in 1993 I published a book on Willem Arondeus, in Dutch. Their conviction was a foregone conclusion.Īrondeus said he hoped that by his life and death, he could prove that “homosexuals are not cowards.” Yad Vashem has honored him as Righteous Among the Nations. They successfully destroyed about ten thousand records, but five days later the entire unit was arrested. On March 17, 1943, he and other members of his resistance unit set the Amsterdam General Registry Office on fire, trying to destroy all the original records so the false identity papers couldn’t be checked. (Being himself part of a persecuted minority, perhaps he felt a special kinship with them.) He urged other artists to stand up against the Nazi invaders.
In 1940, after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, he joined the resistance.Īrondeus utilized his artistic skills by forging identity papers for Dutch Jews. At a time when homosexuality was still illegal and deeply taboo, Arondeus spoke openly about it.įor seven years in the 1930s he lived with his lover and struggled to make a living. He was the son of theater costume designers and one of six children, but became estranged from his family after he came out as gay at the age of seventeen. On this day in 1943, Willem Arondeus and eleven other Dutch resistance members were executed for sabotage and treason in connection with their anti-Nazi activities in the Dutch Underground.Īrondeus, an artist, novelist and biographer, was rather old for a resistance fighter he was 48 at the time of his death. (Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. His final message before his death, as relayed to his lawyer, was to tell the world that “homosexuals are not cowards.1943: Willem Arondeus, gay resistance fighter He had been openly gay his entire life, living with his boyfriend Jan Tijssen in the years leading up to the war. But a few weeks later, Arondeus was captured, and he and many of his collaborators were executed. The plan was a success, and thousands of files on Jews and non-Jews alike were destroyed.
#Willem arondeus registration#
So in 1943, Arondeus led the charge in his greatest act of resistance: bombing the registration office in Amsterdam and destroying those records. The resistance group he belonged to specialized in forged documents, but the Nazis countered by checking documents against public records. He fought against the forced registration of Jews at a time when his countrymen still considered it harmless, and urged his fellow artists to do the same through underground, illegal publications. When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Arondeus was among the first to join the resistance movement, along with his friend, lesbian cellist Frieda Belinfante. Art and activism would soon define his own life as well. In 1935, he switched to writing, penning two novels which he also illustrated, and in 1938 he published his most successful work, a biography of the painter and political activist Matthijs Maris. His biggest commission came in 1923, when he was asked to paint a mural for Rotterdam City Hall. He struggled to earn a living as an artist, designing posters and illustrating poetry. As a teenager, he was thrown out of his home by his parents when he announced that he was gay. A compendium of queer people in the 19th and 20th centuriesĭutch illustrator, author, and anti-Nazi resistance fighter.