38 Victims: He Escaped the War—But Not Justice: Dutch Nazi Spy Waals JJ
10 May 1940. German forces strike westward without warning, and the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg are invaded in a single morning. Paratroopers fall from the sky, tanks roll across fields, and the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, rains bombs on cities and civilians. The Dutch army fights bravely but cannot withstand the lightning German assault. In Rotterdam, the heart of the country’s trade, the sky turns black with smoke as the German air force destroys the historic city centre in a single day. Within days, the Netherlands surrenders,
and occupation – a time of fear, hunger, and betrayal – begins. Among those who watch the ruins of Rotterdam smoulder is a young technician who sees in chaos an opportunity for gain. Before long, he will betray not only his country but all who trust him. His name is Anton van der Waals. Anton van der Waals was born on 11 October 1912 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father, Gerardus, ran a small painting business, and his mother, Adriana, cared for the home and the children. The family lived modestly but respectably, in a city that was growing fast with trade
and industry. Anton was an unplanned child and when he was born, he already had four siblings. He was restless from a young age – clever enough to learn quickly but unwilling to follow rules. After finishing school, he took a job as an office clerk, then as a salesman, but his ambitions outgrew his abilities. At nineteen he decided to study electrical engineering, hoping for a modern, stable career. He earned a diploma but could not keep steady work. Every job ended the same way – with arguments, failure, or dismissal. He tried
to start his own repair business for radios and motorcycles, but it went bankrupt within months. After this, van der Waals decided to attend a technical school in Dordrecht in Western Netherlands for a short time but left after poor results and lack of money. When his father’s health declined, Anton returned home to help with the family business. The years of the Great Depression were hard in the Netherlands, and for a time he lived on unemployment support. He felt humiliated and blamed others for his misfortune and in 1934 he
joined the NSB, the Dutch fascist movement, in which he played no active role. Though the membership gave him a sense of belonging and pride, he kept it secret even from his girlfriend Francien Goedhart. That same year as he joined the fascist movement, he married her, but when she finally discovered his ties to the NSB, the marriage ended bitterly after less than two years. Just two weeks after his divorce van der Waals married again, this time to Johanna Hendrika Groos, and soon had a son, Gerard. But Anton
refused to recognize the child legally and abandoned both wife and son without support. So, his second marriage also collapsed within two years. In 1939 he married for a third time, to Aukje Grietje Harkina Smits, who believed he had been married only once before and his first marriage lasted only two days. His life was already, before the start of the Second World War, marked by deceit, and lies to his closest people. During this time, he worked at the electrical engineering company de Hoop in Rotterdam, a job he obtained by misrepresenting his qualifications in the field.
On behalf of his employer Lodewijk de Hoop, van der Waals worked regularly as an electrical engineer in the port of Rotterdam, where he was mainly involved with submarines and acquired German and English language skills. When the Second World War broke out on 1 September 1939, he saw it as an opportunity. He began to speak of inventions and secret designs, hoping to impress others with his cleverness. After the brutal bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940 by the Luftwaffe, he claimed to have discovered a new type of aircraft engine.
He approached a local factory director, Ary van der Meer, saying he would rather sell the design to the British than to the Germans. The story was false, but it gained him entry into the Dutch resistance, which was small at the time but steadily growing. Among his new contacts was also a young Jan Streef, who later organized meetings of the resistance group in van der Waals’s apartment. What the other resistance fighters did not know was that their friendly host was already in contact with the SD – the Nazi intelligence
agency. In late 1940, van der Waals visited the SD office in Rotterdam, offering to provide information on resistance groups. At first, they ignored him, but soon Joseph Schreieder, head of the SD counterintelligence in The Hague, saw potential in him. On 30 April 1941, van der Waals officially became an SD informant. His first mission was to find the man who had shot a German railway officer. Within days, he delivered the suspect, Hans Bierhuijs, to the SD and received a reward of 5,000 guilders as well as a steady monthly salary from the Nazis.
From that moment, van der Waals became one of the SD’s most successful agents in Western Europe. He infiltrated the resistance group which was active in the Kennemerland region in the northwestern Netherlands, pretending to be a trusted resistance courier. Within weeks, his information led to the arrest of the group’s key members. The Germans seized their radio codes and used them to track other resistance cells. Resistance fighters were later executed. Van der Waals’s betrayals were methodical and cold, motivated not by ideology but by his greed and vanity.
Rumours soon spread among the resistance. When almost every group that had contact with van der Waals was broken up, suspicions turned toward him. Members of the resistance planned to kill him, but before they could act, the SD arrested them all. Van der Waals under new cover name Anton de Wilde, moved on to another group, led by the former Olympic athlete Ernst de Jonge. He claimed to have parachuted in from England and carried English cigarettes to prove it. Again, the ruse worked and the group was betrayed, most of its members captured, some executed.
Van der Waals’s reputation as a spy grew and he infiltrated yet another resistance network – the ’t Zwaantje group run by shipowner Allard Oosterhuis, who maintained a secret escape route from the Netherlands to Sweden. On 23 July 1943, the SD destroyed the group thanks to van der Waals’s information. As a result, the Swedish route from Netherlands was closed, and dozens of people were captured. By this time, even the SD began to use him with caution. Schreieder considered sending him to England as a double-agent agent, but decided
the risk was too great. Instead, they spread rumours that he had been killed, hoping to calm the resistance’s suspicions about van der Waals´s actions. In September 1943, van der Waals was sent briefly to Sweden to gather intelligence on Dutch contacts there, but achieved little. He returned to the Netherlands under a new name, Hendrik Jan van Veen, and settled in Loosdrecht in the north-western part of the Netherlands. There, in June 1944, he married for the fourth time to Cornelia Johanna den Held. The marriage, like all others, collapsed after a short time.
As the war drew to its bloody end, van der Waals vanished into the chaos. He escaped arrest when the Netherlands was liberated by the Allies, and for a time his name faded from memory. In a strange twist, he later turned himself in to the Canadian military police, claiming he wanted to serve as an informant against Nazi fugitives. In reality, he just wanted to change sides and join the victors of the war. The Canadians handed him over to the British intelligence officers. Since it was soon known that he worked for the SD,
he was considered suitable for tracking down Nazis who had gone into hiding in defeated Germany and infiltrating the remnants of the Nazi movement. Later, under the leadership of Louis Einthoven, the head of the Dutch secret service Bureau Nationale Veiligheid, he carried out various missions and allegedly was also deployed in Berlin against the Soviets. In the Netherlands, however, Einthoven was pressured by surviving victims of van der Waals’ war time activities, who were pushing for the prosecution of the former Nazi agent.
In early 1947, the Dutch authorities brought him back from Germany and imprisoned him in The Hague. His trial opened in April 1948. Joseph Schreieder, his former SD master, was brought from Germany to testify as a witness of his collaboration. The evidence was overwhelming: reports, coded messages, and testimonies from those who had survived German torture because of his betrayal. On 7 May 1948, the court pronounced its verdict. Anton van der Waals was found guilty of treason and directly responsible for the capture of at least eighty-three people, of whom thirty-eight
had been executed. He was sentenced to death and though his plea for clemency reached the new Dutch Queen Juliana, she refused to grant him mercy. For his punishment van der Waals waited in his cell for almost two years. Justice finally caught up with him on the morning of 26 January 1950, when the 37-year-old van der Waals was led to the Waalsdorpervlakte, the same execution ground near The Hague, where the Germans had executed over 250 members of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. When the rifles fired, they ended the life of one of the most infamous
traitors in the German-occupied Netherlands and avenged the deaths of dozens of brave men and women who fought not only against the occupiers, but also against traitors from their own ranks. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.