Dutch Nazi Traitor Who Killed His Own People – Painful End of Hermannus Reydon JJ

The 10th of May, 1940. The Netherlands did not fall by a single fatal stab, but faded away as every reactive vein was severed hour by hour. As the parachutes of the Luftvafa stained the skies of the Netherlands, they carried not only explosives, but the end of an era. High above, German squadrons tore through key points. On the ground below, Nazi mobile forces shredded the final lifelines of a dying nation. 4 days later, on May 14, Dutch history was incinerated in Rotterdam. Under tons of hot steel

falling from the void, the city’s core was crushed into ash along with over 800 lives. Amidst the pungent smoke of tens of thousands of leveled homes, a cruel ultimatum was issued. Utre would be the next scapegoat. Standing at the threshold of genocide, the endurance limit of a nation shattered. The Netherlands knelt. The country surrendered in utter humiliation. But in that very hour of engulfing darkness, another entity was reborn. As the national power apparatus was dismantled, a prison door quietly

opened. Without ceremony, without a sound, Hermanis Raon stepped out from the shadows of his cell to breathe the air thick with the smell of fire. While the entire nation grieved over the loss of their country, that national socialist fanatic smiled. He had just found the most glorious fortune of his life amidst the catastrophe of his compatriots. Raidon did not return to heal. He entered a moral vacuum taking shape where old rules had been buried and the new order had yet to be named. There, traitors like Raidon did not need to

seize power. They only needed to wait to be installed into the new machinery. With the title of Secretary General of the Department of Information, he turned the pen into a blade and art into chains, imprisoning the soul of an entire nation within the dungeon of a coldblooded ideology. However, history is a terrifyingly impartial judge. Those who rise from the blood and ashes of betrayal are often blind to the price of the soul. 3 years later, the very darkness in which Raidon once lurked would manifest as a brutal

death sentence. An end that no propaganda pen could whitewash and no lie could excuse. This is the dossier on Hermanus Raiden, the voice of the devil, the man who built a throne on the pain of his fatherland only to be consumed by the very flames of hatred from his own people. The lawyer persona and the seeds of fanaticism. Hermanis Raon was not born from the shadows of a lack of education but was an intellectual molded by the formal educational system of the Netherlands. Born on the 6th of December 1896 in the

town of Vorshoten, Raiden early on displayed sharp thinking abilities which would later become the tools he used to legitimize ideological crimes. In 1923, he graduated with a law degree from the prestigious Utre University and married Vilhelmina Anganita Haksteinhart. Instead of using the law to protect social order, his lawyer’s degree became a cover for Raidon to build an extremist ideology, worshiping nationalism, and venerating the peasantry as the pure core of the Germanic race. To Raiden,

all other modern values were decadence that needed to be purged. This blind faith found fertile ground when the National Socialist Movement known as the NSB was founded by Anton Musut and Cornelis Van Gilkirken on the 14th of December 1931. Modeled after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, the NSB quickly became a magnet for those dissatisfied with the parliamentary system. In the spring of 1,932, Raidon officially joined this organization with membership number 252. This was the milestone that transformed

an intellectual lawyer into a professional henchman for a foreign ideology. Raidon’s fanaticism was soon rewarded with practical power. On the 1st of February 1933, he was appointed to lead the NSB branch in Amsterdam, the most important political and economic center of the Netherlands. Throughout the next 6 years, Raiden constantly sharpened his most dangerous weapon, words. From 1933 to 1938, he participated in the editorial board of the weekly Vul on Vaderand, meaning people and fatherland, where he directly

shaped the perception of party members with steel-like fascist reasoning. This period witnessed the fluctuations of the NSB on the political stage. After reaching a peak of nearly 8% of the vote in 1935, the movement began to slide due to the process of radicalization and open anti-semitism. By 1937, when public trust plummeted to only 4%, the NSB decided to move to a total media front by establishing the daily newspaper Het National Daglad. Raidon’s propaganda career peaked in 1938 when he officially held the

position of political editor and later editor in chief of Het National Dougl Raidon directly controlled the machine of lies turning the newspaper into a ruthless brainwashing tool to prepare the mindset for the collapse of the nation. When World War II broke out on the 1st of September 1939, the Dutch government clearly identified the true face of this traitor. Raiden was no longer a simple journalist. He was listed as one of the 21 most dangerous individuals to national security. This was the final limit before Raiden

transitioned from a preacher of ideology to a direct criminal, pushing the nation into the tragedy of occupation. the liberation of the invader and the venom of propaganda. The fall of the Netherlands in May 1940 was the fateful door that transformed Hermanis Raidon from a political prisoner into the supreme power of the propaganda machine. Previously on the 3rd of May 1940, identifying the threat from treasonous ideologies, the Dutch government had ordered the arrest of Raidon in the village of Ulkansplot.

However, the protection of national law could not overcome the brute strength of Nazi Germany. Only a week later, on May 10, the German army surged across the border, mobilizing the Luftvafa air force and paratroopers to capture strategic points, pushing the Netherlands into its death throws. The most brutal turning point occurred on the 14th of May, 1940. To crush the final will to resist, the Nazi Germans launched a bombardment that destroyed the entire historic center of the city of Rotterdam. Facing the threat of Utre

being leveled in a similar scenario, the Dutch military was forced to sign surrender papers that very same day. The collapse of the nation was conversely the day of glory for Raidon. On May 15, the German occupying forces immediately granted him his freedom. Without a second of hesitation, Raidon returned to his desk in the capacity of editor and chief of the newspaper Het National Dark Blood. He began using his pen to legitimize the occupation, glorifying those who had just dropped bombs on his

own compatriots and brainwashing the public with a new order full of violence. By 1941, Raiden’s propaganda venom began to transform into direct and bloody acts of repression. During the two days of February 22 and 23, the German army conducted a large-scale raid on the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. More than 400 men were arrested and deported directly to the Bukhenvald and Mount Mhousen concentration camps, places synonymous with a death sentence. In the face of that wave of brutality, an unprecedented event exploded on the 25th

of February 1941, the February strike. For the first and only time in the heart of a Europe groaning under the heel of occupation, tens of thousands of Dutch citizens cast off their fear and stood tall, taking to the streets to strike and directly challenge the terror that the Nazis were inflicting upon the Jewish community. Instead of making the fascists flinch, the wave of popular resistance made the ruling apparatus served by Raiden even more ferocious. Immediately after using violence to suppress the strike, Nazi

Germany tightened its grip on the entire society. Policies to isolate Jewish people were pushed to the most extreme levels. More than 15,000 people were forcibly sent to forced labor camps. Throughout this process, Raiden played the role of the one who whitewashed the crimes. Through press publications, he silenced the pain of the victims, described the repression as an inevitable purification, and praised Nazi cruelty as a symbol of discipline strength. Raon turned words into a type of invisible chain, imprisoning the

conscience of the people, while the hands of the occupier was soaked in the blood of his own countrymen. The peak of power on the blood of compatriots. As the war moved into 1,942, the Nazi German ruling apparatus in the Netherlands no longer stopped at occupation, but shifted to a phase of exterminating opposition groups and the Jewish community at their roots. On the 29th of April 1942, a cruel decree was issued. All Jewish people were forced to wear a yellow star badge on their chests to serve the purposes of identification

and public stigmatization. Anyone who violated this or was caught without a badge after May 5 was sent directly to the Moltousen concentration camp. This was not a common administrative punishment, but a covert death sentence executed through sheer brutality. Not stopping at stigmatization, these policies were merely a stepping stone for a crime on a larger scale. By July 1942, official deportations began, marking the moment when death trains rolled out to take Dutch citizens to extermination camps in Poland. In that

bloody context, Hermanis Raon did not flinch. On the contrary, he exploited the chaos to climb higher rungs of power. Raidon was brought into the propaganda and political council of the NSB while also taking leadership of the Netherlandstand, a fascistized farmers organization aimed at controlling food sources and forcing the peasantry to serve the interests of the Third Reich. The pinnacle of Raon’s power came in early 1943. After an internal purge and conflict between leader Anton Musett and Toby Goden, Raon

was officially appointed as the successor to the position of secretary general. On the 1st of February 1943, he took office as the secretary general of the department of public information and the arts as well as the president of the Netherlands Chamber of Culture. With these two seats, Raon held the power of life and death over the entire spiritual life of the nation. He became the absolute ruler of every field from the press and publishing to music and painting. Raidon’s power at this time

was used for a single goal, the total fascistization of Dutch society. He ordered the silencing of all opposing voices, closed any newspaper office that still possessed a shred of conscience, and replaced them with rhetoric praising Nazi violence. Under the iron fist of Raidon, art was no longer a matter of creativity, but became a tool of lies. Culture was no longer the national identity, but became propaganda trash. Raidon turned the entire country into a massive psychological prison cell, where

he used his pen and decrees to brainwash the masses while simultaneously blurring every boundary between the truth and the bloodstained lies of the invader. Death sentence and the bloody retribution. While Hermanus Raidon was reveling in the ultimate power of a cultural tyrant, the death sentence for him had been signed in blood by the Dutch resistance forces. For the CS6 resistance group, Raiden was not merely a traitor, but a toxic tumor that had to be excised immediately to save the soul of the

nation. On the 9th of February 1943, justice finally knocked on Raidon’s door. Garrett William Castine, a courageous neurologist, directly carried out this sentence. Castine broke into the private residence, shooting Raidon’s wife dead on the spot before patiently lying in weight behind the front door. When Raidon stepped into the house, Castine pressed the muzzle of the gun against his back and pulled the trigger. Despite being hit by multiple bullets at close range, this criminal did not die

instantly. He collapsed in a pool of blood and began a prolonged journey of agony and pain. The confrontation between light and darkness continued with a tragic sacrifice. On the 19th of February 1943, Castine was arrested by the German secret police at a cafe in the city of Delft. Inside the interrogation room of the German security service, when left alone while still handcuffed to a chair, this hero chose a proud end. Instead of letting the enemy subdue him, he threw himself through the thirdstory window,

sacrificing his life to eternally carry the secrets of the resistance to the grave. Meanwhile, Raidon had to endure a long and humiliating process of dying. Castain’s shots had destroyed his body beyond recovery. After months of suffering pain on his hospital bed, Raiden drew his last breath on the 24th of August 1943 in Leiden, ending the life of a criminal at the age of 46. The death of Raidon exposed the most brutal face of the Nazi machinery in the Netherlands. On the 28th of August 1943,

the occupiers organized a lavish funeral in the Hague to honor the traitor. The most notorious names such as Anton Musett, Arthur Sci Inquart, and Hans Albin Router were all present beside his coffin. To retaliate for the death of Raidon and other Nazi officials, the Germans activated Operation Silbertan. This was a mass murder policy. For every Nazi party member killed, the Germans would randomly execute three innocent Dutch civilians. More than 50 intellectuals and opponents of the occupation were brutally murdered by

Dutch collaborator execution squads during this bloody reprisal campaign. History does not stop at taking the life of an individual to carry out punishment. While Raiden’s body was being taken for burial, the genocidal machine he helped build continued to crush the last remaining lives. On the 3rd of September 1944, the final death train departed from Westerborg camp heading for Achvitz. Raiden was dead, but the venom from his writings and decrees continued to push thousands of people into the gas

chambers. He did not live to witness the fall of the Third Reich, but his name has been eternally nailed to history as a man who used his pen to grease the path leading to the mass murder pits, leaving behind a legacy of ashes and resentment for future generations. The bloodstained pen and the verdict of history. World War II officially came to a close in Europe on the 8th of May, 1945. As the darkness of the Third Reich vanished, the light of justice began to shine into the most brutal corners in

the Netherlands. After 5 years of occupation, this nation looked back in horror at the unhealable scars. Approximately 107,000 Jews had been deported from their homeland. The majority of them were taken to Avitz and Soibbor, where death was operated like an industrial assembly line. Only a lucky few survived to return, leaving a permanent anthropological and cultural void in the heart of Dutch society. Looking back at this entire journey of crime, we realize a bitter truth. The tragedy was not only created by guns or

toxic gas. It began with written words. Hermanus Raidon was the one who greased that genocidal system with the power of language. He did not stand directly at the gas chambers, but he was the one who used the propaganda machinery to strip away the humanity of the victims before they boarded the trains. By poisoning public opinion and glorifying tyrants, Raon turned brutality into a justifiable logic, turning the pain of his compatriots into a stepping stone for personal fame. As an expert in historical research, I evaluate Hermanus

Raidon not just as a national traitor, but as an eternal warning about the corruption of the intelligencia. When a lawyer or a journalist uses knowledge to serve evil, their destructive power is more terrifying than any army. The dark legacy he left behind is a testament to how words can become weapons of mass murder if we allow ourselves to be led by hatred in the name of extremist nationalism. The greatest lesson that today’s generation needs to deeply engrave in their hearts is the power of truth and

the responsibility of the individual voice. History is not just pages of paper that have fallen asleep. It is a mirror for us to examine the present. In an era of exploding information, practicing critical thinking and maintaining morality against waves of toxic propaganda is the only way to protect democracy. Never be silent in the face of injustice because the silence of the majority is the most fertile ground for men like Raidon to rise. Build a future where compassion and truth are the compass for every

action. In today’s modern world, are we vigilant enough to identify the new toxic pens hiding under the guise of freedom and justice? Please subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell to join us in decoding the costly lessons from world history.