Artist and author Willem Johan Cornelis Arondéus Willem Arondeus, an openly gay member of the Dutch Resistance to the Nazis involved in falsifying IDs for Jews was executed on July 1, 1943, along with 11 co-conspirators, for fire bombing the Amsterdam Office of Public Records .
Willem was born on August 22, 1894 in Naarden, Netherlands.as the youngest of six siblings in Naarden, Amsterdam, His parents, Hendrik Cornelis Arondeus and Catharina Wilhelmina de Vries, designed costumes for the theater. From a young age, he was a talented artist and his parents encouraged his creativity, until he came out as homosexual at age 17.
In a time when nearly all gay people were in the closet, Willem’s parents could not accept his orientation. Their rejection led Willem to leave home, and severe all contact with his family. That part of his story is, unfortunately, all too familiar to too many LGBT+ people even to this day.
It would have been a lot worse, had Denmark not decriminalized homosexuality in 1811. Thanks to Napoleon, but restrictive rules still barred homosexuality in the early 20th century.
In 1911, the beliefs of the ruling political parties led to the age of consent for homosexuality to be changed to 21 in the Netherlands . despite the age for heterosexuality remaining at 16. Despite the first gay bar opening its doors during this time, these restrictive age rulings, along with other laws against public indencency, were used to unfairly target gay men.
But these rulings did not intimidate Arondeus. He refused to suppress his identity as a gay man.Picking up work where he could find it, Arondeus quickly learned, though, that persistent discrimination of LGBT citizens made life difficult. Alongside living in poverty, he also struggled to find housing due to his refusal to hide his sexuality.
He began building a career for himself as an illustrator and painter, and in 1923, he was commissioned to paint a large mural for Rotterdam City Hall. In the early 1930s, he produced nine tapestries with the coat of arms of various Dutch munipicalities which still hang in Villa Welgelegen, an official building in Haarlem.
He was commissioned to illustrate poetry books, as well as to designing posters and calendars.
However, he never had much success as a painter and was living in abject poverty.
In 1932 to 1941, Arondéus had a relationship with Gerrit Jan Tijssen, a greengrocer from Apeldoorn. They lived together in Apeldoorn and later in Amsterdam. In 1941, Tijssen returned to Apeldoorn because Arondéus's resistance activities made it too dangerous to stay together in Amsterdam. They never met again.
In 1935 he decided that visual arts might not be for him, and turned to poetry and writing. This turned out to be a good move. In 1938 he published two novels, Het Uilenhuis ('The Owls House') and In de bloeiende Ramenas ('In the Blossoming Winter Radish'), which were both illustrated with his own designs.
and in 1939 he published his most famous and, by all accounts, his best work “The Tragedy of the Dream” which is a biography of the Dutch painter and political activist Matthijs Maris.
And then in 1940 the Nazis came, and his real work began. Upon their occupation of the Netherlands at the start of the 1940s, the Germans brought with them Paragraph 175. a law first introduced by Hitler in Germany in an effort to cleanse the country of homosexual activity. The ruling, which first began by expelling any gay and lesbian organizations in Germany, was revised to make homosexual activity between men punishable by imprisonment. Even the slightest bit of suggested evidence could send them behind bars, and as a result, over 100,000 German men were arrested and 50,000 were imprisoned.
Further, over the course of the Nazi rule, it is estimated that between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps. Marked by pink triangle badges, they were brutally abused; and many underwent experimental medical treatments aimed at curing their sexualities.
Concentration Camp Prisoners with Pink Triangle Identification
In realisation of this dire threat, like many others, Willem Arondeus joined the Dutch resistance almost immediately and he intended to do whatever he could to protect members of the homosexual community as well as the Dutch Jews.
When the Nazis came to the Netherlands, they mostly took their time with their policies. There weren’t any immediate deportations, there were no strict curfews. They were trying a subtle approach to keep the Dutch from resisting.
This mostly worked. Many of the Dutch were fooled into thinking the Nazis weren’t as bad as everyone was saying. But the Nazis didn’t hesitate when it came to criminalizing homosexuality. and in no doubt of his and others’ fate at the hands of the Nazis, Arondeus first published the underground resistance paper Brandarisbrief and then formed the Raad van Verzet (Resistance Council) with other artists.
At this time, he would meet Frieda Belinfante, a cellist, conductor, and a gay Jewish woman.
Frieda Belinfante
Frieda Belinfante Frieda had become the youngest woman in Europe to lead an orchestra at that time. By 1941, she had. put away her cello to conduct a campaign of resistance and defiance against the Nazi oppressors. Using their artistic talents, the group set to work producing forged documents for Jews and others who were wanted by the Gestapo.
Their first problem was that the Dutch identity cards were some of the hardest to counterfeit in Europe. By trial and error and sheer will and audacity (and a rather large financial contribution by Harry Heineken the prominent Dutch brewery owner), they succeeded in producing adequate counterfeit papers using a printing press. They managed to produce around 70,000 false papers that helped to hide the hunted and persecuted.
Problems started to arise when the Nazis began to check the corresponding duplicates in the records office. The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands were issuing identification papers (called persoonsbewijs) to all Dutch men and women. To ensure this system worked as best possible the Nazis used local records to keep track of the Dutch population.
One record set they used were the Bevolkingregisters which are similar to a Census. These records are very important in Dutch Genealogy research as they give lots of information on the households as well as family relationships.
Arondeus and the others in the resistance movement realised the records office would have to be destroyed Arondeus and the rest of his unit constructed their riskiest plan yet: they would blow up the facility, along with the hundreds of thousands of documents inside or all their work would be in vain.
Frieda Belinfante, said that while both of them knew the danger that would come if they were caught, each knew it was necessary to carry out their mission.
“He said, ‘Do you think that we see the end of this war?’ and I said ‘I don’t think so’ and he said ‘I don’t think so either,’” Belinfante recalled in a conversation the two had about the danger of their plan. “And then he said ‘Do you mind?’, and I said ‘No I don’t’, and he said ‘I don’t either.’”
On March 26th, 1943, a group from the Dutch Resistance Movement led by Arondeus, entered the Registration building in Amsterdam disguised as Dutch policemen. They chose a late hour while the Registration Office was empty, so no innocent people would be harmed, and drugged the guards. They destroyed as many papers as they could and planted a bomb in the building.[
The next morning on March 27th, the bomb exploded and most of the building was destroyed. More than 800,000 identity cards were burned in the explosion. This operation saved the lives of many people and brought the Dutch Resistance Movement a symbolic victory over the Nazi occupation.
Amsterdam civil registry office
But because Arondeus and his people managed to escape that night, the Nazis promised a large sum of money to anyone who could uncover the culprits.
On April 1st, an anonymous source informed the Nazis about the Dutch Resistance Movement’s involvement, and Arondeus was arrested. He took full responsibility for bombing the Registration Office and refused to give up his comrades’ names. However, the Nazis found his notebook, which included all the names of the participants in the operation.
ome of them managed to escape, but Arondeus and twelve more members of the Dutch Resistance Movement including two other gay men , on July 1, 1943 were taken from their cells at six o'clock in the morning and handcuffed two by two. At the execution site in the Overveen dunes, still handcuffed to one another and without blindfolds, they were shot dead with machine guns. Frieda Belinfante herseld managed to escape execution.
In the final days before his execution at the hands of the Nazi party, Willem Arondeus asked his lawyer Laura Mazirel “ “Let it be known that gays are not cowards.”
Shortly after the liberation, their shared graves was found, in a messy pit one meter dee, and in the autumn of 1945, they were reburied at the Honorary Cemetery in Bloemendaal. On Willem Arondéus's gravestone it reads: Such a death surpasses life. nelis Arondéus *
Though the bombing of the Amsterdam registry building was widely regarded after the Holocaust as a lifesaving moment in history, education about the heroic moment omitted Arondeus’ leadership due to the fact that he was a gay man.
While his family did receive a medal of honor for his sacrifices in the years following his death, homophobia that persisted throughout the 1950s and 1960s prevented LGBT war heroes like Arondeus from getting the recognition they deserved. This went against Arondeus’ final message to his lawyer for the public to be informed of LGBT participation in the mission.
It was only in 1984 that the Dutch government posthumously awarded he and the others who took part in the raid on the population registery, were awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross in 1984, some 40 years after the war had ended. It is speculated that this delay in recognising him was due to his sexuality. In 1986, he was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
Despite this recognition, and his last words, Willem’s sexuality was not recognized until a TV documentary in 1990 that it become known to the general public that Arondeus, was gay. and the Dutch public finally learned the true extent of his bravery forever cementing his efforts as a symbol of heroism in the LGBT community for years to come.
Frieda Belinfante’s contribution to the resistance was officially recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1994. She died one year later, at 90 years old.
“He was a great hero who was most willing to give his life for the cause,” Belinfante said. "Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards."
In 2023, Arondéus was a character in A Small Light, a biographical World War II television drama miniseries and his story was featured in a documentary Willem and Frida - Defying Nazis by Stephen Fry. 
