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Willem Arondéus - artist and resistance fighter

cropped black and white photograph portrait of a young man

Gay artist and author who fought in the Dutch Resistance during World War II

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Adrian Murphy (otvara se u novom prozoru) (Europeana Foundation)

Willem Arondéus was a Dutch artist and author who joined the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance movement during World War II. In a time of great prejudice and danger, Arondeus was openly and defiantly gay.

He was born in Naarden in August 1894. Soon afterwards, his family moved to Amsterdam, where he trained at an art school. After finishing his education, he moved to a number of cities in the Netherlands as well as Paris.

black and white photograph, profile portrait of Willem Arondéús

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.

design showing the coat of arms of North Holland and the coat of arms of Amsterdam and with motifs of fish, animals and birds
tapestry design with the coat of arms of Alkmaar and peacock motifs

He was commissioned to illustrate poetry books, as well as to designing posters and calendars.

artwork, a male figure is scything crops to harvest them
artwork with a male figure holding a cup and surrounded by stylised falling leaves
artwork, a stylised male figure is moving forward surrounded by geometric lines suggesting storm winds

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.

poster design with floral motif and text
design for a page of a calendar with grid of dates and stylised figures

When Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands during World War II, Arondéus became a member of the Dutch resistance movement. He used his artistic skills to forge false identity papers and other documents to help people escape persecution.

However, soon the German forces began to compare the forgeries with population registers - which showed they had been faked.

black and white photograph of a building on an Amsterdam street

In an attempt to hinder this, Arondeus and others planned a bomb attack on the population registery office in Amsterdam. Disguised as a policeman, he entered the building on 27 March 1943 with a group of resistance fighters. The explosion destroyed 800,000 identity cards, which was around 15% of the total.

While all of the bombers escaped on the night, Arondéus was arrested a few days later. In June 1943, he was tried and sentenced to death, along with 13 other men who had taken part.

Willem Arondéus was executed on July 1, 1943. Just before he was executed, Arondéus made a point of asking his lawyer to make sure the public knew that he (and two other men in the group) were gay: 'Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards'.

design with text and an illustration of embracing figures

From 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.

colour photograph of a stone memorial plaque on a wall with text including twelve people's names

Today, Willem Arondeus is remembered with plaques and a number of streets in Dutch cities named after him.

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.

small brass plaque embedded in the pavement, dedicated to Willem Arondéus

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.