Wikipedia Deep Dive

Willem Arondeus

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Tell People That Homosexuals Are Not Cowards

Those were his last words. Willem Arondéus spoke them just before facing the Nazi firing squad on July 1, 1943. He wanted the world to know something specific about who he was and what he had done.

Arondéus was a Dutch artist, writer, and resistance fighter who helped bomb the Amsterdam public records office during World War II. The attack destroyed 800,000 identity cards that the Nazis were using to hunt down Jews. He was caught, tried, and executed within three months. But before he died, he made absolutely certain that his sexual orientation would be part of the historical record.

This insistence matters. In 1943, being openly gay was itself an act of defiance. The Nazi regime sent homosexuals to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear pink triangles and subjected to particularly brutal treatment. For Arondéus to declare his homosexuality while facing death for anti-Nazi resistance was to reject two forms of oppression at once.

The Artist Before the War

Willem Johan Cornelis Arondéus was born in 1894 in Naarden, a small fortified town east of Amsterdam. His father traded fuel. Willem chose a different path entirely, becoming a visual artist who designed posters, wove tapestries, illustrated books, and painted murals.

In 1923, when Arondéus was about twenty-nine, the city of Rotterdam commissioned him to paint a large mural for its city hall. This was a significant commission for a young artist. He illustrated the poems of major Dutch literary figures: J.H. Leopold, Pieter Cornelis Boutens, and Martinus Nijhoff. He admired Richard Roland Holst, an older Dutch designer whose influence shows clearly in Arondéus's decorative style.

But fame never arrived. Despite these commissions, Arondéus lived in poverty. By the mid-1930s, he made a decisive pivot. He put down his brushes and picked up a pen.

The transition wasn't immediate. He had been writing poems and stories throughout the 1920s, but none of them found a publisher. Success came only in 1938, when he published two novels in the same year: Het Uilenhuis (The Owls House) and In de bloeiende Ramenas (In the Blossoming Winter Radish). Characteristically, Arondéus created the illustrations himself. He never entirely stopped being a visual artist.

The following year, he published a biography of the painter Matthijs Maris, titled Matthijs Maris: de tragiek van den droom—The Tragedy of the Dream. Matthijs was one of three Maris brothers who became significant Dutch painters in the nineteenth century. By choosing to write about this painter, Arondéus was exploring the artistic tradition he himself belonged to.

In 1941, he published a scholarly work on monumental painting in the Netherlands. It appeared with his own illustrations, of course. But by then, the world had changed completely. The Nazis had occupied the Netherlands, and Arondéus was already involved with the resistance.

How the Resistance Worked

The Dutch resistance during World War II operated through a decentralized network of small groups. People found each other through trusted connections, often through their prewar professional or social circles. Artists knew artists. Writers knew writers. Underground newspapers brought people together.

Arondéus entered the resistance through publishing. In 1942, he started an underground periodical called the Brandarisbrief. Think of it as a samizdat newsletter—typed, mimeographed, and passed from hand to hand in secret. These publications served multiple purposes: they spread news the Nazi-controlled media suppressed, they maintained morale, and they created networks of trust between like-minded people.

In 1943, the Brandarisbrief merged with another underground paper called De Vrije Kunstenaar—The Free Artist. Through this merger, Arondéus met Gerrit van der Veen, the editor of De Vrije Kunstenaar and a sculptor by profession.

Van der Veen had developed a specialty that was absolutely critical to the resistance: forging identity documents.

The Problem of the Registry

To understand what Arondéus did, you need to understand how the Nazi occupation worked in the Netherlands.

The Dutch had an exceptionally thorough civil registration system. The Municipal Office for Population Registration maintained detailed records on every resident: name, address, date of birth, religion, family relationships. This was typical of an efficient, modern bureaucracy. In peacetime, it helped the government provide services and maintain order.

Under Nazi occupation, this same registry became a killing machine.

The Nazis used the population registry to identify Jews. Dutch Jews were required to register their religion, and the records made it trivially easy to find them. The registry also tracked who lived where, making roundups efficient. When the Nazis wanted to deport Jews from a particular neighborhood, they simply consulted the records.

This created a terrible irony. The very efficiency that made Dutch society function smoothly in peacetime made the Holocaust function smoothly during the war. The Netherlands had one of the highest Jewish death rates in Western Europe—about 75 percent of Dutch Jews were murdered, compared to about 25 percent in France. Historians have debated the reasons, but the thorough population registry is widely considered a contributing factor.

For forgers like Gerrit van der Veen and his team, the registry posed an obvious problem. You could create beautiful fake identity papers, but if the Nazis checked the documents against the central records, the forgery would be exposed. The papers would say one thing; the registry would say another.

The solution was audacious: destroy the registry itself.

The Bombing

Arondéus, van der Veen, and their associates developed a plan to attack the Amsterdam population registry. The team included Frieda Belinfante, a conductor and musician who was both Jewish and lesbian. In the resistance, she worked on document forgery alongside Arondéus.

On the night of March 27, 1943, they struck.

The attack was a partial success. They destroyed 800,000 identity cards—about fifteen percent of the total records. They retrieved 600 blank identity cards that could be used for future forgeries, plus 50,000 Dutch guilders in cash. They blew up the building.

And they got away clean. No one was caught that night.

But someone betrayed them. To this day, the identity of the informer is unknown. On April 1, 1943—just five days later—Arondéus was arrested. He refused to give up his teammates, but the Gestapo found his notebook. Through it, they arrested most of the group.

Frieda Belinfante was the sole core member to survive. She went into hiding by adopting a male identity, passing as a man for the remainder of the war. This disguise saved her life.

The Trial and Execution

Arondéus was tried on June 18, 1943, along with thirteen other men. He pleaded guilty and took full responsibility for the attack. This was likely a deliberate strategy to protect others. Two young doctors who had been involved received clemency—possibly because Arondéus's willingness to shoulder the blame made their roles seem peripheral.

Twelve of the fourteen were sentenced to death. On July 1, 1943, they were executed by firing squad.

Before his death, Arondéus gave specific instructions. He wanted people to know that he and two other men in the group—identified only as Bakker and Brouwer—were homosexual. The accounts differ on whether he conveyed this message to a friend or to his lawyer. But the message itself is consistent across all sources:

"Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards."

In Dutch: "Zeg de mensen dat homoseksuelen niet per definitie zwakkelingen zijn." The Dutch phrase is slightly different—it translates more literally as "Tell people that homosexuals are not by definition weaklings." But the meaning is clear. Arondéus wanted to strike a blow against the stereotype that gay men were effeminate, cowardly, or weak.

Why This Message Mattered

The equation of homosexuality with cowardice had deep roots in European culture. Gay men were stereotyped as soft, feminine, lacking in masculine virtues like courage and physical bravery. The Nazis, with their cult of hypermasculinity, took this prejudice to murderous extremes. But the stereotype existed across the political spectrum.

Arondéus knew exactly what he was doing. By insisting that his homosexuality be publicly acknowledged alongside his act of resistance, he was directly refuting the slander. He had just participated in one of the most daring resistance actions of the Dutch underground. He had faced arrest, torture, and execution without betraying his comrades. He was about to die for his beliefs.

If that wasn't courage, what was?

His message was addressed to the future. In 1943, there was no organized gay rights movement to receive it. Homosexuality remained criminalized throughout Europe. But Arondéus understood that history would remember the resistance, and he wanted history to remember that gay men had been part of it.

Recognition

After the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, Arondéus's family received a posthumous medal from the Dutch government in his honor. This was relatively common for resistance fighters. More official recognition followed: in 1984, he was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross.

But the most significant recognition came in 1986, when Yad Vashem—the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem—recognized Arondéus as Righteous Among the Nations. This title is given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The bombing of the population registry, by hampering Nazi efforts to identify Jews, directly contributed to saving lives. The blank identity cards the team retrieved helped Jews and others evade capture.

The Righteous Among the Nations designation matters because it places Arondéus in a specific moral category. He wasn't just fighting the Nazis in general; he was specifically protecting Jews from genocide. This recognition has been extended to roughly 28,000 people from over 50 countries—a small fraction of those who helped, but those whose actions could be documented and verified.

His Legacy in Culture

Arondéus's story has attracted increasing attention in recent decades, particularly as LGBTQ history has become more widely studied and celebrated.

In 2023, the English actor Stephen Fry—himself openly gay and a prominent advocate for LGBTQ rights—made a documentary for Channel 4 about Arondéus and Frieda Belinfante. The documentary, titled Willem & Frieda, explored their wartime resistance work and their identities as gay people defying both Nazi occupation and the broader homophobia of their era.

Arondéus has also appeared as a character in dramatized accounts of the Dutch resistance. National Geographic's miniseries A Small Light, which focuses on the people who helped hide Anne Frank's family, includes Arondéus as a character played by Sean Hart.

These cultural representations serve an important function. For much of the twentieth century, LGBTQ people were written out of heroic narratives. When gay and lesbian resistance fighters were mentioned at all, their sexual orientations were often omitted or downplayed. Arondéus made this erasure impossible by explicitly demanding that his homosexuality be remembered. He understood that visibility matters, that representation shapes how communities understand themselves and how others understand them.

The Bigger Picture

Willem Arondéus was one person in a vast network of resistance. His attack on the population registry was one of many sabotage operations. His death was one of thousands of executions.

But his insistence on being remembered as gay makes him representative of something larger: the presence of LGBTQ people in every human struggle. Gay and lesbian people have always existed. They have always participated in the great movements and conflicts of their times. They have always shown the full range of human courage and cowardice, heroism and failure.

What has varied is visibility. For most of history, LGBTQ people either hid their identities or had those identities erased after death. Arondéus refused both options. Facing execution, with nothing left to lose, he chose to make a statement that would outlast him.

He was right to think it would matter. Eighty years later, we remember not just what he did, but who he was. His final words have become a rallying cry. They appear on memorial plaques, in museum exhibits, in documentary films.

Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.

He told them. We're still listening.