Willem Arondéus - artist and resistance fighter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.