Froe de Arie

Froe de, Arie Arie de Froe was born in 1907 in Arnhem (prov. Gelderland) into a family with seven children. His father was director of a local high school. At the age of 12, his mother passed away. As formal education was a central issue within the de Froe family, Arie went to study medicine, and in the thirties started to practice in Amstelveen, close to Amsterdam. He married in 1934 and had two children. In 1938, he wrote his doctoral thesis in physical Anthropology, called: “Measurable Variables of the Human Skull” (Meetbare Variabelen van den Menselijken Schedel). Subsequently he taught at the University of Amsterdam in the Faculty of Anthropology. In January 1941, the Jews of the Netherlands were ordered to register as Jews, as a first step in the process of their isolation. Using his professional expertise, Arie de Froe became involved in helping to ‘prove’ that certain Jews were not at all racially Jews by Nazi standards. When approached by Jan van Hulst*, asking to declare that his Jewish wife, Pauline Horowitz, was not racially Jewish, Arie prepared a genetic research report, closely working with legal documents, mostly falsified, in order to prove his theory, stating that she ‘had no Jewish characteristics” and was not Jewish in Nazi terms. This report was then presented to Hans Calmeyer*, a German administrative lawyer appointed by the German authorities in the Jewish Department at their headquarters in The Hague, who was to check "racially ambiguous" Jewish cases, and thus had the ultimate authority to classify a person in racial terms. In the van Hulst case the scam was succesfull. Arie de Froe issued a similar report for Pauline’s mother, Chaya Margolia Horowitz-Zoukerman, stating that she had Slavic characteristics and was to be considered half “Aryan” – again successfully. In addition, de Froe was approached by Mrs. Mimi Voet, born in 1922, who had a Jewish mother, but did not know the identity of her father. Whereas the people whohad adopted her told her that her father was Jewish as well, she decided to try her luck and get an ‘official’ statement that she was only half Jewish. De Froe managed to fabricate a scientific report, ‘proving’ that a non-Jewish man (who had agreed to the scam) was her biological father, which then successfully passed Calmeyer’s office. Among others who were helped acquiring Aryan or half-Aryan status were: Paul Jaffe, b. in 1889 in Frankfurt-am-Main; Jacob Cohen, born in 1892 in Amersfoort; I. van Creveld from Bussum; Josefine Feiner-Gruenbaum, born in 1907 in Wenen; Raphael Lanes; Alexander Horn, born in 1916 and Emmy Andriesse; A.E. d’Oliveira, his daughter Elsa, and other relatives as well as members of the Rodrigues Pereira and Jessurun d’Oliveira families. Sometimes, de Froe saw 20 –30 people a day – not being able to help them all because of lack of sufficient supporting evidence. By 1943, after having dealt with a number of individual cases for Portuguese Jews, de Froe had the idea to try and have the Portuguese Jews as a group defined as non Jews and thus sparing them deportation. To this purpose he wrote an extensive document of about 100 pages titled: “Anthropologische Untersuchung der sog. portugiesische Juden in den Niederlande” (anthropological research on the so-called Portuguese Jews) – ‘proving’ that this special group of about 4,000 Jews of Portuguese descent were in fact not Jews at all but belonged to the Mediterranean variant of the white race. As a result the group was given a temporary exemption from deportation (Sperre), while the German authorities investigated the matter, a time span that was used by many to go into hiding. Each case was to be individually studied. Again, de Froe moved in with forged ancestral origins. It took until well into 1944 before a final German decision vis-à-vis the Portuguese Jews was taken: it was decided that they were to be considered Jews after all and that they had to be deported. On February25, many of them were deported to Theresienstadt – the camp for the so-called ‘privileged’. In 1954, Arie de Froe became a professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam where in 1972 he was appointed as Rector Magnificus. He passed away in 1992. On July 23, 2007, Yad Vashem recognized Arie de Froe as Righteous Among the Nations. Lit. A. de Froe: “Anthropologische Untersuchung der sog. portugiesische Juden in den Niederlande” J. Presser: Ondergang part 2: pp. 72-82 L. de Jong: Het Koninkrijk