Veen van der Gerrit

Veen van der, Gerrit Jan Gerrit Jan van der Veen was born in 1902 in Amsterdam to a working-class, Calvinist family. His father was a butcher. After finishing high school as a technical draftsman, he continued his studies at the national art academy and became a sculptor. He was a socially involved person who was to become one of the leading figures in the resistance of artists in the Netherlands. Soon after the start of occupation, Gerrit Jan refused to sign the ‘Aryan declaration’, as was required by his position with the civil guard. In November 1941, this was followed by his refusal to join the Kulturkammer, as was required for every artist per decree by the Reich Commissioner, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. But the main breakthrough in Gerrit Jan van der Veen’s resistance activities started in the summer of 1942, with the beginning of the deportation of the Jews for “work in the East”. Gerrit Jan started forging identity cards in order to give Jews and resistance people a safe identity. With such a forged card, the bearer could obtain food coupons and other necessary items. A number of these false IDs were given to the student resistance group ASG*, which was involved in locating hiding addresses for Jewish children and accompanying them there. Also other Jews benefited from these new official papers produced by Gerrit Jan. Initially, real IDs that were “lost” were altered; at a later stage they were completely falsified and, yet later, stolen on a large scale. To this purpose, van der Veen created an underground organization called the BPC, the identity card center, (Persoonsbewijscentrale). With graphic artists and many others, it grew into an organization that falsified a thousand cards each week. In the spring of 1943, many of the thousands of Dutchmen who went underground in order to escape forced labor in Germany were given false IDs created by this group. On March 27, 1943, the van der Veen group initiated a unique and daring action in Amsterdam to destroythe official card system that clearly showed who was a Jew and who not by means of a black mark at the IDs’ top corner. The raid was carefully planned, but only partially successful. Only part of the archives was destroyed until the group was discovered and fire fighters came to the premises to extinguish the fire that had erupted in the archives. Willem Arondeus*, Johan Brouwer*, Sam van Musschenbroek*, Coos Hartogh*, Karl Groeger*, Auguste Reitsma*, Koen Limperg*, Sjoerd Bakker*, Cornelis Barentsen* and two Jews, Rudi Bloemgarten and Henri Halbertstadt, were all caught and arrested. Van der Veen himself went underground. While trying to free his comrades from the Weteringschans prison, van der Veen was shot in the legs. De Clercq Zubli*, a physician and friend in the underground, treated him at his hiding address, but he was caught there some weeks later. He was executed on June 10, 1944 in the dunes by Overveen (prov. North-Holland). All the others were executed one month later. The effect of this daring action was close to nil, since the German authorities kept an exact copy of the population registry at their headquarters in The Hague. Gerrit Jan Van der Veen has become a symbol of the resistance in the Netherlands. The former Euterpe Street in Amsterdam, where the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” was located during the occupation, was changed to Gerrit van der Veen Street in 1946. On September 3, 2002, Yad Vashem recognized Gerrit Jan van der Veen as Righteous Among the Nations.