“Tell People That Homosexuals Are Not Cowards”: The Resistance and Sacrifice of Willem Arondéus
- U I Team
- Jun 13
- 5 min read
On a summer morning in July 1943, Willem Arondéus faced a Nazi firing squad in the dunes of Overveen. As he stood before his executioners, his last message was not for the sake of vengeance, politics, or even personal redemption. It was a plea for dignity. “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards,” he said, a final testament that would echo far beyond his death.
His name remains largely unknown outside the Netherlands, yet Arondéus’s act of resistance against the Nazi regime was nothing short of heroic. A celebrated artist turned saboteur, he gave his life in the name of truth, freedom, and protection of others, particularly the Dutch Jews who were being hunted, catalogued, and deported to their deaths. His story, long eclipsed by history’s broader brushstrokes, deserves to be remembered in full.
Early Life and Creative Work
Willem Johan Cornelis Arondéus was born on 22 August 1894 in the town of Naarden, the youngest of six children in a working-class Dutch family. His father, Hendrik Cornelis Arondéus, was a fuel trader in nearby Amsterdam, and his mother, Catharina Wilhelmina de Vries, supported the family while Willem grew up in an environment neither affluent nor artistically inclined.
Nonetheless, from an early age, Arondéus exhibited a remarkable artistic sensibility. He pursued a career as an illustrator and designer, producing posters, murals, and tapestries in the 1910s and 1920s. He admired the work of the prominent Dutch artist Richard Roland Holst, whose influence can be seen in the structural clarity and symbolism of Arondéus’s own visual style.
In 1923, Arondéus received one of his few major commissions: a mural for the Rotterdam City Hall. But despite his talents, financial hardship dogged his every step. He struggled to find a stable income from art and lived in poverty for much of his life. Personal isolation compounded his difficulties; as an openly gay man in early 20th-century Netherlands, he endured considerable stigma and exclusion — even among his fellow artists.
By the mid-1930s, disillusioned with the limitations of visual art, Arondéus shifted towards writing. He had long composed poetry and short stories, but his literary voice only found a wider audience in the years leading up to the Second World War. In 1938, he published two novels — Het Uilenhuis (“The Owls’ House”) and In de bloeiende Ramenas (“In the Blossoming Winter Radish”) — both adorned with his own illustrations.
The following year saw the publication of his biography Matthijs Maris: De Tragiek van den Droom (“The Tragedy of the Dream”), about the melancholy Dutch painter Matthijs Maris, known for his ethereal, dreamlike works. Arondéus identified deeply with Maris’s artistic alienation and fragile mental state. In 1941, he published Figuren en Problemen der Monumentale Schilderkunst in Nederland, an ambitious treatise on the challenges of monumental painting in the Netherlands. But by this time, the war had reached Dutch soil — and Arondéus’s pen would soon give way to far more dangerous tools.
Joining the Resistance
When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the country quickly fell under military occupation. Almost immediately, the Nazis imposed anti-Jewish regulations, including compulsory registration, restrictions on movement, and forced identification through identity cards. The Dutch municipal population records — notably precise and thorough — were quickly weaponised by the Nazis to identify and deport Jews, Roma, political dissidents, and other targets.
In 1942, Willem Arondéus founded a clandestine journal, Brandarisbrief, a cultural and intellectual resistance periodical that later merged with De Vrije Kunstenaar (“The Free Artist”). Through this merger he came into contact with sculptor Gerrit van der Veen, a central figure in the Dutch resistance known for forging false identity papers to help Jews and others evade detection.
Arondéus joined van der Veen’s underground network, soon becoming instrumental in forging identification cards and travel permits. He worked alongside others, including Frieda Belinfante — a lesbian cellist and conductor who also joined the resistance. But the meticulously maintained population registry in Amsterdam’s Public Records Office undermined their efforts. Forged documents could be cross-checked against the real lists, rendering them ineffective.
To make their forged IDs viable, the resistance needed to destroy the original records.
The Attack on the Amsterdam Public Records Office
On the night of 27 March 1943, Willem Arondéus and a group of 14 resistance fighters — mostly artists and intellectuals — launched a daring attack on the Amsterdam Public Records Office at the Plantage Middenlaan. Disguised as Dutch policemen, the team gained entry to the building and planted explosives throughout the archive.
The explosion destroyed approximately 800,000 identity records, about 15 percent of the total, and damaged many more. The raid also recovered 600 blank identity cards and 50,000 guilders to fund further resistance activity. Crucially, the damage temporarily crippled the Nazis’ ability to track down Jews and others using the registry. It was a major act of sabotage — and it briefly worked.
Though no one was caught on the night of the bombing, a betrayal from within the resistance soon led to arrests. On 1 April 1943, Arondéus was taken into custody by the Gestapo. Despite severe interrogation, he refused to identify his fellow conspirators. However, a notebook in his possession allowed the Nazis to trace and arrest the rest of the group.
Belinfante, the only woman involved, evaded capture. She disguised herself as a man and lived in hiding for the remainder of the war.
Execution and Final Words
Arondéus and his co-conspirators were tried by a Nazi military tribunal on 18 June 1943. All were found guilty. Of the fourteen who had carried out the attack, twelve were sentenced to death. Two were granted clemency, reportedly due to Arondéus accepting full responsibility for the act, hoping to save the younger men.
On 1 July 1943, Arondéus was executed by firing squad in the dunes of Overveen, near Haarlem.
In his final moments, he made a statement that was extraordinary not only for its bravery, but for its unflinching truth about identity. He asked that word be passed on, whether through a lawyer, prison official, or friend is unclear, that he, along with two others in the resistance group, were homosexual.
His exact words in Dutch were:
“Zeg de mensen dat homoseksuelen niet per definitie zwakkelingen zijn.”
Translated: “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.”
It was a final act of defiance, not just against fascism, but against centuries of societal erasure and vilification. Arondéus understood that the fight for justice could not be separated from the fight for dignity.
Posthumous Recognition
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Dutch government posthumously honoured Arondéus and his family for their resistance. In 1984, he was formally awarded the Verzetsherdenkingskruis (Resistance Memorial Cross), and two years later, Yad Vashem in Israel named him Righteous Among the Nations — the designation given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Though his name never reached the same renown as other resistance heroes, efforts to bring his legacy to light have grown in recent years. In 2023, Stephen Fry produced and presented a Channel 4 documentary titled Willem & Frieda, exploring the extraordinary collaboration between Arondéus and Belinfante. Their story — one of courage, culture, and identity — offered a rare depiction of queer resistance during the Holocaust.
In popular culture, Arondéus was also portrayed by Sean Hart in National Geographic’s wartime drama A Small Light, introducing his story to a wider international audience.
