The bones of this Leader of the Dutch people are highly sought after

A large gaping hole more than one and a half meters deep. This can be seen in 1956 in the cemetery in The Hague where NSB leader Anton Mussert was buried after he was executed ten years earlier. The Netherlands is in turmoil. Have the bones of the country’s traitor disappeared during the Second World War?

For many, Anton Mussert is seen as the personification of evil. The man who extended a helping hand to the Germans during the Second World War, together with the National Socialist Movement (NSB) he founded, and was rewarded with the title of Leader of the Dutch People.

Before that time, however, there seems to be nothing to indicate that the son of a beloved head teacher, born in Werkendam in 1894, would go off the rails in such a way. He is a quiet boy, considers his father his best friend and has few or no friends, Auke Kok writes in book Mussert, journey to evil. When he goes to secondary school, this does not change and he manages to complete it with great difficulty.

He enlists in the Navy as an 18-year-old, but is rejected. Why remains unclear. He goes to study at the Technical University and then enlists in the army as a student. But a kidney condition means he has to leave.

Due to his kidney disease he meets his wife. That is his mother’s half-sister, his aunt, who will take care of him. They married in 1917, much to the sorrow of the family. Anton was then 23, Rie 41. They remained together until his death, although he later cheated on her with his 30-year-younger grandniece Marietje. He likes to keep it within the family, so to speak.

Mussert completes his studies, starts working as an architect at Rijkswaterstaat and moves to the province of Utrecht. He is full of ambition, makes a name for himself as a designer of bridges and locks and even becomes friends with a Jewish colleague.

But everything changed when he founded the NSB in 1931 and over the years moved further towards fascism and persecution of Jews and openly collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War. After a year-long trial, he was given the death penalty and shot dead in the dunes near The Hague on May 7, 1946.

To prevent his final resting place in The Hague from becoming a place of pilgrimage, his body ends up in a mass grave together with other executed traitors. And it was precisely at that location that there was a big gap in 1956.

In right-wing circles there is talk of Operation Wolfsangel: the exhumation and reburial of the ‘Great Leader’. And that would have worked. Mussert’s body was transferred to the garden of a veteran and later moved and reburied in Flanders, an extreme right-wing Belgian told TweeVandaag in 2004. True, he says he will take that secret to his grave.

Jan Meyers, who wrote a biography about Mussert in 1984, said during the broadcast of the current affairs program that he thought the story was authentic. Would it really have disappeared? However, a spokesperson for the municipality says that Mussert never left the cemetery and the grave was cleared in 1956 as planned. His remains were then strewn on the cemetery’s charnel ground. And with that, it will forever remain a mystery what really happened.