Gerrit Kuilder has been wronged. Found a year ago NRC in the National Archives, where Public Access Day is organized annually, documents that suggested that Kuilder had contributed to the persecution of Jews as a police officer.
Before and during the German occupation, Kuilder was a national police officer in Baflo, in the north of Groningen. On or just after March 8, 1943, he was ordered to arrest a 92-year-old Jewish man in Warffum. Kuilder refuses. Principle. “He could never arrest people who had done nothing,” his commander wrote in a report for the occupation authorities.
Kuilder was relieved of his position and imprisoned. A few days later a telex message arrived at the headquarters of the Ordnungspolizei: Kuilder had “changed his position.” In the future he would follow “every command given to him.”
There the documents in the relevant file of the National Archives ended. And so it seemed as if Gerrit Kuilder followed every order from the Germans from March 15, 1943, including the deportation of Jews.
But it wasn’t like that. Historical facts can be found in archives, but the various pieces, in an image that Dutch scholar Frits van Oostrom often used, form at most a tiled path. You need more tiles to get closer to reality.
After publication of the article, two people emailed NRC. Henk Kuilder, cousin of Gerrit, and Pauline Broekema, former journalist and author of the book Benjamin. A hidden death (2001), referred to sites outside the National Archives, which clearly showed that Kuilder had indeed maintained his principled attitude. And that he had been punished for that.
On September 30, Kuilder was dismissed from service as a police officer and nominated for deployment to the Arbeitseinsatz. Kuilder was arrested in October 1943. First, as he would later explain in writing, from October 15 to 19, he was imprisoned in a prison camp in Ommen, Drenthe. On October 19, he arrived at Camp Amersfoort, where he was held until March 30, 1944. detainee number 2376. “Probable reason for arrest,” according to the administration of the camp, now a memorial center: “Refusal to cooperate in the arrest of Jews.” Fellow prisoner Kornelis Mulder made a drawing of Kuilder in the camp, with the number 2376 on his cap.
On March 30, 1944, Kuilder would be transported to Krefeld, a forced labor camp. On the green-gray archive card of Camp Amersfoort it says: ‘Did not leave’ behind the category ‘Other details’.
This is where Pauline Broekema’s contribution comes in handy. For her book, she spoke to the daughter of Gerrit Kuilder, who died in 1960, who was a neighbor of the Jewish butcher Benjamin Broekema in the Oosterstraat in Warffum (“no family,” she writes). According to Gerry Kuilder, her father was indeed transported from Amersfoort to Germany on March 30, 1944. “On the way he escaped from the train. According to Gerry, this happened near Deventer. After the escape, Kuilder went into hiding. First with a resistance member in the village. And later at home. This is how he was liberated, in hiding at Oosterstraat.”
No one from the Jewish community in Warffum, writes Broekema, survived the persecution.
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