Even the Nazis Feared Her — The Dutch “Black Widow” JJ

On 10 May 1940, German paratroopers dropped onto the bridges and airfields of a country that had spent eight months insisting it wanted no part of the war. The Netherlands had declared itself neutral. Hitler attacked anyway, without a declaration of war. Four days later, the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying the historic heart of the city.

Faced with the promise that other cities would burn the same way, the Dutch army surrendered after five days of fighting. Queen Wilhelmina and her government escaped to London. The occupation began. The Nazis moved quickly. Anti-Jewish laws were introduced. Arrests followed. In July 1942, the systematic deportations to the concentration camps began.

What followed split the Dutch population into two histories that ran side by side. One was written by ordinary citizens who began to resist almost at once, working in secrecy, hiding those in danger, and risking their lives against the occupation. Some were caught. Some were shot. Most of them are anonymous in the record and always will be.

The other history was written by people who looked at the swastika flying over their own capital and decided it belonged there, and that their futures lay underneath it. A number of them rose to real power in those five years, and they rose on the backs of Jewish suffering. One woman took the second path further than almost anyone else in the country.

She read Mein Kampf as a student. She joined the youth wing of the Dutch fascist party. Then she quit that party, not because it was extreme, but because she judged it insufficiently committed to racial doctrine. She married the man who handed the Dutch gold reserves to Berlin.

And after the war ended, after the camps were opened and the numbers were counted, she spent 60 more years on television and in print insisting that the murder of Europe’s Jews had never happened at all. Her name was Florentine Rost van Tonningen. The Dutch press called her the Black Widow. If you want more stories the record keeps and most people never hear, subscribe to Bunker Files now.

She was born Florentine Sophie Heubel on 14 November 1914 in Amsterdam, the youngest of four children. Her father was German. He had come to the Netherlands as a young man to build a career in banking, married his employer’s daughter, and made himself into a respected figure in Dutch finance. The family settled in Hilversum and stood in high regard there.

When the young Princess Juliana visited the town, Florentine and her brother Wim were asked to play tennis with her. That was the world she grew up in. Money, standing, and an invitation to the tennis court with the future queen. Historians point to her German background as the reason her attention turned so firmly eastward.

As a young woman, she followed political developments in Germany closely. She read Hitler’s autobiographical and political manifesto, Mein Kampf. She read the writings of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, the man who supplied the movement with its racial theory. These were not accidental books to have on a shelf in the Netherlands in the early 1930s.

They were a choice. In that same decade, she and her brother joined the Nationale Jeugdstorm, the youth organization of the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist Movement. The Jeugdstorm was modeled directly on the Hitler Youth, the uniforms, the drill, the songs, the structure. While she wore that uniform, she was studying biology at Utrecht University with a particular interest in animal psychology.

It is worth sitting with that combination. A young woman trained to observe behavior, hierarchy, and breeding in animals, reading a political program built on the idea that human beings could be sorted the same way. Hitler took power in Germany in January 1933. Three years later, in the summer of 1936, Florentine spent a period in Berlin in connection with her studies.

She saw the movement up close in the year of the Berlin Olympics, when the regime was at its most polished and most eager to impress foreign visitors. She was impressed. What struck her, by her own account, was the camaraderie, the discipline, and the commitment. A year after Berlin, she traveled to the Dutch East Indies.

When she returned home, she did something that says more about her than any speech she ever gave. She left the NSB, not out of doubt. She left because she believed the party was not applying racial hygiene consistently enough, and because the party leader, Anton Mussert, did not share her concerns. She walked out of the Dutch fascist party for being too soft on race.

That is the position she held before the war even reached her country. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The Netherlands stayed out of it for 8 months. Then came 10 May 1940, and the paratroopers, and Rotterdam, and the surrender. In the spring of 1940, Florentine was working at a zoo in Berlin.

When word reached her that the Netherlands had been occupied, she went home. She did not go home to see out the war quietly. She went home intending to contribute to the new order. Shortly after the occupation began, the NSB staged a large gathering it chose to call a liberation meeting. Among those present were Florentine and Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, a prominent NSB figure and a radical national socialist.

He was the party’s second leader, and after 1936, under his influence, the NSB had swung hard toward the Nazi party, taking on its anti-Semitism and its racial doctrine, and warming to the aggressive foreign policy of Germany and Italy. He was, in other words, the man responsible for pushing the party in exactly the direction Florentine had left it for failing to go.

They were introduced. She was immediately impressed. Within a few months, he proposed. The match carried complications. He was 20 years her senior. He was already married and had a child, and there were questions raised about his own racial purity, since he was said to have Indian and black African ancestry.

In a movement organized entirely around bloodlines, that was not a minor detail. The matter went high. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, personally approved the marriage. The wedding took place in December 1940, with the leading figures of the NSB in attendance. Consider what that approval actually meant.

A woman who had walked out of her own party because it would not apply racial doctrine strictly enough, now needed the head of the SS to sign off on the ancestry of the man she was marrying. The doctrine she had demanded be enforced without exception was, in her own case, waved from Berlin. She accepted the exception without visible difficulty.

That is the pattern in almost every one of these movements, once you look closely at the people running them. The rules were built for other people to be measured against, and the measuring stopped at the door. In the early years of the marriage, Florentine held no public office. She performed the representational duties expected of the wife of a senior NSB man, and she gave birth to three sons in quick succession.

Politically, the couple were aligned on the question that mattered most to them. Both believed the Netherlands was a lost piece of Germany and should be absorbed into the Reich outright. Other factions inside the NSB wanted the opposite, holding to Dutch nationalism and an independent Netherlands under German protection.

The Rost van Tongerens wanted their own country erased from the map. Her husband was given one of the most powerful positions in the occupied Netherlands. In March 1941, he was appointed president of the Dutch Central Bank. From that chair, he removed the currency barriers between the Netherlands and Germany and arranged the transfer of Dutch gold reserves into the Third Reich.

A wartime report recorded that he was convinced of the necessity of creating a greater European economic space, a conviction that made cooperation with the German authorities straightforward. Set that against the calendar. In July 1942, the systematic deportations began. Dutch Jews were rounded up and put on trains to Sobibor and Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

While those transports were running, the Rost van Tonningens lived in privilege at the top of the collaborationist order, and the wealth of the Dutch state was moving east. By 1944, the outcome of the war was no longer in question. That was the year Meinoud Rost van Tonningen joined the Waffen SS, the military branch of the SS.

In March 1945, he was sent to the front as an SS-Obersturmführer, a rank equivalent to a first lieutenant in the United States Army. He joined the losing side’s most committed formation at the point where commitment could only cost him. Towards the end, Florentine fled with her children to Goslar in Germany, where her parents owned property.

The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. Her husband died shortly afterwards in prison, held while awaiting trial. He is said to have gone over a stairwell balustrade. Florentine never accepted that account. She insisted for the rest of her life that he had been murdered, and she supplied a motive, that as president of the Central Bank, he knew too much about black market financial dealings involving prominent people.

In her book, she went further and accused Prince Bernhard, the husband of Queen Juliana, of bearing the main responsibility for his death. In July 1948, she returned to the Netherlands. She was arrested on arrival and released a month later. With no income, she moved in with a cousin in The Hague and ran his household.

Then the Dutch state paid her. After 1950, she began receiving a widow’s pension because her husband had sat in the Dutch parliament as an NSB member. She also inherited part of her German family’s wealth. That money bought a villa in the town of Velp and started an electrical company. The wife of the man who shipped the national gold reserves to Berlin was drawing a state pension and living in a villa 5 years after the liberation.

She kept her circle. Across her life, she maintained contact with prominent former Nazis and their families. Among them, Gudrun Himmler, daughter of Heinrich Himmler, and Paula Hitler, the younger sister of Adolf Hitler. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she appeared on Dutch television more than once.

She used the airtime to promote the greatness of Hitler and Himmler, to dispute the circumstances of her husband’s death, and to deny the Holocaust in public. In the 1970s, she became more active. Her villa in Velp turned into a meeting place for old far-right supporters and new ones. Solstice celebrations staged in the style of the Third Reich were held there and became notorious enough to fix the name that followed her for decades, the Black Widow.

In the early 1980s, a small circle of loyal followers formed around her and established the Consortium De Levensboom, presented as a project to promote and revive Germanic culture. It published a periodical, Manuscripten, which advocated National Socialism openly. At its height, it reached a circulation of 450 copies.

In the same period, she was indirectly involved in the founding of the center party helping collect the signatures it needed for the 1982 elections. She financed the work out of her company and the company went bankrupt. Legal proceedings ran through her later life almost without a break. In 1986 the pension became a public argument.

A parliamentary vote settled it. No special legislation would be created for this one exceptional case and she kept the money. Her children never followed her. They distanced themselves from her national socialist ideology throughout which is its own quiet verdict. The three sons born in quick succession during the occupation years grew up inside that house, heard the arguments at that table and came out the other side rejecting all of it in public.

Florentine Rost van Tonningen died on 24th March 2007 aged 92 in the Belgian town of Wassenaar. She had spent her final years there after failing to find rental housing in the Netherlands and she claimed afterwards that life in her own country had become impossible for her. She was buried quietly in the Dutch town of Leiden in a grave she had bought in the 1990s and the burial was kept quiet to prevent neo-fascists gathering at it.

She left debts behind her and there was no money left to pay for the funeral. 62 years separated the liberation of the Netherlands from her death. She had all of them to look at the evidence and change her mind and she used every one of them to insist the evidence was a lie.

The zoo student who found the Dutch fascist too moderate in 1937 was still saying the same things in the 1990s in a villa in Velp to whoever would come and listen. Subscribe to Bunker Files for more of these records and we will see you in the next one.