He Was Hunted by the SS, Then Escaped in a Coffin: Dries Riphagen JJ

February 1946. A hearse moves slowly toward the Dutch border. The wooden coffin in the back is closed. The papers are in order. The guards wave it through because nobody stops a funeral. There is no body in that coffin. There is a living man lying inside it and the Dutch prosecutor had already named him as the man responsible for the deaths of at least 200 people.

His name was Dries Riphagen and the men who got him out were not gangsters. They worked for the Dutch state. Before we go further, if you want stories like this one, the real ones that nobody puts on television, hit subscribe right now. It takes 1 second and it keeps this channel alive. He was born in Amsterdam on the 7th of September 1909.

The eighth child in a house that was already breaking. His father worked for the Dutch navy. His mother kept the house and she died when Dries was 6 years old. His father married again but he was an alcoholic and he did not raise his children. At 14, the boy was sent away to Pollux, a hard merchant navy training center with an ugly reputation.

By 1923, he was at sea as an ordinary seaman. Then he ended up in the United States working for Standard Oil for 2 years. That is where the story turns. In America, he fell in with local criminals and learned how they operated. The protection, the fear, the money. He came home with a lesson and a nickname that followed him for the rest of his life.

They called him Al Capone. But the American criminals only taught him the method. Somebody else was about to hand him the victims. Back in the Netherlands, Riphagen joined the NSNAP, a small Dutch party that copied Hitler’s movement and wanted the Netherlands to become a province of the German Reich. It was violently anti-Jewish from the start.

At the same time, he was climbing the Amsterdam underworld. He was known among the pimps on the Rembrandtplein. He dealt in used cars, some of them stolen. He gambled. He developed a serious taste for jewelry and precious stones. Remember that taste. Every terrible thing this man did later was built on it. Then in May 1940, the Germans invaded, and a man like Dries Riphagen suddenly became very useful.

He did not join the German army. He did something more profitable. He became a trusted man of the SD, the German security service, and later worked with the Central Office for Jewish Affairs in Amsterdam. His official task, along with his friends from the underworld, was to break the black market and to track down Jewish property that was being moved outside German currency rules.

The pay was arranged like a commission. The men received 5 to 10% of everything they confiscated. And whatever they did not declare, they kept. So now the German state was paying an Amsterdam gangster a percentage to find Jewish wealth. He was built for it. He knew which jewelers were quietly moving stones.

He knew which black market runners could be leaned on. He knew the Amsterdam streets in a way no German officer ever would, and he had spent 15 years learning how to make people tell him things. But finding the money meant finding the people, and that is where his real talent showed. It had nothing to do with violence.

This is the part that separates Riphagen from an ordinary informer. He did not kick down doors first. He walked in as a friend. Jewish families in hiding were sitting on the last thing they owned, jewelry, diamonds, gold, whatever could be carried in a coat lining. Riphagen offered to hold it for them. “Keep it safe until the war ended,” he said. He was connected.

He could protect it. He could protect them. They handed it over. Some of them wept with relief. He kept the valuables, cheated them out of every stone, and then told the SD exactly where they were hiding. Think about what that meant in practice. A family sits in a back room above a shop or under a floor waiting in the dark for months.

The one man who knows where they are is the man they paid to protect them. Every noise on the stairs could be food or it could be the end. For the people Rif Hagen dealt with, it was always the end. He decided when. The people who trusted him were loaded onto trains east. He did that again and again and again.

And then he found a way to do it at scale. In 1942, a man named Wim Hennecke, the stateless son of a German immigrant, set up a unit that became known as the Hennecke column. Around 50 men, mostly professional criminals, one job, find Jews who had gone underground. From 1943, Rif Hagen was part of it. He also worked alongside members of the Olij family, street thugs already feared for beating Jews in public.

Here is the number that should stay with you. Between the 4th and the 31st of March, 1943, a single month, the Hennecke column handed 3,190 Jewish people to the German authorities. They were deported to camps in Eastern Europe. The [snorts] payment was between 7 and 1/2 and 40 guilders per person. A human life priced like a used bicycle.

The column also squeezed Jewish people who had been caught, threatening them with deportation unless they gave up the hiding places of others. Fear became the tool that fed the machine. By the end of 1943, Rif Hagen had built a small fortune, and he was already moving it into accounts in Belgium and Switzerland.

The column was shut down in the end, not for cruelty, but for corruption. Even the Germans decided these men were stealing too much. Riphagen did not lose his job. He got a new one. And this time the targets were not only Jews. In the final year of the war, he was working for the Hoffmann group of the SD in Assen.

Their specialty was hunting shot-down Allied airmen and the weapons that were being dropped to the Dutch resistance. In 1944, he played an important part in breaking open the underground organization that forged identity papers, the Persoonsbewijzencentrale. During that operation, the Jewish-German resistance fighter Gerhard Badrian was shot.

So, by the time the war ended, Riphagen had betrayed Jews, resistance fighters, and Allied airmen, and had been paid for all three. The Germans lost. Every man like him in Europe was running or hanging. Riphagen walked out of the war and made himself a deal instead. The Dutch police wanted him for the betrayal of Jews and for treason.

The public prosecutor held him responsible for the deaths of at least 200 people. He was called one of the worst examples of Dutch collaboration. So, he made a move that only a man with no shame could make. He walked up to Willem Sanders, a former resistance fighter, now head of police in Enschede, and offered a trade.

He would name collaborators. He would map out the German-friendly networks. He knew all of them because he had worked with all of them. Sanders took the deal. Riphagen was never handed over to the official authorities. He was held under house arrest as a private prisoner. Not a cell. Not a court.

A house and a bargain. Understand why it worked. In 1945, the Netherlands was full of men who had helped the Germans, and nobody had a clean list of who they were. Riphagen had that list in his head. He had worked beside them, paid them, been paid by them. To an investigator under pressure, he was not a suspect.

He was a filing cabinet. So, they kept him close, and they kept him talking. He was inside the Dutch security system naming names, being useful, watching the doors. And in February 1946, he was gone. The story that spread through Amsterdam was that his old underworld friends had smuggled him across the border in a casket inside a hearse.

Later work by Dutch journalists pointed somewhere far more uncomfortable. The escape was organized by two men from the Dutch secret service itself, the Bureau for Nationale Veiligheid, Fritz and Piet Kerkhoven. Kerkhoven’s business dealt in chauffeur and funeral services. The hearse was the perfect cover, and it was arranged from inside the state that was supposed to be hunting him.

According to his son Rob, once he reached Belgium, Riff again spent the next 3 months traveling to Spain by bicycle. Sit with that image. The man who sold 3,000 people to the SD pedaling quietly across post-war Europe while the survivors were still looking for their families. Spain nearly finished him, nearly.

In May 1946, he was picked up in Huesca in Spain because he had no proper papers. He was put in prison. He should have stayed there until the Dutch came for him. A Jesuit priest stepped in on his behalf, and Riff again was released on bail with an order to fix his documents. He obtained a Nansen passport, a travel document meant for stateless refugees.

Then Fritz Kerkhoven, the same man tied to the escape, sent him clothes and shoes. The diamonds Riff again had left with Kerkhoven were hidden inside them. He was now in Madrid with papers, money, and freedom. The Dutch found him and moved to have him extradited. He got on a plane first.

On the 21st of March, 1948, Riphagen flew to Argentina with a friend. His contact address there belonged to another Jesuit priest. The Dutch ambassador in Buenos Aires requested his extradition, but the request was built on small charges like car theft and robbery. The Argentine courts ruled the offenses were already out of time and the evidence was too thin. He was never sent home.

The reason was who he knew. Riphagen became friends with Rodolfo Valenzuela, a member of the Argentine Supreme Court, who also served as secretary to President Juan Perón. Through him, Riphagen met the presidential couple, and he stayed in contact with Perón for the rest of his life. He settled in Belgrano, a district of Buenos Aires.

He ran a photography press office. He organized boxing matches at Luna Park for Jan Olie, his old friend from the Amsterdam streets. And he worked for Perón’s secret service, teaching anti-communist tactics. Read that again. The skills he was passing on were the ones he had learned hunting families for the Germans. When Perón was overthrown, Riphagen moved back to Europe.

He drifted between Spain, Germany, and Switzerland. He preferred the company of wealthy women who paid for his life. His last known address was in Madrid. In 1973, at a private clinic in Montreux, Switzerland, Dries Riphagen died of cancer. He was 63. He died in comfort, in a country where his stolen money had been resting since 1943.

No trial. No sentence. No apology. And here is the last cut. In 1988, 15 years after he was already in the ground, Dutch authorities issued an arrest warrant and put a bounty on his head. They were still hunting a dead man. That is how completely he disappeared. Think about the gap. From 1946 to 1988, 42 years, there were people in Amsterdam who could still describe his face.

Survivors who had handed him a wedding ring. Children who came home from the camps to an empty house and were told the man who emptied it was living somewhere warm. They aged and they died and the file stayed open on a man who was already buried in Switzerland. The families he robbed never got their jewelry back.

Most of them never came back either. And the men who put him in that hearse never answered for it in a courtroom. 200 deaths on the prosecutor’s file. 3,000 people handed over in a single month and the man walked out in a coffin helped by the very country that wanted him. So tell me in the comments, who failed harder? The police officer who trusted him for information or the state that let him ride out in a hearse? I read the comments on every video and the sharpest answer usually comes from someone who knows this period better than I do.

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