On the 10th of May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. German paratroopers seized bridges, airfields, and strategic positions while the Luftwaffe pounded Dutch cities from the air. Four days later, a devastating aerial bombardment destroyed much of the historic center of Rotterdam. Faced with the threat of similar attacks against other cities, the Netherlands surrendered on the 15th of May.
The occupation brought immediate and systematic persecution. Under Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the German authorities introduced measures designed to isolate Jews from Dutch society and strip them of their rights. Jewish businesses were confiscated. In January 1941, all Jews in the Netherlands were ordered to register with the occupation authorities.
The Germans claimed the measure was for their protection, but in reality it made future deportations far easier. More than 159,000 people were registered, including thousands of refugees who had fled Germany and Austria. In April 1942, Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David; anyone caught without it faced arrest and deportation to Mauthausen, a camp understood to mean almost certain death. Deportations began in July 1942.
Trains departed regularly from the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught to Auschwitz and Sobibor. Between 1942 and 1944, more than 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported; only around 5,200 survived. Tens of thousands went into hiding, often with the help of the Dutch resistance. But survival depended not only on secrecy; it also depended on avoiding betrayal.
Across Amsterdam, criminal gangs, collaborators, and paid informers began hunting Jews in exchange for money, valuables, and protection from the Germans. Among the most feared of these men was an unscrupulous gangster known as the Dutch Al Capone. His name was Dries Riphagen. Bernardus Andreas Dries Riphagen was born on the 7th of September, 1909, in Amsterdam, the eighth child in a troubled family.
His mother died when he was six, and his father, an alcoholic, paid little attention to the children. The difficult childhood left a lasting mark. At fourteen, Riphagen entered Pollux, a merchant navy training center in Amsterdam’s harbor, and served as an ordinary seaman before joining cargo ships crossing the Atlantic. He spent roughly two years in the United States, working mainly for Standard Oil, one of the largest American oil companies of the era.
During this period, he became familiar with American criminal circles and their methods. His flashy lifestyle, love of gambling, and underworld connections would later earn him the nickname the Dutch Al Capone. Returning to the Netherlands at eighteen, Riphagen quickly embedded himself in Amsterdam’s criminal underworld. He joined the National Socialist Dutch Workers Party, an extremely anti-Semitic minor party whose goal was to turn the Netherlands into a province of the German Reich.
He worked as a pimp around Rembrandtplein, the nightlife district in central Amsterdam, and traded in jewelry and second-hand cars. He was also involved in black market operations and illegal gambling networks. He married four times; a daughter was born from his first marriage, and a son from his fourth. The German occupation created new opportunities for criminals willing to work with the Nazis, and Riphagen seized them.
He worked closely with the SD, the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party. Together with other criminals from Amsterdam’s underworld, his task was to uncover black market activity and track down Jewish money and valuables hidden from the German authorities. In return, the men received between five and ten percent of the confiscated property, though many also stole valuables for themselves. Riphagen soon became involved in hunting Jews alongside members of the Olij family, who were feared as Jew hunters.
From 1943 onward, he joined the Henneicke Column, a group tasked with hunting Jews in hiding. Founded in 1942 by Wim Henneicke, the column consisted of around fifty men, many of them professional criminals. Between the 4th and 31st of March 1943 alone, the column handed over 3,190 Jewish people to the German authorities, who deported them to extermination camps. The bounty ranged from seven and a half to forty guilders per person.
By the end of 1943, Riphagen had amassed a fortune, much of it hidden in bank accounts in Belgium and Switzerland. He profited directly from the deportation of Jews. After promising a Jewish woman that he would help her escape to England, he took possession of her luxurious house; the moment she was deported, he moved in with his family. He also worked for the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam, the organization responsible for arranging the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands.
During the final year of the war, he worked for the SD in the city of Assen, specializing in tracking down Allied pilots in hiding and monitoring Allied weapons airdrops. The Second World War in Europe ended on the 8th of May, 1945. After the war, Riphagen was wanted for betraying Jews, and prosecutors believed he was responsible for the deaths of at least two hundred people. Rather than face arrest, he contacted Willem Eefhouw Saunders, a former resistance fighter and police chief in the city of Enschede, who agreed to cooperate with him.
Instead of being formally arrested, Riphagen was placed under house arrest as a private prisoner in exchange for information about collaborators and Nazi support networks. In February 1946, he escaped with the help of Frits and Piet Kerkhoven, figures connected to Amsterdam’s criminal underworld. He was smuggled across the Dutch border in a coffin inside a hearse belonging to the Kerkhovens’ transport company, which also handled funeral services. After crossing into Belgium, other criminal associates guided him through Belgium and France before he eventually reached Spain.
According to later statements by his son, Riphagen traveled from Belgium to Spain by bicycle over a period of three months. In May 1946, he was stopped in the city of Huesca because he lacked valid identity papers. He was imprisoned but later released after a Jesuit priest intervened on his behalf, on the condition that he obtain proper documents. Riphagen subsequently acquired a Nansen passport, an identity document issued to stateless refugees.
The Kerkhovens supplied him with clothes and shoes containing diamonds hidden inside them, valuables Riphagen had left in their care. When Dutch authorities eventually tracked him down in Madrid, Riphagen fled to Argentina with a friend in March 1948. The address he used there belonged to another Jesuit priest, though no direct connection to the Nazi ratlines has ever been proven. The Dutch ambassador in Buenos Aires, Floris Carcilius Anna Baron van Pallandt, attempted to have him extradited.
The effort failed because the available charges mainly involved older crimes, such as car theft and robbery, while there was too little evidence to continue pursuing him for wartime crimes. In May 1951, the right-wing Argentine newspaper La Razón reported that the Supreme Court had ruled the remaining charges were too old to prosecute. Riphagen’s escape from justice was largely due to his connections with Rodolfo Valenzuela, a member of the Argentine Supreme Court and a close associate of President Juan Perón. Through Valenzuela, he established close contacts with Perón and his third wife, María Estela Martínez de Perón, known as Isabelita, relationships he maintained for the rest of his life.
Riphagen settled in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires, where he operated a press photo agency. He also worked at Perón’s intelligence service and organized boxing matches at Luna Park for his old associate from Amsterdam, Jan Olij. After Perón’s fall in 1955, Riphagen traveled across Europe, mainly between Spain, Switzerland, and Germany, living as a kind of gigolo, surrounding himself with wealthy women who supported him financially. Dries Riphagen, considered the worst war criminal in Amsterdam, died of cancer at a private clinic in the Swiss city of Montreux on the 13th of May, 1973.
He was 63 years old.