When Nazi Germany invaded the neutral Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the country's fate changed in a matter of days. German paratroopers seized key bridges and airfields, and the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam on May 14, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying the historic city center.
Faced with the threat of similar devastation elsewhere, the Dutch army surrendered after just five days. Queen Wilhelmina and the government fled to London, and the Nazi occupation began.
Soon after, the occupiers introduced anti-Jewish laws. Arrests followed, and in July 1942, systematic deportations to concentration camps began. Across the country, ordinary citizens resisted by hiding Jews and distributing illegal newspapers, risking execution for opposing the occupation.
Not everyone chose that path. Some Dutch citizens embraced the Nazi cause and actively cooperated with the occupiers. Among the most fanatical was Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, a radical national socialist who pushed the Dutch fascist movement toward extreme anti-Semitism and closer alignment with Adolf Hitler's Germany.
During the occupation, he rose to become president of the Dutch Central Bank, helping channel Dutch wealth and financial resources into the Third Reich while thousands of Dutch Jews were deported to Sobibor and Auschwitz. Even as Nazi Germany collapsed, he remained loyal to the end.
Meinoud Marinus Rost van Tonningen was born on February 19, 1894, in Surabaya on the island of Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies and today Indonesia. He later studied law in the Netherlands and earned his doctorate in 1921.
After completing his studies, he began a career in international finance and administration that eventually took him to Austria. In 1923, he accepted a position in Vienna as assistant to Alfred Zimmermann, the League of Nations Commissioner-General overseeing Austrian finances.
Austria was struggling with severe economic difficulties following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Rost van Tonningen became involved in efforts to stabilize the country's financial system. He proved capable and ambitious, earning a reputation as a skilled administrator.
When Zimmermann was recalled in 1926, Rost van Tonningen succeeded him in a reduced role and continued working with Austrian authorities until 1928. After the arrangement expired, he returned to the Netherlands.
Three years later, the economic crisis triggered by the Great Depression led Austria to seek international assistance, bringing him back to Vienna in 1931 as a representative of the League of Nations. He was tasked with monitoring Austrian financial policy and reporting to the League.
He exercised considerable influence over foreign loans and government borrowing, giving him an important role in Austrian economic affairs during a period of political instability. While living in Vienna, he underwent a profound political transformation.
Rost van Tonningen developed strong anti-Semitic and anti-communist views and became increasingly hostile toward parliamentary democracy. He formed a close friendship with Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who dismantled Austria's democratic system and established an authoritarian government.
He strongly supported Dollfuss and admired his determination to crush political opposition. The assassination of Dollfuss during the failed Nazi coup of July 1934 marked a turning point.
Rost van Tonningen never established the same relationship with Dollfuss' successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, and gradually drifted toward more radical political circles in Vienna. He began associating with individuals sympathetic to National Socialism and increasingly viewed Hitler's Germany as a model for the future of Europe.
He also started considering a political career in his homeland and opened discussions with Anton Mussert, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, better known as the NSB. After returning to the Netherlands, Rost van Tonningen officially joined the NSB in August 1936.
He quickly became one of the party's most prominent figures and won a seat in the Dutch Parliament later that year. He soon emerged as the leader of the party's parliamentary faction and distinguished himself from many colleagues through his uncompromising support for Nazi Germany.
He also became editor-in-chief of the NSB's party newspaper, using it as a platform to promote his increasingly radical views. Rost van Tonningen pushed the movement toward a closer alignment with Hitler's Germany, often frustrating more moderate figures within the party leadership.
From the beginning, he belonged to the most radical wing of the NSB. He believed the movement should embrace Hitler's racial ideology and align itself much more closely with the German Nazi party.
His views frequently brought him into conflict with Mussert, whose version of fascism was generally less radical and more focused on Dutch nationalism. Rost van Tonningen repeatedly organized uniformed groups and activist squads that marched into working class and Jewish neighborhoods, deliberately seeking confrontation and intimidation.
By the late 1930s, he had become one of the most outspoken anti-Semites within the NSB. In 1938, he advocated restricting Jewish immigration from Germany and promoted a proposal known as the Guyana plan, which called for the forced migration of European Jews to Suriname, a Dutch colony in South America.
Even many German National Socialists showed little enthusiasm for the proposal, and it was never implemented. Unlike many members of the NSB, he regarded Hitler, rather than Mussert, as the true embodiment of political leadership.
Rost van Tonningen met Hitler personally on two occasions and became increasingly convinced that the future of the Netherlands lay within a German-dominated Europe. In 1939, he established the Mussert Guard, a paramilitary organization whose members later formed an important recruiting ground for the Dutch SS.
His admiration for Nazi Germany became so intense that he sought membership in the Dutch SS unit Westland. Ironically, his application was initially rejected because, having been born in the Dutch East Indies, he could not provide documentation proving that his family possessed what the Nazis considered pure Aryan ancestry for the previous 150 years.
The Second World War started on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. For eight months, the Netherlands remained neutral, hoping to stay out of the conflict.
In December 1940, Rost van Tonningen married for the second time. His new wife was Florentine Heubel, a committed National Socialist who shared his admiration for Hitler and the Nazi movement. The couple would go on to have three children.
Rost van Tonningen also had two daughters from his first marriage to Mary Sarah Gordon Hasselbach, whom he had married in 1924 before divorcing in 1936. During the German occupation, he became one of the most powerful Dutch collaborators.
In 1940, he was appointed liquidation commissar for Marxist and left-wing organizations by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi administrator of the occupied Netherlands. His task was to dismantle political groups the Germans considered hostile to National Socialism, including the Communist Party and several socialist organizations.
Rost van Tonningen attempted to transform the Dutch Social Democratic movement along Nazi lines, but he encountered fierce resistance. The leadership of the Social Democratic Workers Party refused to cooperate, and many affiliated organizations chose to dissolve themselves rather than submit to Nazi control.
Sports clubs, cultural associations, and labor groups shut down rather than become instruments of the occupation. Despite these setbacks, he helped eliminate what remained of organized political opposition, and in July 1941, the last Dutch political parties were officially dissolved.
His influence expanded further in March 1941, when he was appointed Secretary General of Finance and President of the Dutch Central Bank. In these positions, he played a major role in integrating the Dutch economy into the German war machine.
Under his administration, currency barriers between the Netherlands and the Third Reich were gradually removed, making it easier for Germany to use Reichsmarks to obtain Dutch goods, services, and financial assets. He enthusiastically supported these measures and played a key role in implementing them.
As Germany charged the Netherlands enormous occupation costs and purchased Dutch goods with Reichsmarks, vast sums of money flowed from the occupied country into the Third Reich. At the same time, Dutch authorities continued printing money, contributing to growing inflation and economic instability.
By the end of the occupation, billions of Reichsmarks worth of wealth had effectively been transferred from the Netherlands to Germany. Rost van Tonningen was considerably more radical and pro-German than Mussert and increasingly regarded himself as the more important figure within the movement.
He openly looked down on Mussert, whom he mockingly described as a pocket-sized leader, believing that Mussert had only secured his 1936 meeting with Hitler through his own efforts. Unlike Mussert, Rost van Tonningen maintained close contacts with senior SS officials and regularly visited the homes of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and other influential National Socialists in Germany and the Netherlands.
In private correspondence, he often used vulgar language, spread malicious gossip about rivals, and increasingly dismissed anyone unwilling to share his admiration for the SS as anti-German. Beginning in 1942, he also helped establish the Dutch East Company, an organization intended to support German rule in territories conquered from the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine.
Hundreds of Dutch volunteers, many of them members or supporters of the NSB, were recruited to work as farmers, laborers, engineers, and administrators in the occupied East. Rost van Tonningen viewed the project as part of a broader German-led future for Europe.
However, the venture depended entirely on German military successes. As the Red Army pushed westward and German forces retreated from Ukraine during 1943 and 1944, the project collapsed. The Dutch settlers and workers were forced to abandon the territories and flee toward Germany alongside the retreating Nazi forces.
In 1944, as it was becoming clear that Germany was going to lose the war, Rost van Tonningen became a member of the Waffen SS, the military branch of the SS. In March 1945, he was sent to the front as an SS-Obersturmführer, an equivalent of first lieutenant in the US Army.
The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. That same day, Rost van Tonningen was captured by Canadian forces and taken to a prisoner of war camp.
When his identity became known, he was transferred to a prison in the city of Utrecht and later moved to Scheveningen prison in The Hague following an apparent suicide attempt. Less than a month later, on June 6, 1945, the 51-year-old Rost van Tonningen died after falling from a prison balcony.
Dutch authorities concluded that he had taken his own life, but the circumstances of his death remained controversial for decades. His widow, Florentine Rost van Tonningen, remained a committed national socialist for the rest of her life.
Known as the Black Widow, she openly regretted the fall of the Third Reich and insisted until her death in March 2007 that her husband had been murdered. The controversy deepened in 2000 when Anthony Johannes van der Leeuw, a former employee of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, alleged that Rost van Tonningen had been severely tortured in custody, which ultimately drove him to commit suicide.
Whether he died by suicide or as a result of the abuse he allegedly endured remains a matter of historical debate. His death remains disputed, but history's judgment on the cause he served is not. The ideology he embraced left Europe in ruins, and the Third Reich he admired collapsed into defeat and disgrace.