When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the Luftwaffe deployed paratroopers to seize key positions and support the rapid advance of ground troops. Heavy aerial bombardment of Rotterdam culminated on May 14 with the destruction of its entire historic center. Faced with the threat of similar devastation in Utrecht, Dutch forces surrendered one day later.
Soon after, the Nazis occupied the country and introduced anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude Jewish citizens from society and strip them of their livelihoods. Arrests followed, and in July 1942, systematic deportations to death camps began.
Not all were willing to accept this new reality. Across the Netherlands, ordinary citizens began to resist, working in secrecy, hiding those in danger, and risking their lives to oppose the occupation. Among them was a banker who turned finance into a weapon and built a secret network that fueled the resistance from the shadows. His name was Walraven van Hall.
Walraven van Hall, often nicknamed Wally, was born on February 10, 1906, in Amsterdam into a prominent Dutch family of bankers and directors. He was the sixth child of Adriaan Floris van Hall and Petronella Johanna Boissevain and was privately educated in his early years.
Rather than follow his family into banking, he chose to go to sea and trained as an officer in the merchant marine. After working for several years as a third mate, Van Hall was declared unfit for service because of his poor eyesight.
In the autumn of 1929, Van Hall went to the United States, where he had intended to join a shipping company in New York. Because of the global economic crisis, he was not hired. Through his brother, Gijs van Hall, who was working in banking in New York at the time and would later become mayor of Amsterdam, he found a position on Wall Street.
After just over a year, Van Hall returned to the Netherlands. In February 1931, he was appointed co-director of a local branch of the Amsterdam-based bank H. Oyens and Sons, where his father was director. In March 1932, Van Hall married Tilly den Tex, and the marriage produced three children.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Dutch resistance set up a fund to support the families of merchant sailors who had been stranded abroad when the war broke out. Van Hall was asked to help establish the Amsterdam branch together with his brother, Gijs.
Thanks to his banking experience, he was able to raise funds with support from the Dutch government in London. Soon after, the occupation tightened as Jews were stripped of their rights and increasingly subjected to persecution.
On February 22 and 23, 1941, German forces raided the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, arresting and deporting more than 400 Jewish men to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The Dutch response was unique in Nazi-occupied Europe. A two-day general strike, known as the February strike, began on February 25, 1941. German authorities brutally suppressed the strike.
This action was followed by a hardening of Nazi policy. The German authorities, as well as collaborating Dutch authorities and civil services, segregated Jews from the general Dutch population and incarcerated 15,000 of them in German-administered forced labor camps. The Germans then ordered the concentration of Jews in Amsterdam and sent foreign and stateless Jews to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast part of the country.
Van Hall was one of many Dutch citizens who could not simply stand by and watch what was happening to their country and people. After the February strike, he collected money for families who had lost their breadwinners due to arrest or dismissal.
Within the resistance, Van Hall worked closely with his colleague Iman Jacob van den Bosch and his brother Gijs van Hall. In June 1943, they founded the National Support Fund, or NSF, which they led together.
The NSF provided financial support to people in hiding, their families, and resistance groups. The funds were also used to support hundreds of Jews, assist resistance activities, carry out acts of sabotage, and help rescue captured Allied pilots.
The NSF had around 2,000 members and worked closely with the government in London, becoming known as the bank of the resistance. The organization relied heavily on Van Hall's financial expertise, and through a range of clever methods he raised large sums of money.
Across the country, the NSF operated through 23 districts with teams responsible for distributing funds, delivering wage packets, and keeping accounts. NSF workers transported suitcases full of cash, delivered money to homes, supported resistance groups, and handled the bookkeeping. Van Hall became known as the banker of the resistance.
Among his additional nicknames was "the oil man," for his ability to ease tensions between different resistance groups and bring them together. He played a key role in establishing regular consultations between the leaders of the most important Dutch resistance organizations. Although his prominent position in the resistance offered certain benefits such as extra food, he refused to take advantage of them.
Together with his brother, he carried out what has been called the largest bank fraud in Dutch history. Between September 1944 and May 1945, treasury notes worth 51 million guilders were secretly replaced with forged ones in 15 stages, with the help of officials at the Dutch Central Bank and the knowledge of the government in exile in London.
These forged notes were then exchanged for real securities at the Kas Vereeniging Bank in Amsterdam and converted into cash by presenting them as payments for workers of factories that could no longer operate due to the war. The operation was carried out in cooperation with Frans den Hollander, who managed the unemployment fund, and without the knowledge of Meinl Rost van Tonningen, the president of the Dutch Central Bank and a Nazi collaborator.
Another way of raising money was to borrow from wealthy Dutch citizens. As proof of their investment, they received old stock certificates, which could be exchanged after the war for their money, backed by the Dutch government in exile.
To keep the money flowing, Walraven van Hall argued that only large sums of at least 25,000 guilders should be loaned. He believed this would reduce the risk of being caught. For this reason, he and his brother developed a system to manage a complex network of illegal loans, all administered in code.
In total, more than 83 million guilders were distributed through the National Support Fund, an equivalent to roughly 450 million euros today, with very little misuse of funds.
On January 26, 1945, due to betrayal by a Nazi collaborator, Johan van Lom, resistance member Teus van Vliet was arrested. Under interrogation, he revealed that an NSF meeting would take place the following day. The next day, all participants in the meeting, including Van Hall, were arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in Amsterdam.
Walraven van Hall was 39 years old when he was executed on February 12, 1945, in the city of Haarlem, along with seven other resistance members, in retaliation for the death of a high-ranking police officer. Ironically, the Germans had no idea who he really was. They believed he was just another resistance fighter, not the man who had financed much of the underground movement.
The Germans officially surrendered all their troops in the Netherlands on May 5, 1945, three days before the general capitulation of Germany.
After the war, efforts began to sort out the complex financial operations carried out during the occupation. Loans to the NSF were repaid by the Dutch government, and the issue of the forged treasury bonds was resolved. The NSF still held 22 million guilders in cash, which was used to build the national monument in Amsterdam and to help establish the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. In 1954, the NSF was dissolved.
Walraven van Hall was posthumously awarded the Dutch Cross of Resistance by the Dutch government. The United States awarded him the Medal of Freedom with Gold Palm. In 1978, Israel recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations for helping to support between 800 and 900 Jews in hiding during the war.
Van Hall is buried at the Dutch Honorary Cemetery in Bloemendaal, where many Second World War victims, including resistance fighter Hannie Schaft and sculptor and resistance leader Gerrit van der Veen, were reinterred after the war.