On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the neutral Netherlands, and by May 14, Rotterdam’s historic center lay in ruins after German bombing. The Dutch army surrendered the following day, and the occupation quickly brought anti-Jewish laws, arrests, and, from July 1942, systematic deportations to concentration camps. While many Dutch citizens joined the resistance, hiding Jews and distributing illegal newspapers at the risk of execution, others embraced the Nazi cause. Among the most fanatical collaborators was a radical national socialist who would rise to head the Dutch Central Bank, funneling the country’s wealth into the Third Reich even as thousands of Dutch Jews were sent to Sobibor and Auschwitz.
That man was Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, a figure whose loyalty to Hitler never wavered—even as Nazi Germany collapsed around him. Born on February 19, 1894, in Surabaya on the island of Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies and today Indonesia, Rost van Tonningen studied law in the Netherlands and earned his doctorate in 1921. He then began a career in international finance that took him to Vienna, where in 1923 he became assistant to Alfred Zimmermann, the League of Nations Commissioner-General overseeing Austrian finances. Austria was reeling from the economic collapse that followed the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Rost van Tonningen threw himself into efforts to stabilize the country’s financial system.
Capable and ambitious, he succeeded Zimmermann in a reduced role in 1926 and continued working with Austrian authorities until 1928, when he returned to the Netherlands. The Great Depression brought him back to Vienna in 1931 as a League of Nations representative tasked with monitoring Austrian financial policy. He wielded considerable influence over foreign loans and government borrowing during a period of intense political instability. It was in Vienna that Rost van Tonningen underwent a profound political transformation.
He developed virulent anti-Semitic and anti-communist views and grew increasingly hostile to parliamentary democracy. He formed a close friendship with Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who dismantled Austria’s democratic system and established an authoritarian government. Rost van Tonningen strongly supported Dollfuss and admired his ruthless crackdown on political opposition. Dollfuss’s assassination during the failed Nazi coup of July 1934 marked a turning point.
Rost van Tonningen never built the same rapport with Dollfuss’s successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, and gradually drifted toward more radical circles in Vienna. He began associating with individuals sympathetic to National Socialism and came to see Hitler’s Germany as the model for Europe’s future. He also started considering a political career in his homeland and opened discussions with Anton Mussert, leader of the National Socialist Movement, or NSB. After returning to the Netherlands, Rost van Tonningen officially joined the NSB in August 1936.
He quickly became one of its most prominent figures, winning a seat in the Dutch Parliament later that year. As leader of the party’s parliamentary faction and editor-in-chief of the NSB’s newspaper, he used his platform to promote increasingly radical views. From the start, he belonged to the party’s most extremist wing, believing the movement should embrace Hitler’s racial ideology and align itself far more closely with the German Nazi Party. This frequently brought him into conflict with Mussert, whose 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 the so-called Guyana Plan, a scheme calling 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 NSB members, Rost van Tonningen regarded Hitler, rather than Mussert, as the true embodiment of political leadership. He met Hitler personally on two occasions and became increasingly convinced that the Netherlands’ future 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 was 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 his family possessed what the Nazis considered pure Aryan ancestry going back 150 years. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The Netherlands remained neutral for eight months, hoping to stay out of the conflict. That hope ended on May 10, 1940, when Hitler launched a surprise attack without a declaration of war.
German paratroopers seized key bridges and airfields while the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying the city’s historic center. Facing 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. 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 have three children; he also had two daughters from his first marriage to Mary Sarah Gordon Hasselbach, whom he had wed in 1924 and divorced in 1936. During the occupation, Rost van Tonningen became one of the most powerful Dutch collaborators. In 1940, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi administrator of the occupied Netherlands, appointed him liquidation commissar for Marxist and left-wing organizations.
His task was to dismantle political groups the Germans considered hostile, including the Communist Party and several socialist organizations. He attempted to reshape the Dutch Social Democratic movement along Nazi lines but met fierce resistance. The leadership of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party refused to cooperate, and many affiliated organizations chose to dissolve rather than submit. Sports clubs, cultural associations, and labor groups shut down rather than become instruments of the occupation.
Despite these setbacks, Rost van Tonningen 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 roles, he played a major part in integrating the Dutch economy into the German war machine. 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.
Rost van Tonningen enthusiastically supported and implemented these measures. As Germany charged the Netherlands enormous occupation costs and purchased Dutch goods with Reichsmarks, vast sums flowed from the occupied country into the Third Reich. Dutch authorities continued printing money, fueling 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, mockingly describing him as a pocket-sized leader. Unlike Mussert, he maintained close contacts with senior SS officials and regularly visited the homes of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and other influential National Socialists. In private correspondence, he used vulgar language, spread malicious gossip about rivals, and dismissed anyone unwilling to share his admiration for the SS as anti-German.
Beginning in 1942, Rost van Tonningen helped establish the Dutch East Company, an organization intended to support German rule in territories conquered from the Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine. Hundreds of Dutch volunteers, many of them NSB members or supporters, were recruited to work as farmers, laborers, engineers, and administrators in the occupied East. He viewed the project as part of a broader German-led future for Europe. The venture depended entirely on German military success.
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 Germany’s defeat became clear, Rost van Tonningen became a member of the Waffen SS. In March 1945, he was sent to the front as an SS-Obersturmführer, roughly equivalent to a first lieutenant.
The 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 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 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, known as the Black Widow, remained a committed National Socialist for the rest of her life. 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.