On the morning of 10 May 1940, German forces swept into the Netherlands, and the Luftwaffe dropped paratroopers behind Dutch lines to seize key positions ahead of the advancing ground troops. Heavy bombing of Rotterdam followed, and on 14 May the city’s historic center was destroyed from the air. Faced with the threat of the same fate for Utrecht, the Dutch military surrendered the next day. The occupation tightened quickly.
Anti-Jewish laws excluded Jewish citizens from public life and stripped them of their livelihoods. Arrests multiplied, and in July 1942, systematic deportations to the death camps began. Not everyone accepted the new order. Across the country, ordinary citizens began to resist in secret, hiding those in danger and opposing the occupation at great personal risk.
Among them was a banker who turned finance into a weapon, building a hidden network that kept the resistance supplied with money from the shadows. His name was Walraven van Hall. Van Hall was born in Amsterdam on 10 February 1906 into a prominent family of bankers and directors. Raised with a private education, he chose not to follow his relatives into finance, instead training as an officer in the merchant marine.
For several years he served as a third mate before poor eyesight forced him out of service. In the autumn of 1929, he sailed for the United States, hoping to join a shipping company in New York, but the global economic crisis had closed that door. Through his brother Gijs, who was working in banking in New York, he found a position on Wall Street instead. After a little more than a year, Van Hall returned to the Netherlands, and in February 1931 he was appointed co-director of a local branch of the Amsterdam bank H.
Oyens and Sons, where his father was a director. In March 1932, he married Tilly den Tex; the marriage produced three children. When German forces invaded in May 1940, the Dutch resistance established a fund to assist the families of merchant sailors left stranded abroad by the outbreak of war. Van Hall was asked to help set up the Amsterdam branch alongside his brother Gijs.
His banking experience proved valuable, and he was able to raise money with support from the Dutch government in exile in London. Meanwhile, the occupation grew more brutal. On 22 and 23 February 1941, German forces raided the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, arresting and deporting more than four hundred Jewish men to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The Dutch response was unique in occupied Europe: a two-day general strike, known as the February strike, began on 25 February 1941.
The Germans crushed it ruthlessly, then hardened their policy. Jewish citizens were segregated from the wider population, fifteen thousand were sent to forced labor camps, and foreign and stateless Jews were moved to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast. Van Hall was among those who could not stand by. After the February strike, he began collecting money for families who had lost their breadwinners to arrest or dismissal.
He worked closely with his colleague Iman Jacob van den Bosch and his brother Heis van Hall. In June 1943, the three founded the National Support Fund, known by its Dutch initials as the NSF, and led it together. The fund provided financial support to people in hiding and their families, sustained resistance groups, helped hundreds of Jews, financed acts of sabotage, and aided the rescue of downed Allied pilots. It grew to some two thousand members, worked closely with the government in London, and became known as the bank of the resistance.
The NSF operated across the country through twenty-three districts, with teams distributing funds, delivering wage packets, and keeping accounts. Workers carried suitcases full of cash from door to door, supported resistance groups, and handled the bookkeeping that kept the network alive. Van Hall became known as the banker of the resistance. He also earned the nickname the oil man for his ability to ease tensions between competing resistance organizations, and he played a central role in establishing regular consultations among the leaders of the most important Dutch resistance groups.
Although his position brought certain advantages, such as extra food, he refused to take them. Together with his brother, Van Hall carried out what has been called the largest bank fraud in Dutch history. Between September 1944 and May 1945, treasury notes worth fifty-one million guilders were secretly replaced with forgeries in fifteen stages, with help from officials at the Dutch Central Bank and the knowledge of the exiled government in London. The forged notes were traded for real securities at the Kas Vereeniging Bank in Amsterdam and converted into cash under the pretense of paying workers at factories that could no longer operate because of the war.
The operation was carried out with Frans den Hollander, who managed the unemployment fund, and entirely without the knowledge of Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, the president of the Dutch Central Bank and a Nazi collaborator. Van Hall also borrowed from wealthy Dutch citizens. As proof of their investment, they received old stock certificates that could be exchanged after the war for their money, backed by the government in exile. He insisted that loans be made only in large sums, at least twenty-five thousand guilders, reasoning that fewer, larger transactions would reduce the risk of detection.
He and his brother developed a system for managing this complex web of illegal loans, all administered in code. In total, more than eighty-three million guilders, equivalent to roughly four hundred and fifty million euros today, were distributed through the National Support Fund, with very little misused. The end came through betrayal. On 26 January 1945, a Nazi collaborator named Johan van Lom exposed the resistance member Teus van Vliet, who was arrested.
Under interrogation, Van Vliet revealed that an NSF meeting would take place the following day. When the participants gathered, German authorities arrested them all, including Van Hall, and imprisoned them in Amsterdam. Walraven van Hall was thirty-nine years old when he was executed on 12 February 1945 in Haarlem, together with seven other resistance members, in retaliation for the death of a high-ranking police officer. The irony was that the Germans never understood who he was.
They believed they had captured just another resistance fighter, not the man who had financed much of the underground movement. All German troops in the Netherlands surrendered on 5 May 1945, three days before the general capitulation of Germany. After the war, the complicated financial operations of the occupation had to be untangled. The Dutch government repaid the loans made to the NSF, and the question of the forged treasury bonds was resolved.
The fund still held twenty-two 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 formally dissolved. Walraven van Hall was posthumously awarded the Dutch Cross of Resistance, and the United States granted him the Medal of Freedom with Gold Palm. In 1978, Israel recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations for his role in helping to support between eight hundred and nine hundred Jews in hiding during the war.
He lies buried at the Dutch Honorary Cemetery in Bloemendaal, alongside many other victims of the Second World War, including the resistance fighter Hannie Schaft and sculptor Gerrit van der Veen.