On the 6th of June, 1945, a 51-year-old man fell from a prison balcony in The Hague and died. Dutch authorities ruled it a suicide, but the circumstances would remain disputed for decades. His widow, a lifelong National Socialist who became known as the Black Widow, insisted until her death in 2007 that he had been murdered. The man was Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, and his death closed the life of one of the most radical collaborators in occupied Europe, a man who had risen to president of the Dutch Central Bank while helping channel the wealth of his country into the collapsing Third Reich.
Rost van Tonningen had not begun his career as a fascist. Born on the 19th of February, 1894, in Surabaya on the island of Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, he later studied law in the Netherlands and earned his doctorate in 1921. His early professional life took him into international finance and administration. In 1923, he accepted a position in Vienna as assistant to Alfred Zimmermann, the League of Nations Commissioner-General overseeing Austrian finances.
Austria was still struggling with the severe economic consequences of 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, he 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 Great Depression drove Austria to seek international assistance again, and in 1931 he came back to Vienna as a representative of the League of Nations. His task was to monitor Austrian financial policy and report to the League, and he exercised 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 strong anti-Semitic and anti-communist views and became increasingly hostile to parliamentary democracy.
He formed a close friendship with Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who dismantled the country’s democratic system and established an authoritarian government. Rost van Tonningen 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 in his life. He never established the same relationship with Dollfuss’s 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 Adolf Hitler’s Germany as the model for Europe’s future. At the same time, he started considering a political career in his homeland and opened discussions with Anton Mussert, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, 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 emerged as the leader of the party’s parliamentary faction and distinguished himself through his uncompromising support for Nazi Germany. As editor-in-chief of the NSB’s party newspaper, he used the platform to promote increasingly radical views, 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 put him at odds 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 movement. 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 scheme, and it was never implemented. Unlike many NSB members, he 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 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 began on the 1st of September, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. For eight months, the Netherlands remained neutral, hoping to stay out of the conflict.
That hope ended on the 10th of May, 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. 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.
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, joining the two daughters he had from his first marriage, which ended in divorce 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 considered hostile to National Socialism, including the Communist Party and several socialist organizations. He attempted to transform the Dutch Social Democratic movement along Nazi lines but 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.
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 these measures. 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. Within the movement, he was considerably more radical and pro-German than Mussert and increasingly regarded himself as the more important figure. 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 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. He viewed the project as part of a broader German-led future for Europe.
But 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 became clear that Germany was losing the war, Rost van Tonningen became a member of the Waffen SS.
In March 1945, he was sent to the front as an SS-Obersturmführer, equivalent to a first lieutenant. The war in Europe ended on the 8th of May, 1945. That same day, he 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, he fell from a prison balcony and died. The controversy over his death 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 abuse he allegedly endured remains a matter of historical debate. His death remains disputed, but the 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.