Nazi Ideologues Rally Around Widow of Suspected Dutch War Criminal

The 72-year-old widow of a man who committed suicide in 1945 while awaiting trial on war crimes charges is the rallying point for a handful of Nazi ideologues in the Netherlands.

Florentine Rost van Tonningen, whose husband, Meinoudt, was deputy chief of the Dutch Nazi Party during five years of German occupation in World War II, was convicted in October of preparing to distribute anti-Semitic literature and was given a suspended four-month jail sentence.

Anti-fascist watchdog groups say she has several thousand followers out of a population of 14.3 million. But they do not consider the followers a threat.

Aided by a puppet National Socialist (Nazi) government, the wartime German occupation force destroyed the Netherlands’ once-vibrant Jewish community during World War II, shipping an estimated 100,000 Jews to Nazi death camps.

Guilty Conscience

Dutch collaboration with Nazi Germany still weighs heavily on the collective Dutch conscience. Postwar Netherlands has been one of Israel’s leading supporters, and because of this has become a main target of the 1973 Arab oil boycott.

Rost lives surrounded by Nazi memories, nevertheless, in a sprawling white stucco mansion on Recluse Road in this affluent eastern Dutch town. Her home is a shrine to the now-banned Dutch National Socialist Movement, the Dutch version of the German Nazi Party.

According to the watchdog groups and press reports, she hosts regular meetings of sympathizers from the old days, who reverently refer to her as “The Lady.”

Dozens of pictures of her husband fill her living room, and a color photograph of Adolf Hitler is prominently displayed in her study.

Proud of Hitler Meeting

Rost recently recalled with fondness her one meeting with Hitler.

“The grandeur of what this man has accomplished will one day be recognized,” she said in an interview.

Richard Stein, a spokesman for the Foundation for the Fight Against Anti-Semitism, said that Rost has a mailing list of about 2,500 sympathizers to whom she sends pro-Nazi material.

The material, sent under the letterhead of the Tree of Life Consortium, which she founded, contains praise for German Nazi leaders, singling out Hitler and his deputy, Rudolph Hess, who is serving a life sentence in an Allied war crimes prison in West Berlin. But the literature carefully avoids any anti-Semitic content, to stay within Dutch law.

Brochure Confiscated

“It’s absolute nonsense to say that I’d be anti-Jewish,” Rost said. But she refused to discuss the subject further, as an elderly aide stood by attentively.

The court case against Rost was based on a 1984 police raid at her home, in which authorities confiscated a brochure published in West Germany that termed the Jewish Holocaust a fraud.

Although the Dutch Penal Code contains no specific statute against anti-Semitic propaganda, it bans “inciting hatred against people on the grounds of their race, religion or other beliefs.”

Those on Rost’s mailing list range from members of the now-disbanded Dutch Nazi Party to ultra right-wing groups favoring Aryan supremacy and German dominance over Europe, Stein said.

‘Not Tightly Organized’

“They’re not a tightly organized group and are not involved in a sinister plot to overthrow the government or something like that,” Stein said.

Toos Faber, a Justice Ministry spokeswoman, said that Dutch authorities do not view the group with alarm.

“If they commit offenses, we prosecute,” Faber said. “But we don’t see them as a serious threat to society.”