Willem Drees; Served as Premier of the Netherlands for a Decade

Willem Drees, the Netherlands’ longest-serving premier and considered the father of the comprehensive Dutch welfare system, has died, the government announced Wednesday. He was 101.

Drees died Saturday at his home in The Hague and was buried in a private ceremony Tuesday, according to a government statement. His family had asked that news of his death be withheld.

Drees began in politics as a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party, forerunner of the current opposition Labor Party, which he helped found after World War II.

During 10 years as premier, from 1948 to 1958, Drees supervised the nation’s re-emergence into prosperity from the five-year Nazi occupation. In 1947, as minister of social affairs, he introduced a plan giving a pension to all Dutch citizens over 65, the basis of the current welfare system.

Despite some trimming by the current conservative premier, Ruud Lubbers, the system still offers cradle-to-grave care for Dutch citizens.

Although Drees is primarily known for his pioneering welfare programs, he also coped with the Netherlands’ major foreign policy issues.

“Father Drees,” as he was affectionately nicknamed, ended 350 years of colonial rule in Indonesia after a painful postwar period in which the Netherlands tried and failed to impose a self-rule constitution that would have kept the archipelago under the Dutch crown.

His government waged two wars in the late 1940s in an attempt to hold on but finally it was Drees himself who decided that maintaining a colonial empire was a lost cause and handed over sovereignty of almost all of the colony to the new Republic of Indonesia in 1949.

Because of his political prominence, Drees spent part of World War II as a prisoner at Buchenwald, but was released because of a severe stomach ailment. He became active in the Dutch resistance.