How a Gay Artist Saved Thousands from the Nazis: Willem Arondeus
Recently Added
•
10m
On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. As bombs fell over Rotterdam and anti-Jewish laws took hold, Dutch artist and writer Willem Arondeus refused to stay silent. Openly gay in a time of persecution, he joined the resistance and led a daring mission to blow up Amsterdam’s population registry, destroying thousands of identity records and saving countless Jewish lives.
Captured and executed in July 1943, Arondeus faced death with dignity, leaving behind one final message: “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.”
Decades later, he was posthumously honored as a Righteous Among the Nations, becoming a timeless symbol of courage, humanity, and defiance against tyranny.
Up Next in Recently Added
-
Einsatzgruppen Commander Who Brought ...
1 September 1939 — as Nazi Germany invades Poland, the first waves of terror follow not with tanks, but with firing squads. Behind the advancing army come the Einsatzgruppen — mobile death squads sent to exterminate civilians, intellectuals, and Jews. Among their leaders stands Erich Naumann, a c...
-
The Bureaucrat of Death: SS-General W...
He looked like a model civil servant — calm, educated, meticulous.
But behind the typewriter and legal jargon, Walter Stahlecker built one of the first genocides of the Holocaust.
As commander of Einsatzgruppe A, he oversaw the annihilation of the Baltic Jews, turning Nazi ideology into systemati... -
Hitler’s Jewish Doctor: The Untold St...
When Austria fell to Nazi Germany in March 1938, terror spread among its Jewish citizens. But one man, Dr. Eduard Bloch — the family physician who had once cared for Hitler’s dying mother — was declared under “special protection.”
Personally shielded by the Führer and untouched by Gestapo persecu...
