Anton Mussert
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Anton Adriaan Mussert (May 11, 1894 - May 7, 1946) was a successful civil engineer who worked for the Dutch government. He was one of the founders of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands. He abandoned his engineering career to become its leader. As such he was the most prominent national socialist in the Netherlands. During the Second World War he was able to keep this position, due to the support he received from the Germans.
He was born in 1894 in the Protestant town of Werkendam, in the northern part of the province of Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands. In the 1920s he became active in several extreme right organizations such as the Dietsche Bond which advocated a Greater Netherlands including Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium). On 14 December 1931 he, Cornelis van Geelkerken and ten others founded the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB) or, as it reads out in English, National Socialist Movement. He was received by Pope Pius XI on June 16, 1936, but as expected he failed to gain the Vatican's favour totally; in 1941 the Dutch Roman Catholic bishops would even excommunicate all Catholics associated to his National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands. Mussert met Hitler in November of 1936.
During World War II (in 1941) an all-Dutch volunteer SS unit, the SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Niederlande was formed by Mussert.
He was arrested on May 7, 1945, tried for his collaboration in November, and executed for treason on 7 May 1946 in the Hague.
See also
References
- The Patriotic Traitors: A History of Collaboration in German-Occupied Europe, 1940-45 by David Littlejohn ISBN 043442725X
- Dutch Under German Occupation: 1940-1945 by Werner Warmbrunn ISBN 0804701520
- Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees, 1991, ISBN 0130893013
External links
- [Anton Mussert and the Dutch Nazi Party]
- [Anton Adriaan Mussert]
- [Flags of the NSB]
- , a Paul Verhoeven directed 1968 TV documentary
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