Velzer Affair

Hannie Schaft

Earlier this year, the province of North Holland agreed to fund another investigation into the Velzer Affair, a murky World War II case involving the betrayal of communist resistance fighters and collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. Many questions are still swirling around this mysterious event when many communist resistance activists and advisors were handed over to the Germans and executed. The most well known individual case was that of Dutch communist resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, who was murdered three weeks before the Netherlands was liberated. Many feel that Velzen’s chief of police and several officers collaborated with the Nazis and some of them were members of the Dutch National Socialist Party (NSB), but nothing has ever been proven. People claim that high ranking officials rounded up several left-wing and Communist resistance fighters and handed them over to the Nazis, in order to ensure that the Dutch society would run the same as it had before the war. The Velzer Affair remains an influential and mysterious war time event.