Anton Mussert

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Anton Mussert


Born	May 11, 1894 Werkendam, Netherlands
Died	May 7, 1946 (aged 51) The Hague, Netherlands
Political party	National Socialist Movement (NSB)
Religion	Christian

Anton Adriaan Mussert (May 11, 1894 in Werkendam – May 7, 1946 in The Hague) was one of the founders of the National Socialist Movement (NSB) in the Netherlands and its de jure 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. After the war he was convicted and executed for high treason.

He was born in 1894 in the Protestant town of Werkendam, in the northern part of the province of Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands. He showed from an early age talent for technical matters and he chose to study civil engineering in Delft. 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 worked for the Dutch government as a successful civil engineer, but abandoned his job to become the party's leader. 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.

On 21 June 1940 Mussert agreed to have no objections to the joining of NSB members to the SS-Standarte 'Westland'. On 11 September 1940 Mussert instructed Henk Feldmeijer, who was a NSB member since 1932, to form the Nederlandsche SS (Dutch SS) as a division of the NSB. On the other hand, Mussert had nothing to do with the raising of an all-Dutch volunteer SS unit, the SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Niederlande.^[1]

He was arrested on May 7, 1945, tried for his collaboration in November, and executed for treason on 7 May 1946 in the Hague (on the Waalsdorpervlakte).