The Silence of Laren The baroness and her Jews in hiding
The article | Introduction | Dutch version
Introduction
In 1964, Hans van Straten1 published the book Moordenaarswerk (Murderer's Work). Based on extensive literature research, he describes more than one hundred high-profile Dutch murder cases from 1844 to 1963. One of these cases is the double murder of the Jewish Horn brothers. In the night of 11 to 12 July 1942, they were violently killed in or near the villa in Laren (North Holland), where they had been in hiding since late 1941. It was a case of robbery homocide: the brothers were killed by, or on the orders of, their host, the widow Helena Louise Schuiringa-Otto.
The exact course of events remains unknown: on August 31, 1950 the widow committed suicide. Only a year after her death, the mortal remains of the brothers are found. Buried in a pit in the garden of her former villa.
Van Straten releases a reprint of Murderer's Work in 1990. The story of the murder in Laren prompts the journalist Jeroen Terlingen to explore that story in depth. He then has lymph node cancer. He's looking for a subject that won't be immediately overtaken by current events, if medical worries take him out of the running for a few weeks. Also, working on his article and the associated travel allows him to escape the medical circuit. He completes his article during the week he is declared cured.
For his research he can use the chapter written by Van Straten in 1964. In addition, Terlingen received help from a retired police officer from Laren, who had "kept" the keys to the police station. He secretly made copies of relevant documents during the evenings and weekends. Public prosecutor Wassenbergh, who was in charge of the murder investigation in 1951-1952, had, against regulations, not offered the closed file for destruction, This enabled Terlingen to study photos, reports and interrogations in Laren in 1991 and to transcribe them
1 Hans van Straten. Dutch journalist and writer (1923-2004).
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 1/34 where necessary.
In 1991, Jeroen Terlingen spoke with people who had personally known either the victims or the main suspects. He was able to check many of their statements, even though these were about cases that happened decades earlier, with the official reports from 1951-1952. All of these witnesses have since died and the police files have disappeared.
All of this makes Jeroen Terlingen's 1991 account the most reliable account of the events in Laren, which took place from about 1934 through 1952.
With thanks to Jeroen2 and Jim Terlingen.3
Bart FM Droog, Eenrum, 3 June 2021.
2 Jeroen Terlingen (Utrecht 1943). Journalist, writer, film maker and teacher. https://jeroenterlingen.nl/ 3 Jim Terlingen (Utrecht, 1965). Journalist and researcher. https://jimterlingen.nl/
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 2/34 The article The Silence of Laren The baroness and her Jews in hiding
By Jeroen Terlingen, Vrij Nederland, 1991
It was not the fine fleur of Laren who sat at the well-stocked table of Frau Baronin von Schuiringa von Otto during the war years. Her neighbor, the NSB'er4 Woudenberg, Telegraaf editor-in-chief J.M. Goedemans,5 NSB-mayor Knipscheer: they found her, baroness or not, too vulgar. But the ordinary inhabitants of Laren - the policeman, the grocer, the veterinarian - enjoyed the banquets. When the Horn brothers from Cologne, wealthy German Jews, took shelter with the baroness, not much seemed to change at first. But how could a wealthy German widow with many NSB friends actually offer shelter to Jewish refugees? And how did Siegmund and Karl David Horn find out that they had ended up at a very bizarre hiding place? The reconstruction of a war drama in Laren.
4 NSB = National Socialistische Beweging; the major Dutch Nazi party.. 5 De Telegraaf was (and is) one of the major Dutch newspapers.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 3/34 Portrait of the Horn family, circa 1936. Front row Siegmund, Jakob Leopold, Martha (Bernhard's wife), Bernhard and Karl David. Back row the two sons of Martha and Bernhard, Karl and Erich. Horn heirs' collection.
On December 6, 1941, two Jewish businessmen fled from Cologne to the Netherlands. Karl David and Siegmund Horn went into hiding with Frau Baronin von Schuiringa von Otto (43), who lived in a villa on the Rijksweg in Laren. The Horn brothers were rich. Henk Beuker, actually a wallpaper upholsterer for the Baroness, had smuggled their furniture, paintings and thirty crates of porcelain, gold, silver and ivory objects to Laren in his truck on 3 November 1941. At their friend Juliane Gutzeit's house in Cologne, Karl David and Siegmund - seventy and sixty-three years old, both small in stature and set - left twenty-seven and a half kilograms of gold and silver jewelry. On their way to the Gooi, they stopped in Nijmegen, where they checked with director B. Coster the contents of a chest that, as soon as Hitler came to power, they had deposited at the Amsterdamsche Bank. The chest had been purchased from a hardware store next to the bank and contained jewelry and hundreds of forty-thousand guilders in cash in various currencies and securities. Before moving in with the Baroness, Karl David and Siegmund stayed with her friend Bertha Rijnders-Reneman6 in Baarn for four days. When their rooms were prepared, they went into hiding in Laren. Although, hiding...
6 Lubertha Rijnders-Reneman (1881-1961); Stichting Groenegraf.nl, Baarn, (accessed 06-06-2021); https://groenegraf.nl/hetverhaalvan.php?id=8011
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 4/34 Neighbours remember their daily walk. One waved his walking stick as if he were a tambour-maître, the other whistled a tune. Veterinarian J. van Raadt,7 who treated Frau Baronin's Pekingese Mounty, saw them regularly taking a taxi to the hairdresser. Siegmund, the youngest and fittest of the two brothers, took Dutch lessons in Hilversum and travelled with the Baroness to the Mak van Waay art auction in Amsterdam,8 where part of their antique collection was sold for fl 10,797.39 on 29 May 1942. The brothers were overjoyed when visitors wanted to play cards with them, but who played skat? They often entertained themselves for hours with solitaire.
In July 1942 Karl David and Siegmund Horn suddenly disappeared from Laren. They were still there on Saturday the eleventh, when they watched how garden boy Gijs Gieskens dug a deep pit in the garden of the Baroness to hide her copper from the Germans. After that vet Van Raadt brought them by car to the border town Putte-Stabroek. They thought it safer to flee to Switzerland. Their stay in the Netherlands had lasted exactly 217 days; long enough for Siegmund Horn to love the Baroness so much that he drew up a deed of gift with the help of the local police sergeant F. Vreeswijk9: if anything should happen to him or his brother during the remaining years of the war, liebster Helena would inherit their possessions. Only a few weeks later the Baroness received the Todesschein (death certificate) of the Horn brothers. They had been arrested at the Belgian- French border. In Laren it became known that Karl David had taken a handful of veronal tablets.10 Siegmund tried to flee and was shot. Although Frau Baronin von Schuiringa von Otto had already experienced some disturbing things in her life, she was again inconsolable.
Close to the Czech border in the former East Germany lies the small town of Marienberg in the foothills of the Ore Mountains (Erz Gebirge). Once, when silver and uranium were mined here, it must have been a prosperous place. Now it presents the bleak picture of an average ex-GDR town: neglected houses, broken streets, a Wartburg wreck here and there.11
7 = Dr. Hendrik van Beek. 8 Auction house located at Rokin 102, Amsterdam. The company still exists in 2021: https://www.makveilingen.nl/historie-mak/. 9 = Police Sergeant Johannes Frijters, born on 18-09-1893 in Fijnaart en Heijningen. On 29-11-1916 he was married in Rotterdam to Catharina Cornelia Vermunt (1893-1970). He died on 08-04-1978 in Laren, where he was also buried. Birth record West-Brabants Archive, Marriage records Stadsarchief Rotterdam and Noord-Hollands Archive. Militia register (for son Cornelis Josephus) Noord-Hollands Archive. Family Johannes Frijters / Catharina Johanna Vermunt (F20038). Family tree of Laren ancestors. Laren, https://www.larensevoorouders.nl/ntg/familygroup.php? familyID=F20038&tree=tree1 [accessed 27-05-2021]. 10 According to rumours that apparently still circulated in 1991. 11 Wartburg was a well-known GDR car brand.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 5/34 When the mines were exhausted, so was nature. At this moment the only green colours in Marienberg are Russian uniforms, but these too are about to disappear.
The year 1843 is chiselled on the façade of the local bookshop. Neither the owner, nor his father, nor his grandfather ever saw any reason to record local history, to collect old postcards, or even to publish a map. After the Wende, the director of the Verkehrsamt was given the task of designing a brochure in case an unsuspecting tourist ended up in Marienberg. My request to see the preliminary result embarrasses the man. He points out the window. 'Wir haben nur einen quadratischen Marktplatz' ('We only have a quadratic market square').
On the other side of that windy plain, bordered by trees that stick their branches desperately upwards - so young and already bare - stands the town hall. A dusty register is found in a jiffy, but I am not allowed to see it: Herr Bürovorsteher has forbidden it.
Is the chief perhaps present? 'Unfortunately...' What do you mean, "unfortunately"? When he's gone, I can have a look at the book at my leisure. A shocked look: 'That's not how we do things here. Has the chief ever decreed something about reading aloud? Relief! At dictation speed I am told that Helena Louise Otto was born on 1 August 1898, the daughter of Moritz Albin Otto and Hulda Lina Thomas. She lived at 401 Marienberg, in a farmhouse. A lady from the land registry is walking along to point out the place where her birth house was built into the Straße des Friedens (Street of Peace) before the First World War.
At the edge of Marienberg is a signpost from 1772. Sixty place names are carved into the stone column, with behind each name the number of hours you have to walk to get there. Chemnitz is six and a half hours away. That's where Lenie Otto must have got on the train when she left for the Netherlands in 1919.12 She was right, I think, as I leave two black-clad hitchhikers with freshly shaved skulls and cheerful runic characters standing under a tree with brown blossom.
12 According to the Amsterdam Foreigners Register, she first came to the Netherlands temporarily, in 1922. Before that she lived in various places in Germany. She was trained as a nurse at the Paul Gerhardsstift in Wittenberg near Halle. After that she lived and worked in Leipzig for three and a half years, then in Chemnitz and then in Oldenburg for half a year. This probably means that she went from her parental home in Marienberg to the nursing school in Wittenberg, and that front service in France was out of the question. Source: Stadsarchief Amsterdam, https://archief.amsterdam/indexen/deeds/e0e0c50d-570d-4cf2-ad67-64a80e71572f
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 6/34 To the Netherlands
After the First World War, there was famine, especially in the east of Germany. Despite an influenza epidemic, the Allies maintained a food blockade. Thousands of young women fled the daily menu of pine cones, nettles and chestnut flour and hired themselves out as maids to wealthy foreign families. The shrinking chance of getting a husband at home was of course also a motive for the mass exodus. Between 1914 and 1918, 1.8 million Germans, mostly young men, died. Lenie Otto worked as a nurse on the battlefield. She told friends later that as a young girl she had to identify her two brothers who had died in a trench on the Marne.13 When she left her birthplace in Saxony at the age of twenty-one,14 her parents had also died.
In the Johannes Hove15 in Laren, an eighty-seven year-old woman puts her arms around me. Nurse Otto had thick black hair, everywhere. On her upper lip she bleached it. She always kept her forearms covered, even when it was hot like hell outside.
In 1932, the year Carry van Bruggen16 died in Laren and fellow townsman Eduard van Beinum was appointed second conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Lenie Otto started a boarding house on Van den Brinkweg. Nurse Otto' was her nickname, because she looked like the deaconess on the Droste tin.17
From Marienberg she had first gone to Doorn - perhaps the only place in the Netherlands she had heard of, thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm. But the nightlife in the big city attracted her more. In The Hague she married Georg de Haas, a criminal who died in prison. Did she marry purely to acquire Dutch citizenship? She never told anyone about her first marriage. In café Centraal, the young widow18 met Jan Jacob Schuiringa, a sturdy horse trader, who gave her money for a shop selling chocolate and chocolates in Molenstraat. The shop went bankrupt, because Lenie had a lot of skills but not the ability to handle money. Schuiringa persuaded her to start a boarding house in Laren, where he had just bought a riding school in the Sint-Janstraat. Nurse Otto took care of his staff there for three guilders fifty a day: the pikers Van Nuchteren19 and Van Dansik, stablehand Mensinga (little Willem) and of course Jan Schuiringa himself.
13 This was probably nonsense. 14 Most probably also nonsense. 15 Pensioner's home. 16 Carry van Bruggen (1881-1932); famous Dutch author, from Jewish descend. 17 Brand of chocolate., which had a deaconess as symbol. 18 The marriage between Helena Louise Otto and Georg de Haas ended in divorce in 1929. He died in 1931.Source: Municipal Archive, The Hague. 19 A pseudonym.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 7/34 Mrs Van Nuchteren-Slager: 'I was just seventeen, I was riding a horse and my father regularly asked me to deliver flowers to the boarding house of nurse Otto. She was rude and impertinent. One time my future husband had to take her to Amsterdam where she had something to discuss. "Pick, go and have a drink there," she said. But if a stone flies through the window you must come and help me." "Old fart," she said to him because he was fourteen years older than me, "what do you want with a kid like that?" She didn't begrudge me him. The men she cooked for - and she was great at it - were hers. She wrapped them all up with dainty dishes.
Apart from the staff, vet Van Raadt, an NSB member from the very beginning,20 and policeman Vreeswijk, a son of a Brabant farmer and father of eight children, soon succumbed to the charms of Lenie Otto. This small, black woman, almost illiterate, speaking in nervous, crooked Dutch, must have had more appeal than just a skilful hand at cooking.
Mrs. Van Nuchteren: 'She gave herself and then, as a man, you have to be very strong to say no. In time, my later husband became afraid of her. When he suffered a double fracture in his leg while training horses, he preferred to lie in a room behind the stables rather than in Nurse Otto's lodgings.
The daughter of the flower man married her chosen one, but not everyone was so lucky. Mrs Van den Brink: 'I was in my early twenties when I was riding. After riding, the whole club would go and have a drink in De Bloeiende Wingerd (a pub). Only Mr Schuiringa was still free, so I usually sat next to him. Until Nurse Otto found out about it. She was furious, at him and at me. I didn't dare go up against such a rival. Schuiringa confessed to me later: "I sleep with my gun next to me, I don't trust that woman one bit.
20 According to the reports of his trial in 1947, he joined the NSB after the German invasion, May 1940.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 8/34 Jan Jacob Schuiringa
Only a photograph has survived of the original farmhouse. On the gable stone it says '1893'. Jan Jacob Schuiringa was twelve years old when his parents moved to Garnwerd. He was born in Sauwerd, lived in Winsum for a short time. Three old villages in the Maren area of Groningen with horizon on all sides. They are so close together that Belcampo21 often visited them in one day.
Schuiringa got his love of horses from his service in the cavalry. In 1920 he sold his parental home and most of the land, to the annoyance of his mother and his three-year-older brother Cornelis Jan. But he needed his inheritance to start a trading stable. Schuiringa, a burly, cheerful man, travelled a lot to Elmshorn, a horse centre north of Hamburg. On a piece of land near the farm in Garnwerd, he stabled his breeding stallion Friedrich, who is still spoken about in awe in the Groningen horse world. Schuiringa was always travelling to riding stables in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. This became a lot less when he bought his own riding school in Laren22 and fell under the spell of his nurse Otto. Despite the fear that the fifty-three year old bachelor felt for Lenie Otto, he married her on 30 March 1935. The prescribed waiting period after the announcement of the marriage was cancelled with the permission of the public prosecutor: the groom- to-be had suddenly become seriously ill.23 In the house which Sister Otto had rented for them both on Legrasweg in Laren, municipal official Roefs appeared at his bedside with hastily called witnesses: the maid of honour, also with her husband, stable boy Mensinga and policeman Vreeswijk. The mortally ill groom gave each of them twenty-five guilders from his pocket; more than a week's pay. Veterinarian Van Raadt was absent. On Saturday 30 March 1935 the NSB gathered sixteen thousand supporters in the Rai in Amsterdam to celebrate the successful elections. Van Raadt was too busy shouting 'houzee'24 to witness the wedding of his friend.
21 Belcampo, pseudonym of Herman Pieter Schönfeld Wichers (1902-1990). Famous Dutch writer. 22 This must have been in 1931: "Four years ago he bought the riding school on the St. Jansstraat" (...) De Gooi- en Eemlander, Hilversum, 15-04-1935. 23 He did not suddenly fall seriously ill: "When an incurable disease confined Mr. Schuiringa to his sickbed a few months ago, he sold the stables. (...)De Gooi- en Eemlander, Hilversum, 15-04-1935. 24 The word used to greet each other used by NSB members. It means something as 'Keep afloat, stay on course'.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 9/34 Marriage and death of Jan Schuiringa
From Schuiringa's shaky signature under the marriage certificate you can see that the ceremony must have demanded a lot from his strength. He weakened quickly and nurse Otto kept everyone away from him from her wedding day. Only Long Leen, the maid, was allowed to enter the house. When she came in in the morning, she first held her cold hands against his feverish head at his request. Fourteen days after he was married, Schuiringa died.
So this is where she has been crying, I think at the general cemetery in Laren. That gaudy tombstone of red granite - with chocolate letters Family Tomb - wasn't there yet, of course. Neither was the now faded image of a grieving woman kneeling among roses.
The chains and copper lanterns on the pilasters have disintegrated with age,' says gravedigger Van Schalkwijk. The grave used to look like a fairground attraction.
Buried with Jan Jacob Schuiringa was also the family feud that had isolated him after the sale of the farm. In a long black coat, which had turned green here and there and was worn out to the bone, Cornelis Jan Schuiringa travelled to Laren. At the quarry he spoke about the tragic death of his brother, who had succumbed to a fatal illness just when he had found happiness. The daughter of Cornelis Jan stood next to him. She was called 'Golden Reina' because of the legacy that mother Schuiringa had left to both her sons one year before Jan Jacob's death.
Lenie Otto, who from April 1935 called herself the widow Schuiringa - although she always had trouble with the sch25 - was also suddenly a wealthy woman. The riding school was sold.261 L. Weiler from The Hague got the show jumper Alt Schwede. The thoroughbred gelding Avilon went to the Colenbrander fund, with the request that the animal be put at the disposal of Lieutenant Greber. All other horses had to be sold.
Mrs E. Verbeek: 'I rode in the riding school in The Hague and was very attached to my Witvoet, a thoroughbred Hanoverian, who rang the bell for everyone at competitions, except for me. But that sour-faced woman wouldn't let me buy him out before the auction. Later on, a gentleman had a fatal accident with that horse and I got Witvoet for a hundred and twenty-five guilders.'
25 Pronounced “sg” -difficult to pronounce for German and English speaking people. 26 The riding school had already been sold before Jan Schuiringa's death. De Gooi- en Eemlander, Hilversum, 15-04- 1935.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 10/34 Inheritance of 4,00,000 guilders
The widow Schuiringa-Otto saw with sorrow how Long Leen inherited a thousand guilders from her husband and a golden ring with a whip and hoofs. Hendrik Geukema, a labourer from Garnwerd, received five hundred guilders. Florist Bakker, who often hunted with Schuiringa in Kootwijk, would have liked to have his rifle, but did not get it. The widow herself kept only a chest of gold objects, watches on heavy chains that had to be wound with a key. The rest of Schuiringa's possessions were sold. In September 1935 Lenie Otto, who still could hardly read or write, owned four tons. In 1991, according to the CBS, that would be five million two hundred thousand guilders.27
'She enjoyed her own meals so much that she grew pear-shaped,' jeers an elderly Laren woman with a frugal mouth. 'And then those crooked, hairy legs underneath,' her sister snickers. 'You know, fried sole [species of fish - ed.]...' muses the first, who at the memory has to dab the corners of her mouth with a handkerchief. 'Small wonder, if you could afford it.' I have yet to hear the first kind word from a woman about the widow Schuiringa. Men's eyes light up. 'She had something,' muses a former supplier, but there is no further expla- nation. 'An exciting woman,' chuckles the postman of the time. Hated or loved, the brand new millionaire was a godsend to many residents of Laren in those lean years just before the war. A source of income for shopkeepers, domestic staff, policemen, taxi drivers and gardeners. A source of entertainment for the ordinary villager, who did not take part in the artists' parties in hotel-restaurant Hamdorff.28 For the widow Schuiringa - for intimates now Auntie Loeki instead of nurse Otto - had the idea that money could buy not only luxury and prestige, but also affection. And there were plenty of people who were happy to let her believe it.
At a time when Prime Minister Colijn had to explain publicly his relations with the German H. Schultze, when Minister Romme submitted his law on the prohibition of working for married wome, and when Minister Oud of Finance dismissed his treasurer-general with everyone's approval because he was celebrating New Year's Eve in the company of homosexuals ('I'll clean out that swine stable in my department'), the widow Schuiringa was having the time of her life.
27 In 2021 more than 4 million euros. 28 Hotel-restaurant in Laren that existed from 1901-1979. Restarted in 1998. https://hamdorffetenendrinken.nl/historie (accessed 26-05-2021).
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 11/34 Binge parties
Immediately after the erection of the pompous grave monument for her late husband, she hired a car with a driver, with whom she made a trip along the Rhine. Then she stayed in Laren for a few months, showered friends and acquaintances with gifts, organised firesome parties, moved to villa De Drossaert on Driebergsestraatweg in Doorn - before travelling again with her driver Henk Kock, named after his hair the redhead. This time she wanted to go to Compiègne, four years before Hitler, to see the train carriage where in 1918 the German army command had to sign the capitulation. On 14 July 1936, the widow Schuiringa settled in Soest with her regular cavalier, whom she now introduced as her fiancé. Red Kock had already assaulted a daughter from his first marriage, resulting in the kid having a broken leg. He also regularly assaulted his fiancée. When he beat her black and blue between parties, she went into hiding at a friend's house in Utrecht, but in January 1939, the widow Schuiringa finally had enough of the beatings. She threw her goldfish in the bathtub with enough food for a month, had cards printed with a golden crown and the inscription Frau Baronin von Schuringa von Otto (she thought she really had become a noblewoman because the horse trader had been a dike-grave29) and left for her native country. For a while she lived in the Breitestraße in Düsseldorf - bombed out during the war, now one of the city's main streets with all the leading banks. Then she moved to Cologne, where she rented a large house on the Kaiser Friedrichsufer. That name was changed to Konrad Adenauerufer, but the view over the Rhine from the surviving building at number thirty-seven is as impressive as ever.
As usual, the widow Schuiringa threw herself into the nightlife. In between her affairs, she visited Fernande Markes,30 because she was owed money by a business relation of her late husband. The lawyer couldn't help her. She had defended a Jewish client and had been dismissed from her profession.31 Fernande Markes referred Frau Baronin to colleague J. Bungarten and brought her into contact with Karl David and Siegmund Horn. From October 1941, when the first Jews were deported in Cologne, the Horn brothers had been talking to
29 Dike grave = dijkgraaf; non hereditary title for somebody who's responsible for the maintenances of dikes. 30 Fernande Goldberg-Markes (Liège (Belgium), 1905 - Bergisch Gladbach, 1988). Daughter of a German father and a Belgian mother; the Catholic family had to leave Belgium after 1918. She studied law in Cologne; in 1934 she was sworn in as a lawyer at the Oberlandesgericht in Cologne. Michaël Löffelsender. Kölner Rechtsanwälte im Nationalsozialismus. Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhundertts 88. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2015. Blz. 105. Findbuch zum Nachlass von Fernande Goldberg-Markes. Jahersbericht 2019. NS Dokumentationszentrum der stadt Köln. Köl, 2020. Pages 86-87; http://www.museenkoeln.de/Downloads/nsd/NS-DOK_JB-2019_web.pdf 31 In 1937, Markes came under the treatment of the Jewish doctor Dr Max Goldberg (1898-1944; deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, later murdered in Auschwitz). They became friends and went on holiday together. In 1939, Markes was indicted on suspicion of "Rassenschande". On 7 October 1939, she is dismissed from the bar. Only in October 1946, the 1939 verdict was annulled; she then worked as a lawyer again until 1973. In 1950, she had her unofficial marriage to Max Goldberg, concluded on 12 September 1938, confirmed. Michaël Löffelsender. Kölner Rechtsanwälte im Nationalsozialismus.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 12/34 her about escape. Was this wealthy, German-speaking lady with connections to the police in the Netherlands not an excellent opportunity to go into hiding? The brothers thought so.
The villa on the corner of the Rijksweg Amsterdam-Amersfoort/Vredelaan Laren. Around 1970 the villa had to make way for the widening of the A1 motorway. Collection Jeroen Terlingen.
The former nurse Lenie Otto travelled at lightning speed to the Gooi region to rent a capital villa, worthy of a baroness ,from estate agent H. ten Kroode on the Rijksweg in Laren. Painters and upholsterers went to work. She asked Brigadier F. Vreeswijk if the police force would keep an eye on her during her absence. Then she quickly returned to Cologne to help Karl David and Siegmund pack their belongings. The Horn brothers would have preferred to celebrate Christmas with the whole family one more time. To their friend Gustav Behrens- mann,32 who became mayor of the village of Kamen after the war, they asked to use his influence with Gestapoführer Herr Doctor Schäfer,33 but in vain. Their
32 Presumably it was Gustav Berensmann, who was mayor of Kamen before the war. Ulrike Faulhaber. Mondäne Villen aus goldenem Zeitalter denkmalwürdig. Westfälische Rundschau, Essen, 02-06-2008. 33 Dr. Emanual Schäfer (1900-1974). Gestapo commander in Cologne from late 1940-1942. Afterwards "Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SDs in Serbia. Punished very mildly after the war. Thomas Roth. Die Geheime Staatspolizei Köln. Portal Rheinische geschichte, Bonn, 2017. http://www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de/Epochen-und-Themen/Themen/die-geheime-staatspolizei-koeln/DE-
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 13/34 deportation date was not changed: 6 December 1941 was fixed. That day they fled to Laren.34
Even if Karl David and Siegmund had managed to prolong their stay in Cologne for a few weeks, they would not have been able to gather a complete family around the Weihnachtstisch (Christmas dinner table). As one nephew and one niece had fled Germany earlier: Erich and Ilse Horn.
Erich and Ilse Horn
In 1938 I walked through the Siegfried Line and into Belgium,' Erich Horn (78) 'told me in the boardroom of Metafranc,35 a factory producing door and window fittings in the old district of Schaerbeek in Brussels. 'I was on the Place Roger, without money, I didn't speak the language, but I found work in the abattoir. In 1942, I left here to try to reach the non-occupied part of France. My wife, our three-month-old daughter and I were arrested. We managed to escape before we were deported. We got real papers from a "good" German and all three of us made it through the war.'
Erich Horn does not want to tell much more about himself. After the war, he built up his business by travelling all over the country with a sample suitcase. Now he has sixty employees in Belgium, spread over two companies and a business near Brescia in Italy. He lives soberly above his company in Brussels. Every morning at half past seven he goes downstairs. Once a month he visits his branch in Italy.
Erich works so hard not to have to think about the past,' says his sister Ilse Horn (80). Small and coquettish, impeccably dressed and coiffed, she tells her life story while lighting one cigarette after another.
'I studied chemistry in Bonn until we were forbidden to do so. Changing universities was hard enough for me, so I went to Bern, so that I could at least do my PhD in the same language. When I finished, I wanted to go to Erich in Brussels, to see if we could set up a company together. But everyone felt the war was going to break out: we didn't get any money. Erich fled to France, I wanted to go back to Switzerland where I at least knew people.
At the station near the border, I was arrested and imprisoned in Besançon. They took my mother's jewellery, which I wore under my clothes. From a camp in
2086/lido/57d131c2670e55.79095568 34 It is unclear what sources Terlingen bases his description of the events of 1936-December 1941 on. His description seems to contrast with the version by Hans van Straten, 1964/1990. However, it does not matter for the general outline what exactly happened: both authors date the Horn brothers' arrival in the villa in Laren to early December 1941. 35 Still existing in 2021; https://www.metafranc.com/
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 14/34 Pithiviers, I was put on a train to the east. Shortly after departure I managed to jump out of the moving train. As it turned out, I was the only survivor of that whole transport.'36
The story is told in an uninterrupted monologue. 'Because I have lost the literary ability to write it down myself.'
Ilse Horn: 'When I ended up in the embankment along the railway line, I was found by a Frenchman, who I managed to persuade to let me continue. Only by begging. I had only ninety francs37 in my pocket and was too dirty to handle. I came to a suburb of Paris where I accosted a nun in a church. My mother had always given a lot of meat to the Franciscan convent in Cologne. I thought: they must have noticed that up there. The nuns helped me on to Paris where an acquaintance from Brussels had an office. He arranged for me to go to Lille to the Crystal Palace brothel. I had to wait until the brothel opened. Frightened and alone I sat down in a cinema, where I listened to the song "Begin the Beguine" for the first time. When I hear it now unexpectedly...
Anyway, those ladies hid me for a night, fed me and smuggled me across the border the next day. On the train, I joined a curious company that unscrewed the benches to hide food. I got through all the checks without papers and without money. Thinking of my arrest at the French-Swiss border, I jumped out of a moving train at the station for the second time in my life and went into hiding in Brussels. I never left here again.'
Occasionally, IIse Horn hides her face in her hands: out of embarrassment, because she was pleased with the cigarette of a German prison guard, because in her despair she said Jewish prayers at a statue of Mary, or because she crouched down in the pink mirrored room of the brothel over a newspaper and threw her excrement out of the window.
'But that's not what you came for,' she says cheerfully in the now semi-dark room.
36 In 1941-1942, Pithiviers (France) functioned as a "Durchgangslager", a transit camp similar to Westerbork in the Netherlands. From Pithiviers, 6,079 Jews were transported to Auschwitz in six transports between 25 June and 21 September 1942, 115 of whom survived. Source: Pithiviers. Post from oblivion, Lotty Veffer Foundation, Amsterdam, 2015.https://www.pudv.nl/pithiviers/ | https://web.archive.org/web/20210526123142/https://www.pudv.nl/pithiviers/ 37 According to the official exchange rate at the time 4.50 Reichsmark / 6 guilders. The actual value was definitely less. Exchanges rates/value of money 1942. Droog Magazine, Eenrum, 2021. https://www.droog-mag.nl/hitler/1942/index.html#valuta
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 15/34 Erich and Ilse are the children of Bernhard Horn, one of four sons in the family of a butcher from Cologne.38 Bernhard's three brothers were called Karl David, Jacob and Siegmund.
Ilse: 'Karl David was a bon vivant, creative, full of life, he dared everything. I learned to play chess from him. He came to Bern when I was a student there and we spent an afternoon together talking in rhyme. Uncle Siegmund was the businessman, quiet and silent. The third brother, Uncle Jacob, was physically handicapped, he suffered from arthritis.'
Karl David and Siegmund Horn started a wholesale petrol business after the First World War. They developed a process to manufacture lacquers and stains and sold their successful business before Hitler came to power. The business changed hands several times, but still exists as Zweihorn-Werke, part of the ICI group in Hilden near Düsseldorf.39
The three brothers originally lived in the Jahnstraße in the Jewish quarter of Cologne, where there is now a sports school. They then bought a large villa in the Raschdorferstraße, which the neighbourhood called 'the little castle'. but the authorities forced them to move back to Jahnstraße in 1941. The castle burned down completely during a bombing raid in October 1944.
Ilse Horn: 'Onkel David, we never mentioned his first name, was very sensitive to female beauty and often had girlfriends. Onkel Siegmund lived for years with the same woman, Juliane Gutzeit,40 but my uncles never married.41 My grandmother, an old-fashioned potentate, disapproved of marriage with a shiksa. Later, the Nuremberg laws made marriage impossible. The widow, who was twenty-six years younger than Uncle David, must have had little trouble winding him round her finger. He must have talked Siegmund into it: we must go, a Baroness who guarantees us safety in Holland!'
38 According to some sources there was a fifth brother: Josef Horn (Cochem, 1887- Riga, 1941). But this is probably a mistake - as he is not mentioned on the grave monument in Muiderberg. One of these sources: https://www.geni.com/people/Josef-Horn/6000000015332196064 39 Now acquired by Akzo Nobel and still based in Hilden in 2021; https://www.zweihorn.com/ . The company produces stains and lacquers, mainly for wood products. This may explain why they were called furniture manufacturers in 1951. 40 No further details known, except that she was not Jewish. 41 According to genealogical sites, Karl David Horn had been married and had one daughter. We assume that information is incorrect, otherwise Ilse Horn would have told so in 1991.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 16/34 When Karl David and Siegmund left Cologne hidden under canvas in a lorry on the day they were to be deported, they promised their invalid brother Jacob to find a way for him to also go into hiding in the Netherlands. It never came to that. Early in 1942 Jacob was arrested by the Nazis and later murdered in Theresienstadt. On the advice of their children Erich and llse, Bernhard and his wife decided to flee to Brussels with their youngest son Karl Heinz. They were arrested near Eupen and also deported to a concentration camp. Brother and sister do not know which one; they never heard from their parents and their brother again.42
In Laren
Police Superintendent W.A.N. Boog
The first party that nurse Otto - the widow Schuiringa, Aunt Loeki, Frau Baronin - organised as soon as Karl David and Siegmund Horn were installed in Laren was for the Laren police, out of gratitude for finding their villa in immaculate condition. The only person who came to the party without his wife was the chief of police, superintendant W.A.N. Boog.43 He did not like it. Guarding empty premises was a normal task for the police, and he preferred to have as little to do with Schuiringa's vulgarity as possible. Boog is no longer alive, but he wrote
42 According to the Gedenkbuch Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945 Bernhard Horn perished in Auschwitz, date unknown. https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/en941321. Places and dates of death of his wife Martha Horn-Bier and their son are not known, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/en941428 and https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/en1665061 43 Willem Antonius Nicolaas Boog (Amsterdam, 10-9-1895 - Utrecht, 31-03-1969). The family tree of Laren ancestors. Laren, https://www.larensevoorouders.nl/ntg/getperson.php?personID=I19315&tree=tree1 [accessed 27- 05-2021]. See also: Inspector W.A.N. Boog honoured by his companions. De Gooi- en Eemlander, Hilversum, 16- 06-1949; https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:011239451:mpeg21:a0039 See also: Report on the arrest of Henri Benard van Straten and his wife Lientje Salomons by the wrongful inspector of police Boog in Laren. Jewish Monument. https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/584735/verslag-arrestatie- henri-benard-van-straten-en-zijn-vrouw-lientje-salomons-doo Elbert Roest and Teun Koetsier. Schieten op de maan. Gezag en verzet in Laren NH in WOII.. Publisher van Wijland, Laren, [2016].
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 17/34 down his impressions of the meeting.
'Mrs Schuiringa drank a lot and was terribly, even annoyingly, overbearing. ( ... ) "I'd like to have my picture taken with the fat one," she said, seating herself on the knees of sergeant Moes.44 ( ... ) It was noisy and strange, with an excess of food and drink. ( ... ) We all got an alpaca cigar box, cheap kitsch from a bazaar of fifty to one hundred cents, bought with money from Mrs. Schuiringa by brigadier Vreeswijk. ( ... ) A few weeks later, at Christmas, I received a large smoked eel with a bright red ribbon around the head; I sent it back.'
Before the war, the police force in Laren had already been discredited. In February 1934 - Nurse Otto was running her boarding house and Jan Schuiringa was still alive - a few dozen left-wing youths from all over Europe gathered in camp De Toorts (the Torch), which was run by the Trotskyist councillor P. van Praag.45 Sal Tas46 was still able to finish his welcome speech. Then the police picked up the participants and divided them among cells in Laren and surrounding towns. The foreign youths who had been accommodated in Blaricum, Hilversum and Amsterdam were allowed to leave the country at their own initiative and travelled to Brussels to continue the congress. Only the Laren police handed over four German boys directly to the German border police. Officially the deportation took place by order of mayor Van Nispen tot Sevenaer,47 who thought he was acting in the spirit of Minister of Justice Van Schaik.
44 Pseudonym. 45 Pieter (Piet) van Praag (1902-1977). Jewish socialist politician. Database Joods Biografisch Woordenboek. https://joodsbw.nl/id/P-7200 46 Salomon (Sal) Tas (1905-1976). Jewish socialist politician and journalist. Joods Amsterdam, https://www.joodsamsterdam.nl/salomon-tas/ 47 Hubert Louis Marie van Nispen van Sevenaer (1879-1958). Gelders Archief. https://permalink.geldersarchief.nl/1F2CEAA7A7964A2A993DEA89D831EDDD
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 18/34 But the then chief of police in Laren, the NSB'er J. Hoogvorst, made no mistake about it. We thought that an example had to be set,' he told the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. Boog, Vreeswijk and Moes were part of the arrest team.48
"The Laren police force: from left to right: Mijns de Leeuw (the last night watchman), A. Witjes, A.C. van Gilst, H. v.d. Berg, J. Hoogvorst, A.J. Hordijk, W.A.N. Boog and J. Frijters. Under the leadership of chief of police W.A.N. Boog (Mr. Hoogvorst was already retired), supplemented by younger officers, this corps has done a lot of good work for the community because of their anti-German attitude." Photo and text: Historische kring Laren; https://his- torischekringlaren.nl/johtje-vos/ accessed 26-05-2021.
Among the released youths was Herbert Rahm, who would later become known by his wartime pseudonym, Willy Brandt.49 He was briefly imprisoned in Amsterdam and remembers the fate of his four friends. Brandt: 'Hans Goldstein was released immediately and emigrated to Palestine. Kurt Lieberman and Heinz Hoose were given six-year prison sentences and survived the war. The fourth, Franz Bobzien,50 a teacher from Hamburg, was tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Sachsenhausen, where he died in 1941. I was lucky that they only had four cells in Laren.'
48 See also: Weer een beledigingszaak van Larens burgemeester. Het Volk, Amsterdam, 06-02-1935. https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMKB15:000891031:mpeg21:p00006 49 Willy Brandt (1913-1992), social-democrat, federal chanchellor of West-Germany, 1969-1992. Bundeskanzler- Willy-Brandt Stiftung / Norwegisch-Deutsche Willy Brandt Stiftung, Berlin/Oslo, 22-05-2018. https://www.willy-brandt-biography.com/biography/ 50 Franz Bobzien (1906-1941). As a prisoner, he had to clear unexploded bombs in Berlin. He was killed on 28 March 1941 in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The biennial Franz-Bobzien-Prize is named after him. It is awarded by the city of Oranienburg and the Sachsenhausen Memorial Centre to projects that promote democracy and tolerance. Dr. Horst Seferens. Franz Bobzien. Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten. Oranienburg, https://oranienburg.de/media/custom/2967_1683_1.PDF?1536838708 [accessed 27-05-2021].
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 19/34 Hoogvorst retired in 1940 and was succeeded by Boog, who hated National Socialism as much as anything leftist. At the beginning of the war, he was still a proud man, who had a lot of women's eyes on him when he led the St.-Jans procession with cape and sabre. When mayor Van Nispen tot Sevenaer stepped down in 1942 and was succeeded by the NSB member Knipscheer,51 letters for the mayor were opened secretly at the chief of police's home in order to conceal anonymous reports and to warn Laren residents of imminent arrests. With the help of radio technician Casper Tauber,52 Boog hid a microphone in the mayor's room in order to be as aware as possible of his plans. Inspector Boog is the policeman who helped the Laren resistance like no other.
Adjutant Moes was a macho type with a round head and a bull nose, who gave out fines to anyone who wore a strip of orange53 in their clothes during the war years. A former resident of Laren, Mrs. S. Mulder: 'I have seen how he lifted a Jewish girl who was taken away by her hair until she pointed out to whom she had waved: her little brother.'
Moes's hobby was to spy on couples making love. There are still couples in Laren who are proud of his fine for immoral behaviour. After the war he was banned from visiting the woods and moors by his chief of police.
During the war years, Brigadier Vreeswijk, the father of the large family, seemed to worry mainly about how to feed all the little Vreeswijks. The widow Schuiringa, who saw him as her counsellor since he acted as witness at her second marriage, was an excellent cash cow for this. She told friends that she paid for the priest training of Vreeswijk's son. She financed life insurance for a disabled child and took in two of his daughters. Vreeswijk gave hospitality to two non-commissioned officers of the Wehrmacht, although the police were exempt from this obligation.
Vreeswijk and Moes were Schuiringa's most loyal visitors during the war, according to elderly Laren residents, but the other members of the corps were also happy to be received. Langstraat, who worked for Moes, liked to drop in. Hordijk came there and Van Laar. Also J. Spaans, who laid the annual wreath on behalf of the resistance at the monument in Laren and who after the war was a member of the committee to judge alleged collaborators, occasionally went
51 A.W. Knipscheer (1883-1952) was installed as mayor of Laren at the end of November 1943. "The speeches during the installation were played on a loudspeaker outside on the steps, so that many residents of Laren could listen to this important event from far away. Soester Courant, Soest, 01-12-1943. https://archiefeemland.courant.nu/issue/SoesterCourant/1943-12-01/edition/null/page/1?query= He was arrested in May 1945. In 1948 he was sentenced to 12 year imprisonment. He died in detention in 1952; buried at Laren cemetery. 52 Probably a pseudonym, if this person existed at all. 53 Symbol of the Dutch monarchy.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 20/34 along with policeman Saakes to have coffee with the widow. Until the day I spoke to him, Spaans thought he had visited a real baroness. When I tell him about Lenie Otto's origins, he responds with relief: 'It has always amazed me how someone of noble birth could be so brutal and so foul-mouthed.'
When would Karl David and Siegmund Horn have realised that they were in an extremely bizarre hiding place?
When - after just getting used to the Laren police - they were suddenly confronted by uniformed compatriots, who were enticed by Frau Baronin's hausgemachte grüne Klöße?54
On 3 May 1942, every Jew in the Netherlands was obliged to wear a star of David. At the end of May Karl David and Siegmund Horn sold part of their art possessions ('collection Baroness S. te L.' was written in the catalogue) via Mak van Waay's auction house in order to have sufficient cash for a flight to Switzerland. They disappeared in mid-July. Of course, the widow Schuiringa-Otto was upset that summer when she realised that her friends had been murdered. The high-spirited Karl David, who had enjoyed her charms in Cologne, had become more distant in Laren. But the timid Siegmund actually blossomed. He started wearing shoes with a high heel to look taller, bought a corset to curb his embonpoint and courted the Baroness fervently.
Yet it would be hypocritical to conceal the fact that the death of the Horn brothers did not cause the widow only grief. Even more so: their death announcement came at just the right time. The majority of the Laren community knew that the Baroness had in fact been an obscure lodger in a nurse's uniform, but had sorely missed her regal gifts between 1939 and 1942. The widow Schuiringa did her utmost to compensate for this lack. Black market traders from all over the Gooi region knew how to find their way to her villa. Among them was Gerrit de Groot, her late husband's former stablehand, who had grown into a 'Heer Olivier' avant la lettre.55 The widow showered him with gifts: a riding crop, a silver tie pin, a travel set, an egg-shaped bedroom suite made of white lacquer, which was provided with his initials. When the widow Schuiringa's friend, Mrs Rijnders-Reneman, caught the baroness in bed with the much younger stable boy, she was embarrassed: 'Gerrit came to lie with me, Bertha, because he was so cold'. But most of the time De Groot walked around in the suits that the Horn brothers had made at the renowned tailor Geijer in Cologne, but had not taken with them on their flight. Eventually he ran away with Vreeswijk's youngest daughter.
54 Traditional German potato dish. 55 Heer Olivier" (gentleman Olivier), nickname of the Dutch swindler Arie Olivier (born 1939), who was active in the years 1970-2000.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 21/34 Dining at the widow's
Two or three times a week, the widow would freshen the white flowers for the man-sized portrait of Jan Jacob Schuiringa, and she would spend a day in the kitchen before friends, or the friends of friends, took their seats at her table under the ceiling angels. Some of them left it at just one visit: her neighbour, the NSB member H.J. Woudenberg, leader of the Nederlandsch Arbeidsfront,56 Eduard van Beinum, who during the war lustily carried on conducting business,57 De Telegraaf editor-in-chief J.M. Goedemans,58 Mayor Van Nispen tot Sevenaer and his successor, the NSB member Knipscheer. They found the widow too vulgar. She invariably ended the meal tipsy, hardly containing her sexual appetite, muttering obscenities with the nasal accent of the Saxons, who not without reason are called Plattfüsser der Völkerwanderung (flat feeters of the peoples migration). Her peculiar demand that all the guests should be tied together with a red ribbon from wrist to wrist also caused irritation. If you didn't watch out, you would pull the soup over your neighbour's lap before you had even finished your meal.
As the fine fleur from De Gooi region avoided the widow, ordinary Laren residents took their places. From policeman to poulterer, from taxi driver to grocer, from rubbish collector to gardener: all the elderly people I telephoned after a call in a regional magazine remembered - sometimes with a smile - the pork chops, chicken breasts and rabbit legs they were served in the villa. 'And that was during the war, sir.'
On the occasion of a Christmas party - I have not been able to find out the year - the widow had 400 home-made Christmas dumplings and 300 Christmas parcels delivered. If we set the average family size in Roman Catholic Laren at five, thirty-five hundred inhabitants (out of a population of seven thousand) benefited from the generosity of the pseudo-baroness. Is it strange that the 56 Hendrik Jan Woudenberg (1891-1967). Was imprisoned for collaboration from 1945-1956. See: Biografisch Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbeweging in Nederland; https://socialhistory.org/bwsa/biografie/woudenberg-h 57 Eduard Alexander van Beijnum (1900-1959). Was allowed to conduct again after the verdict of the 'Honor Council for the Art after 1 July 1945. Marius Flothuis, "Beinum, Eduard Alexander van (1900-1959)", in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland. http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn2/beinum [12-11- 2013] 58 J.M Goedemans (ca. 1884-1970). Goedemans (was) initially banned from working for the press for four years after the war; later on, this was reduced to one year. "De Telegraaf was banned from appearing for thirty years, but this was already lifted in 1949 by the Board of Appeal for the Purge of the Press. Thus, the Council was much milder than the Commission, which had wanted to declare De Telegraaf the sole scapegoat. According to the Appeals Council, the contents of the newspaper "did not contrast unfavourably with those of other papers". It was a relative judgment, which did not so much nuance the collaboration of De Telegraaf as bring the other newspapers up to Telegraaf level." Harry van Wijnen. Zuivering. NRC Handelsblad, Rotterdam, 22-04-1995.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 22/34 acquisition of the inheritance of Karl David and Siegmund Horn was a condition for the sad widow to be able to continue acting as a benefactress?
In the spring of 1943, H.L. Schuiringa-Otto had three pots on the fire.
In Leer, just across the border in East Frisia, she tried to get hold of eighty thousand marks through the courts, which Jan Jacob Schuiringa had lent at high interest - probably to evade tax in the Netherlands.
In Cologne, she litigated to obtain gold jewellery and a silver tea set (which had belonged to Queen Victoria) from Juliane Gutzeit, the former concubine of Siegmund Horn. Mrs Schuiringa had a notarial deed, stating that Siegmund had sold this part of his possessions (twenty-seven and a half kilo) to her friend Nicolaas van Vulpen for fl 12,500. A relatively low sum, but the Horn brothers wanted to go to Switzerland quickly and needed the money immediately.
In Nijmegen was the biggest haul: the chest with gold and platinum objects, bonds, shares and banknotes with a total value of almost one and a half tons.
But alas. The trial in Leer dragged on for nine years and was finally lost in 1947.
During the war, Mrs. Schuiringa travelled to Cologne three times - until she couldn't anymore. It is not possible to find out who accompanied her, because according to the hotel register, on her regular stopover in Hotel Europaïschen Hof in Krefeld, she had all her lovers registered as Mr Schuiringa. On her first visit she received two thousand marks from Frida Werntz, the Horn family's housekeeper, and some jewellery from Juliane Gutzeit. The second time, both women refused to receive the Baroness at home. The widow Schuiringa met them on a bench in park Marienberg. The name reminded her of her birthplace, it was supposed to bring luck. Frida Werntz: 'She demanded more money, asked for the crockery and threatened: "Wenn Sie mir die Sachen nicht mitgeben, schmeiße ich die beiden Jungen hinaus und können sie auf die Straße verrecken."'59 She already knew then that the Horn brothers had died.
In March 1943 Mrs Schuiringa visited Frau Werntz in the hospital with the warm greetings of Karl David and Siegmund Horn, who had arrived safely in a village near Sankt Gallen and were in urgent need of money. She did not get it.
And Nijmegen? There - with the deed of donation signed by Siegmund Horn and brigadier Vreeswijk and the death certificates of both brothers - the inheritance
59 “If you don't give me the things, I'll throw the two boys out and they can die on the street.”
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 23/34 had to be easy to collect.
But director Coster of the Amsterdamsche Bank did not trust the matter. The filthy copies which the widow waved, her contradictory stories (one time she had been engaged to Karl David, the other time to Siegmund; sometimes she asked for money on an account, the next time for the contents of a safe) made him decide to refuse every request.
A phoney SD agent
Again, sergeant Vreeswijk acted as a support and anchor for Mrs. Schuiringa. First, he sent the brother of sergeant Moes, who was a policeman in Nijmegen, to the bank. Without success. Then he introduced his friend Bram Kruse60 to the widow. Kruse had retired in 1939 as a fifty-nine year old brigadier-major police officer in Bussum and was eager for a lucrative job. In Nijmegen, he introduced himself as a member of the Sicherheitsdienst. Did the bank director know that he was punishable if he withdrew Jewish capital smuggled out of Germany from its rightful owner? Kruse took his role a little too far. When he went to the Divisenschutzkommando on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam to denounce the obstinate bank director, the occupying forces confiscated the cash and the gold objects from the chest in Nijmegen.61
In the villa in Laren, the first traces of the freneticism with which a life on credit had to be continued became visible. Mrs A. Steen, who ran the hairdressing salon Anjolien together with her sisters Jo and Lien: 'The widow still bought expensive perfumes, which I could no longer sell to anyone in Laren, to give away to everyone. But there was no way she would pay me. "As soon as I get die Erbschaft (the inheritance), Annie..." In the chair she was a bundle of nerves, shoulders shaking, hands fluttering. Then I said, "Woman, don't move for a minute..." Her hair grew thinner and thinner.
Grocer Wim Verver (82), who is still working in his shop: 'I didn't dare to do it, but my father was tough. He went to the widow on Sunday afternoon with a stack of bills and came back with paintings.'
'She became less and less able to cope with being alone,' recalls Vreeswijk's youngest daughter. If creditors came to the door, she would shut herself up in the pantry. "I am afraid, Lotti'. In the evening I had to sleep in her four-poster bed, the Pekingese lying at our feet'.
60 a pseudonym. Ghis real name was Abraham Cense (Rhoon, 1885 - Bussum 1965). Source: Abraham Pieter Johan Cense. https://web.archive.org/web/20210527090317/https://www.hansschouten.nl/apjc.htm 61 According to Van Straten, the Amsterdamsche Bank-Nijmegen also resisted the attempt of the Devisenschützkommando to confiscate the possessions of the Horns. Van Straten, Moordenaarswerk, p. 175.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 24/34
Her sister: 'I had to do that too, then I got the creeps. She rarely washed herself anymore, her skin became more and more yellow. The black hair, the crooked nose... A lot of people thought she was a Jewess. After "Nurse Otto" and "Auntie Loeki" she was now called the Christmas tree in the village. She bought a monkey-hair coat with two foxes on it on credit, hung herself with shiny stuff and made herself up as she went along.
The NSB'er Simon Batelaan (22),62 one of the bodyguards of neighbour Wouden- berg, still fell for it. He became the last lover of the Baroness (47) and fell into disfavour when he complained in January 1945 that his parents had not received a Christmas packet. Wim Verver attended the last dinner party. He still remembers the details - the roasted hare, the 'Kartoffelsalat', the red cabbage, the strawberries with whipped cream - because shortly after dinner the news came through that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide (April 30, 1945, 2.45 pm - JT). Verver: 'I left immediately, because I sensed the changing mood. Did I know how the NSB members and the police would react to the news?
After the war
Lonely years lay ahead for the widow Schuiringa. Her NSB friend Van Raadt disappeared as a political delinquent behind bars. Black-marketeers lost their position of power. The Laren police force was completely swallowed up by the purge, which ended in a fierce struggle between chief of police W. Boog and police sergeant F. Vreeswijk. Vreeswijk was supported by his son-in-law J. van Wolferen, who had been given a job as an administrator with the police at the beginning of the war. Boog's past as a resistance fighter was not as undisputed as he pretended. Vreeswijk, who was arrested immediately after the war, was so angry about this that he started a smear campaign against the chief of police, about whom - as he explained to the purge committee - after twenty-six years of cooperation, he could not tell anything positive. Jealousy because Boog became chief of police and he - with more years of service in Laren - did not? Revenge for the clear disapproval that Boog expressed for Vreeswijk's attachment to the widow Schuiringa? Did he think that attack was the best form of defence? After all, Vreeswijk had voluntarily taken Germans into his house and Boog blamed him for breaking into his office together with Van Wolferen in order to give the NSB-mayor a list of names of people who had to be taken away to do work on the land. And it was a fact that the same son-in-law played a bad part in the failed liberation of a resistance worker.
J. Bartelsman, who now lives in Colombia: 'I was arrested by the SD in October 62 Possiblyk Simon Batelaan, ca. 1923-1992. Source: http://www.den- braber.nl/genealogie/bronnen/familieberichten/poolster_overlijden.html
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 25/34 1943 for making and distributing false identity papers. Led by Boog, a tunnel was dug into my cell to allow me to escape. Van Wolferen heard about it and took me to another cell at gunpoint. I was transported and only released in July 1945.63
In De Gooi- en Eemlander was suggested that Boog had handed over a Jewish family to the Germans. In reality, he had warned the family the evening before - as he did with all imminent arrests - but his warning was ignored. On 26 September 1946, J.M. Goedemans, editor-in-chief of De Telegraaf (dismissed by the Germans in 1942) wrote to the tax lawyer of the Special Court of Justice: 'I asked the mayor, Van Nispen tot Sevenaer, whether I acted correctly if I made a move to the Gooi- and Eemlander in order to put an end to the writing. The mayor encouraged me to do so, saying that the campaign against Boog was the result of animosity within the police force. That this view was correct, became clear to me, when I spoke to the editorial staff and they told me that the messages came from a certain Van Wolferen, son-in-law of policeman Vreeswijk'. The fact remains that complaints were lodged against Boog with the purge committee. He was supposed to have been involved in the arrest of 'left-wing elements' who for years had protested violently against his contribution to the extradition of their German comrades to the Gestapo in 1934. As so often in liberated Holland, Vreeswijk's and Boog's possible misdeeds disappeared under the cloak of love - their mutual hatred did not diminish.
When Boog was rehabilitated in 1948, he was a broken man, undergoing shock and sleep treatments, and dragging himself with difficulty to his retirement.
'Now that there is nothing left to get from me, everyone stays away,' the widow Schuiringa complained to long Leen Smit, her boarding house helper from the 1930s, with whom she was still in contact. She picked up the thread and travelled to battered Cologne. Not by limousine this time, or with a stopover in Krefeld, but (with her Pekingese on her lap) in the uncomfortable truck of contractor Eggenkamp, who often had to be in Nijmegen for reconstruction work. The last part of the journey she got a lift from British soldiers.
Juliane Gutzeit and Frau Wentz were still alive. They no longer possessed a tea set or jewellery, but they did give Frau Baronin a surprise: a niece of Kart David and Siegmund Horn had survived the war and was living in Brussels.
IIse Horn: 'In the autumn of 1946, an ugly woman came to my door, accompanied by a man in a lead coat who introduced himself as Kriminalkommissar. "I am your
63 Art painter Jan Bartelsman (1916-1998). Source: Artitst De Valk. https://web.archive.org/web/20210527093531/https://devalk.com/kunstenaars/diverse/bboe.html Bartelsman's story raises eyebrows. Digging a tunnel in a police cell?
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 26/34 aunt,' the woman said, 'Baroness von Schuiringa von Otto. I was going to marry your uncle Siegmund. I looked after him and your Uncle Charley during the war." She asked if I would just sign something unimportant so she could collect an engagement present in Nijmegen. "A formality," she added. The woman went pale when I went to call my brother - she obviously knew nothing about his existence - and she started moaning and crying when we referred her to our lawyer.
That lawyer was the legendary Mr J. Koeleman64 from The Hague. After three years of litigation, he managed to get Ilse and Erich Horn the remainder of their uncles' inheritance.
Ilse Horn: 'I was present when in 1939 Uncle Siegmund deposited a large sum of money in number account 1010 with the Union Suisse in Bern, but after the war that bank said it knew nothing about it. I would have liked to have had some cash in 1946, because at an auction in Brussels I recognised the large oval bed of white lacquer that had belonged to my uncles. I could not buy it.
Bills, demands, restraining orders
Bills, reminders, restraining orders. At least eight lawyers that Mrs. Schuiruigu had worn out in the course of her life demanded their money: mr. Vonck from Amsterdam, Van Vessem from Amsterdam, Franssen from The Hague, Bungarten from Cologne, Diets from Baarn, Goudsmit from Amsterdam, Jacobs from Laren and Polak from Groningen.
The widow's last hope was placed in shady business agents, who had to take on Mr Koeleman.
To strengthen her case, the widow tried to collect recommendations. Former Prime Minister Gerbrandy didn't respond. Father Henri de Greeve, famous for his mendicant sermons on behalf of the Eastern European fellow-Catholics, did. He wrote: 'I got to know Mrs. Schuiringa in Hilversum and Laren. She knows how to sacrifice herself for her friends; she lives for charity, as it were, and is ready to help anyone. Every year, she receives many underprivileged children at home. She tries to make up for what the toddlers lack. She has made a perfect impression on me'.
On March 6, 1950, Mrs H.L. Schuiringa-Otto registered at the marriage bureau Van Tricht in Hilversum. In vain.
On June 10, 1950 she placed advertisements in the Haagsche Post and in Else-
64 Mr. J.J. Koeleman. Details unknown. Active until at least 1964.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 27/34 vier, in which a cultured lady sought an energetic life-partner. She received no response.
She applied to older gentlemen, who were looking for a reliable housewife. On August 25, 1950 her last hope was dashed. R. Kappius from Zutphen informed her that a family member was going to take care of his father. That same day, the widow received a request to be present at the bankruptcy filing at the office of Mr Oldenvelt in Laren on 4 September 1950. Her debts were estimated at 130,000 guilders. The middle class in Laren had advanced her almost a tonne in anticipation of her inheritance. Hotel Europa-ischen Hof received 6000 guilders. She owed broker Ten Kroode 11,000 guilders (personal loans, kept hidden from business and family, he too had been appointed her sole heir). Vet Van Raadt turned out to have tinkered with his girlfriend's Pekinese for 7500 guilders in a couple of years.
The gas hose is the only solution for her,' said brigadier Vreeswijk to long Leen Smit.
At ten minutes to six on Queen's Day 1950,65 sixteen-year-old Henri van der Zee, now a correspondent for De Telegraaf in Rome, was walking with his father along Brinklaan in Bussum. It was warm and they were tired from the fair: time for a glass of soda.
The bustle in the café was suddenly drowned out by a screeching scream, a bang, the clinking of glass. When father and son ran outside, they saw a small, black woman lying in the street next to a twisted bicycle. Her eyes were closed, blood was running from her nose, her mouth opened and closed like a fish mouth. A bit further on, a KLM bus with a dented front end stood against a tree. Next to it, trembling driver Jaap Tump, who transported staff from Schiphol to the Gooi region every day. The woman suddenly came out from behind the trees, drove for a while in the middle of the road and suddenly swerved right when I wanted to pass.
An accident or suicide?
The fact that Mrs H.L. Schuiringa-Otto drove off screaming long before the collision, points to the latter.
Police officer W. Rigter: 'She had been very depressed for some time and cycled aimlessly through the village.'
65 August 31, 1950, the birthday of the in 1948 abdicated queen Wilhelmina. In later years the Queensday was April 30, the birthdays of her daughter and granddaughter, queen Juliana (1948-1980) and queen Beatrix (1980-2013).
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 28/34 Veterinarian Van Raadt: 'That morning she had been with me in Naarden. She crawled on the ground and begged for a means to kill herself. I refused.'
Domestic servant Rietje Groen: 'The last few days she cried a lot. In the afternoon when I was cleaning the silverware that needed to be sold, she was in tears again. At five o'clock she left without saying a word.'
Frits Marek, cycling home, also believes it was suicide. At a quarter to six I saw her shoot off onto the road, a car could only just avoid her. I said: "You better watch out, lady," but she snapped back: "What are you getting at?”'
Those were the last words the widow Schuiringa exchanged with anyone. A few minutes later her suicide attempt succeeded, although it still took quite some time before surgeon H.J. Jens in the Majella Hospital was able to sign a form: H.L. Schuiringa-Otto, 52 years old. Died 31 August 31, 1950 at 22.00 hours. Cause of death: severe concussion, fractured skull.
On 3 September 1950 Tijmen Fokker rolled the red granite stone of the grave of Jan Jacob Schuiringa at the general cemetery in Laren. On Monday 4 September, with the help of a squeaking hurdy-gurdy, he lowered a simple pinewood coffin into the pit with the help of a squeaking winch. The inscription 'Family tomb' on the tombstone was finally correct, but there was no money to chisel Lenie 0tto's name into the stone.
On a weekday, Brinklaan in Bussum is full of twinsets, deux-pièces and pearl necklaces.
You see the Boulangerie et café Français, where you can eat a croissant opened with an electric bread saw and where the menu only mentions boissons. You pass the shop windows of Jan des Bouvrie,66 you pass the Goois Golf Centre.
Such an avenue.
Just beyond the police station, built on the spot where Anton Dreesmann senior67 received his family at his country house Looverhof, is a row of oaks. This is where Lenie Otto chose to take her life. After the bus rammed her, she wandered a few more metres in the direction of Naarden and finally fell down in front of a house, where years later the grandson of her friend Van Raadt would settle as a veterinarian. She lay facing the convent on Brinklaan, which bears the same name as the village where she was born in the Strasse des Friedens: Marienberg.
66 Jan de Bouvrie (1942-2020), posh Dutch interior designer. 67 Anton Dreesmann (1854-1934). German-Dutch co-founder of the V&D department stores company (1887-2015).
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 29/34 That brings luck! she would have said.
When, a few years after her death, the Amsterdam-Amersfoort motorway was built, her villa in Laren was given the address Vredelaan (Avenue of Peace).
The discovery of the bodies
Forty years ago, on 22 October 1951, in the garden of widow H.L. Schuiringa- Otto, the corpses of Karl David and Siegmund Horn were exhumed.
After the death of the widow, gardener Gieskens, in his foolishness, trumpeted the fact that there was still trade hidden in her garden. That had to dig deep for someone with so little copper, was something he had laughed about it with those Jewish men. Of course it was strange that he had to come back on Sunday evening to fill up a hole that was already partly filled. But the widow paid a guilder for this time instead of eighty cents an hour. Investigator Van 't Wel told chief of police Boog immediately after Mrs. Schuiringa's death that he had been advised to have the widow's garden dug up. Then you will be one step higher, at the expense of a colleague,' Noordenburg, a poultry-keeper, had told him. Boog started to cry when Van 't Wel informed him. After the commotion during the purge, he wanted to retire in peace and quiet; he could not handle a new confrontation with his corps. Yet, after a year full of wild rumours, he was forced to take action. This was caused by a letter from Fiod68 inspector W. van der Poel to the public prosecutor in Amsterdam. Van der Poel investigated the administration of the widow Schuiringa. 'I have heard an alarming stream of rumours.'
Monday the twenty-second was a chilly, misty day, full of confusion. This was caused by Tijmen Fokker, who had hidden a few pork chops and chicken bones in the ground the previous evening, after he was ordered by chief of police W. Boog to be present at the widow's villa at 09.00 hrs. with shovel and sounding board. Then at least we will find something,' he must have thought. The gravedigger 'from Laren, proud bearer of the Resistance Cross, detested the police and had a bizarre sense of humour.
They found Karl David Horn on his back, shot in the head, Siegmund lying on his stomach with his feet against his brother's shoulders. He was bound with belts and webbing and had a smashed skull. Traces of arsenic were found in both bodies.
Jetty Boog: 'Now he's going to die,' my father cried out of his wits when he came
68 FIOD, Fiscale Inlichtingen- en Opsporingsdienst. Police branch of Dutch tax service.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 30/34 home that Monday. 'He' was brigadier F. Vreeswijk, who was arrested in the afternoon by his former colleague W. van 't Wel.
In the detention centre on Vondelstraat in Amsterdam, F. Vreeswijk confessed that he had written a false deed for the widow Schuiringa. He also admitted that on a Sunday in July 1941 he had received six thousand guilders from her, as well as a pistol that had been fired once and in which a second cartridge had got stuck. Yes, officer, that was the pistol he had lent her earlier that month. No, Mr Prosecutor, he had not kept the six thousand guilders, but had given them back a day later. That there happened to be the same amount in his savings account was because his wife and children knitted hankies from confiscated wool during the war.
I am not a criminal...
From the official report: 'I am not a criminal, even though I have done something that could be classified as forgery with regard to this document. (Suspect sobs.) You did not know Mrs Schuiringa, otherwise you would know that she had the qualities to force someone to do what she wanted - even against his will.'
On Monday evening at 10 o'clock, veterinarian J. van Raadt was arrested for the second time in his life. According to the official report he confessed that he had not taken Karl David and Siegmund Horn to the Belgian border. That Jewess with the dachshund legs had forced him to make this statement. Before he was transported to Amsterdam, inspector Boog asked: 'Joris, why such a woman ... ?' The chief of police noted: After some unintelligible mumbling, he, Van Raadt, made a significant gesture by putting the thumb of his right hand between two fingers (index and middle finger) of the same hand. I understood that he meant that he had had a sexual relationship with that woman.'
In Amsterdam, the vet repeated that he had made up the story about his trip to Putte-Stabroek with Karl David and Siegmund Horn in order to help the widow Schuiringa get her inheritance. Until his lawyer Mr Burwinkel spoke to him. Then Van Raadt retracted his earlier statements and maintained that he had indeed been the Horn brothers' driver. He had delivered them - at night, in the middle of the heath, after shouting the password Josephine - to a man waving a red handkerchief.
After his arrest, Sergeant-Major B. Kruse admitted that he had forged a Todesschein (death announcement) at the request of Mrs. Schuiringa and had tried to obtain the Horn brothers' property in Nijmegen as a fake Gestapo. He called in the Divisenschutzkommando and travelled with the widow to Brussels
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 31/34 (2 and 3 October 1946, Hotel Atlanta: Mr. and Mrs. Schuiringa) in order to confound IIse and Erich Horn as Kriminalkommissar.
Vreeswijk , Van Raadt and Kruse stayed in custody for most of October, November and December 1951, but all three were released before the end of the year. The evidence for murder or complicity in the murder of the Horn brothers could not be produced. For what they did confess (forgery) no prosecution was brought. State investigators Arie van Ettekoven and Rinus Udo questioned dozens of people involved, but it was as if the people of Laren had agreed at a joint meeting to keep a low profile. Vicious letters were sent to De Gooi- en Eemlander, who dared to write about 'the Jews K. and S. Horn', instead of 'the Israelites'. Chief Rabbi J. Tal had to come into action to explain that the name 'Jew' was not a swear word.
Paragnostics
In January 1951, public prosecutor H. Wassenbergh decided to call in the psychic69 Gerard Croiset,70 who came from Laren. He visited the house, saw the mortal remains of the Horn brothers, met the suspect Vreeswijk, gardener Gieskens, sergeant Moes and inspector Boog, but had no visions. His successor, psychocopist M.B. Dijkshoorn71 from Breda, had more success. In front of the astonished eyes of the criminal investigation department and the local police, he first performed an act with his dowsing-rod in the garden of the Rijksweg-Oost. Then he was able to tell that the Horn brothers had been poisoned with arsenic supplied by a vet the night before their death. The brothers became nauseous and lost consciousness. A man in a forest ranger's uniform with a broad, German head with a gag on the back of his head shot Karl David Horn through the neck and throat. The second bullet ricocheted. Siegmund awoke from his unconsciousness. A scuffle ensued in the garage of the villa, where he was stunned with a hard blow and then handcuffed. Just as the man and the woman were about to bury him alive, a policeman drove up and was forced to help with the gruesome burial. 'Can this guy be trusted?" the dent-hat had asked. The widow, grinning: 'I have this wimp in my power!
The detectives were baffled by the never-publicised details that Dijkshoorn knew and by his acting talent. 'It was as if we saw Brigadier Vreeswijk and Mrs
69 It was not until 2002 that the Board of Procurators General, which is in charge of the Public Prosecution Service nationwide, banned the use of soothsayers and clairvoyants in investigations. see: Harrie Timmerman. (Nog steeds Tegendraads. NPE, Eenrum, 2018 (2de herziene druk), blz. 199. 70 Gerard Croiset (1909-1980). Renowned Dutch psychic who was especially good at his p.r. See: Piet Hein Hoebens. De professor en de paragnost. Skepter 1.3, 1988; https://skepsis.nl/croiset/ 71 M.B. (Rien) Dijkshoorn ('s-Gravenzande, ca. 1920 - ? ). Internationally operating clairvoyant. His memoirs appeared in My passaport says Clairvoyant. Hawthorn Books, New York, 1974 (Dutch translation: Mijn beroep is helderziende. Verteld door M.B. Dijkshoorn aan Russel H. Felton. Gottmer, Haarlem, 1976.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 32/34 Schuiringa come to life,' they rapped. They then questioned everyone in the Gooi region who had a forest ranger's uniform - without result.
During his investigation, Mr H. Wassenbergh was informed by various parties that Jan Jacob Schuiringa had fallen ill for the first time in his life shortly after receiving his mother's inheritance and just before his marriage: stomach cramps, nausea, hair loss. The public prosecutor decided not to have an autopsy performed on the corpse of the horse trader. If he had been poisoned with arsenic, the suspected culprit was lying - close by - in the cemetery.72
The silence of Laren
The silence of the people of Laren was also prompted by a number of mysterious events. On 29 September 1942, Gerritje Hendriksen died unexpectedly.73 She had been a domestic help to the widow Schuiringa at the time of the Horn brothers' murder; nobody had ever seen her sick before, ever. .
Vegetable trader J. van Gelder (black Joop), who in his green piloclothes and in his inseparable dent-hat visited the widow Schuiringa a lot at the beginning of the war, emigrated to Australia just before the Horn brothers were exhumed. On a quiet road there, he drove his motorbike into a tree.
Jan Kalis, who regularly visited the widow (when he was not in prison because he was in the habit of leaving Gooi restaurants without paying), committed suicide in the Eem river, according to the police report.74 J. Ossewaarde (uncle Joep), a loyal guest in the Schuiringa household, worked at the Armbrust pharmacy and just after the war he boasted to several friends: 'If that woman doesn't pay the bill, I'll have her garden dug up'. He was found dead in his room with closed doors and windows and a burning butane stove.75
Night watchman A. Stam (nicknamed Squint Stam) wrote to the public prosecutor that during one of his rounds in the summer of 1942 he had observed 'peculiar facts' that merited further explanation. According to his children, he was run over by a white Mercedes on the way to Amsterdam, which has never been traced. Neither have the papers Stam carried with him.76
72 The newspaper reports from shortly after Schuiringa's death state that he had been incurably ill for some months. Doctors at that time were very alert to arsenic poisoning, because of several high-profile arsenic poisoning cases in the Netherlands in 1880-1920. Given the murders in 1942, it is obvious to suspect "Nurser Otto" of poisoning her husband in 1935, but it is significant that the suspicion is based on rumours that did not circulate until 1951. 73 Gerritje Hendriksen. Died at the age of 63 on 29-09-1942 in Baarn. Death certificate, Utrechts Archief 74 Death certificate untraceable. 75 Death certificate untraceable. 76 Death certificate untraceable.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 33/34 Since they were awarded the remainder of the inheritance, llse and Erich Horn heard nothing more from or about Baroness H. L. von Schuiringa von Otto in Brussels. Until, incomprehensibly blunt, a letter from Amsterdam plopped on their doormat: could it be that their uncles K. and S. Horn had reddish hair? Presumably their bodies were found in Laren. llse Horn had the greatest difficulty with the journey, which meant a confrontation with the border police. Her stomach turned at the sight of a uniformed nightclub doorman. When the judicial authorities closed the investigation into the murder of Karl David and Siegmund Horn without prosecution, Ilse and Erich buried their two uncles in the Jewish cemetery in Muiderberg. Next to the grave they erected a monument to their murdered parents, their brother Karl Heinz and uncle Jacob.
A few weeks ago, Ilse Horn heard Lenie Otto's life story for the first time. I told her what happened before, during and after the war in Laren and how the fake baroness came to her end.
'God's mills grind slowly, but they grind finely,' she quoted her mother.
Jeroen Terlingen. The baroness and her Jews in hiding. Vrij Nederland 1991/Droog Magazine 2021. Page 34/34