CONTENT WARNING: This post discusses collaboration with Nazi Germany, assassination, and large-scale reprisal killings. Purpose: historical education and remembrance only.
Amsterdam, 21 February 1943: The Assassination of Hermannus Reydon – the “Goebbels of the Netherlands”
Among the tens of thousands of Dutch NSB members, Hermannus Reydon (1892–1943) was one of the most dangerous – not because he carried a gun, but because he controlled words.
From journalist to propaganda chief
A committed National Socialist long before the war, after the German invasion in May 1940 Reydon was rapidly promoted to:
Editor-in-chief of several NSB newspapers
Secretary-General of the Department of Public Information and the Arts (de facto Minister of Propaganda)
The man who censored all press, radio, books, films, and theatre
Reydon was directly responsible for:
Flooding the country with antisemitic propaganda
Silencing every dissenting voice
Creating the cultural climate that justified the isolation, dispossession, and deportation of Dutch Jews to Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Sobibór
The assassination and Nazi revenge
To the Dutch resistance, Reydon was the highest-priority civilian target.
On 21 February 1943, members of the CS-6 resistance group broke into his Amsterdam home.
They shot his wife Johanna dead on the spot and critically wounded Reydon.
He survived the initial attack but never recovered, dying six months later on 21 August 1943.
His death triggered Operation Silbertanne (“Silver Fir”) – a secret reprisal programme personally approved by Himmler and SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Harster.
Result: Over 50 innocent Dutch citizens – lawyers, professors, doctors, writers – were dragged from their homes and murdered in the following months.
Hermannus Reydon did not die on the battlefield or on the gallows after the war.
He died in a hospital bed from resistance bullets – but his death cost the lives of more than fifty others.
His story is a reminder that the machinery of occupation relied not only on soldiers and camp guards, but also on journalists, writers, and artists who used words to sow hatred and legitimise genocide.
They too were criminals. And history never forgives.