Willem Arondeus (Naarden,22 August 1894–Haarlem,1 July 1943) was a homosexual Dutch artist and author, who joined the anti-Nazi resistance movement during World War II.
Willem Arondeus was born in Naarden, as the son of an Amsterdam tradesman in fuels. His parents were Hendrik Cornelis Arondeus and Catharina Wilhelmina de Vries.
Arondeus realized that the demand by the Nazi occupiers that all Jews register with the local authorities was not, as the Nazis claimed, for their own safety, but rather so they could be deported to the Westerbork concentration camp and from there to the death camps in Poland. A concerted operation was underway to hide Jews among the local population, with various underground organizations preparing forged documents for Jews. Arondeus was a member of one such group, Raad van Verzet (Resistance Council). Within a short while, the Nazis began to uncover the false documents by comparing the names with those in the local population registry. To hinder the Nazis, on March 27, 1943, Arondeus led a group in bombing the population registry in Amsterdam. Thousands of files were destroyed, and the attempt to compare forge documents with the registry were hindered. Within a week, Arondeus and the other members of the group were arrested. They were executed that July. In his last message before his execution, Arondeus, who has lived openly as a gay man before the war, asked, "Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards."
In 1945, after the liberation of the Netherlands, Arondeus was awarded a posthumous medal by the Dutch government.
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