Arthur Graaff

Graaff grew up as the son of a decorated Dutch anti-Nazi resistance fighter, Bart Graaff, who spent three years in Nazi captivity and had several other relatives who were anti-fascists, among them an uncle who was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945. Two distant relatives from then Southern Rhodesia, the brothers Dewhurst and Stafford Graaff, fell in action as voluntary pilots in the RAF combating the Nazis. In 1956 the family fled to the US on account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Living in Mountain View, California, Graaff was received by co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel-prize winner William Shockley.

Arthur Graaff (Hilversum, 1948) is a Dutch journalist, author, whistleblower, educator, publisher and anti-fascist. He is known for successful campaigns to end the remembrance of Nazi war criminals on the largest Nazi cemetery in Europe (Ysselsteyn 2021), to end an exhibition promoting Nazi design in 2018, and organizing funding for the beleaguered Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje in 1993. He is sometimes referred to as the most publicized anti-fascist in the Netherlands.

Wanting to start in journalism, he applied as a copy boy at the national daily De Volkskrant (1967-1971) and progressed from there. He signed on as laundry boy on the passenger liner SS Rotterdam for the summer of 1967 to visit New York. Later he also worked for the national tv news NOS-Journaal, was managing editor of three Dutch regional weeklies for publisher Weekmedia, wrote for the Amsterdam daily Het Parool, campaigning against big pharma, also in the Dutch apothecaries official journal ('Pharmaceutisch Weekblad' . He alo wrote for the national daily Trouw, for the Financial Times and became the Dutch correspondent for two Polish weeklies The Warsaw Voice and Nowa Europa as well as writing for the British Content-wire.com. In 1984 he took a job as Dutch copy editor for the official journal of the European Union in Luxembourg. He traveled to a.o. the US, Japan and Uganda for his work and met a.o. web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee, internet protocol developer Vint Cerf and Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

As an educator he lectured in communication, writing and PR and history from 1980 through 2015. A.o. he taught for four years at (then) Holland College in Diemen and set up the first ever PR course in Poland in 1991. He was a guest lecturer in communication at the Warsaw University and the Warsaw Business School. He also taught courses on WW-II at the so-called 'people's universities' in Hilversum, Amersfoort, and Bussum.

In 1983, he started a publishing company Food Publications Media VOF in Amsterdam with two other Dutchmen, and co-wrote and published 'De 50 beste Indonesische restaurants in Nederland' ('The 50 Best Indonesian Restaurants in the Netherlands').

He lived and worked in Warsaw from 1992 to 1996 where he started another publishing company, Trend Inter Media Sp.z.o.o., publishing thematic diaries for Polish high school and university students. There he also published the first eco-diary in cooperation with Greenpeace and started a support campaign for the European association of Judges. In 1998 he started writing on European and webaffairs for the Dutch and English editions of the ICT-weekly Computable and reported from Germany, the UK, the US and Japan until 2002.

Graaff initiated and managed some dozen campaigns since 1992. Two master students have chosen him as subject for their theses, 'Vorwärts' ('Forward', on Nazi-reenactment, 2021) by Sanne Jussen, and 'Vrede met de vijand' ('Peace with the enemy', 2022) by Sjoerd van Hoenselaar, on the campaign to end honoring Nazis on the large Nazi-cemetery in Ysselsteyn.

In 1992, together with his friend dr Michiel Roscam Abbing (with whom he later wrote 'Rembrandt for Dummies'), he set up a protest website called 'Geen.betuwelijn.nu' ('No Betuweline,now') against the construction of a new railway goods connection between Rotterdam and the German border near Arnhem. However, the line was constructed.

In 1993, he set up a campaign to support the last daily in Sarajewo, Oslobodjenje, and with contributions from the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dutch dailies Het Parool, Trouw, de Volkskrant, cartoonist Opland, the Dutch journalists' union NVJ, Reporters Without Borders and others, and collected over €20,000, some bullet proof vests and computers for them. The paper survived.

In 1999, together with ten other well-known Dutch journalists and publicists, he started a whistle-blowing protest against the major Dutch daily publisher, then Perscombinatie, who without agreement or prior consent started exploiting all free-lance material of their contributors under the brand name 'Persdatabank' (later 'FactLane', now integrated in Lexis-Nexis); eventually the court condemned the publisher to pay the free-lancers €2.3 million. From this campaign a new trade union emerged, the Freelancers Associatie).

In 2009 he initiated the news website 'Nieuws-WO2' ('News-WW-II') with the help of fellow journalist and NVJ-board member Tom Posch providing about three news articles on WW-II per working day (until 2017). He also started the website NLnazivrij.tk ('NLnazifree.tk'). He uncovered a.o. that on the basis of Yad Vashem-figures, per capita during WW-II the Dutch had rescued by far the most Jews in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. i.e. on average one person saved on 1,800 Dutch, for which they received about 20% of all Yad-Vashem-recognitions for saving Jews. He also covered all court sessions of the Aachen trial against Heinrich Boere, a convicted Dutch SS-murderer who had managed to escape to Germany, where he had lived freely until 2009. Graaff interviewed the judge and prosecutor, and wrote a blog about the trial, called 'Aken Blog'. His father, a former Nazi prisoner, lent him his car, and paid for the travel (4,000 kms) and lodging. The Council of Europe invited him for an educational conference of a week in camp Auschwitz. He also spent a week visiting camp Dachau and later organized an exposition of his photos there.

As a book author, he wrote six books, including 'Encylopedie voor Iedereen' ('Encyclopedia for Everyone', co-author, 12th edition).

He set up or took part in the following campaigns related to combating Nazism. In 2014, he became spokesperson/campaigner for the union of anti-fascist former resistance fighters (AFVN.nl), until February 2022, when they chose to support Putin, which Graaff did not. In this role, with the AFVN Graaff managed to have two Nazi trade fairs closed and a German commemoration adapted. Many of Graaffs campaigns were supported by the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR). At the Prague-conference in 2016 the FIR awarded the Dutch anti-fascist Max van den Berg, with whom Graaff had collaborated in Holland, with their Michiel van der Borcht-prize for his life-long achievements. Graaff, then still with the AFVN, was one of the speakers/delegates who praised him there.

Also, he writes regular columns for Dutch leftist/socialist blogs Krapuul.nl (since 2014, now some 400 articles) and Konfrontatie.nl and is an irregular interviewee and contributor to letters columns and opinion pages of newspapers

In 2017 the Dutch tv-channel VPRO included Graaffs campaign against Nazi-remembrance on the war cemetery Ysselsteyn in an installment of 'Nicolaas op Oorlogspad'('Nicholaas on the war path'). In 2017, the Dutch national tv-channel NPO did the same, together with the regional channel L1, called 'Het zijn maar Duitsers' ('Theye're only Germans'), also on Ysselsteyn.

From March 2020 till March 2022, he was national rapporteur on Nazism, fascism and racism to the UNHCR (voluntary), appointed by the AFVN and five other Dutch organizations. This coincided with the arrival of Covid in the Netherlands and lacked results. This led to a smear campaign of some 70 articles over more than two years, untruthfully and negatively framing Graaff as a liar and imposter. Graaff received several serious threats. In Nov 2021 a woman was condemned by the court for launching a death threat against him.