Jacoba van Tongeren

Jacoba van Tongeren (14 October 1903, in Tjimahi near Bandung, Dutch East Indies – 15 September 1967, in Bergen, Netherlands) was a resistance fighter, the founder and leader of Group 2000, a resistance group during the Second World War.

Jacoba van Tongeren is the only woman to have created and led a resistance group during the war.

In 1916, the van Tongeren family returned to The Netherlands and from 1916 to 1922 Jacoba went to the Dutch Reformed Gymnasium in Amsterdam.

This was a difficult time of social readjustment: after all, she had never lived in a family before, never had been to school and never been with peers.

Still, these were the years that she made a good connection with her brother, Herman van Tongeren.

Next, she was trained as a nurse in Rotterdam.

She could not complete her education; a streptococcal infection thwarted her ambitions in 1928.

Instead, she spent seven years in a health resort in Groenekan and the tuberculosis wards in Amersfoort.

Here, she met her life companion Nel Wateler.

On return to Amsterdam, she worked as a social worker for Central Care for the Unemployed.

At the beginning of the Second World War, she could still travel around the Netherlands as a social worker, in spite of the restrictions placed on ordinary citizens by the Nazi occupiers.

In 1939 Jacoba's father had received the titular rank of Major General.

From the moment the war broke out, he was in danger, also in no small part because of his rank as Grand Master of the Freemasons for the Grand Orient of the Netherlands.

The occupiers considered Freemasonry “inimical to the people”.

Grand Masters had already been executed in Belgium, Rumania and Poland.

Hermannus van Tongeren called on Jacoba to take the membership lists and other important masonic documents to safe locations.

She could do this delivery work because as a social worker she faced no travel restrictions.

The founders of the resistance paper Vrij Nederland got her involved in resistance work.

Vrij Nederland was one of the first underground publications.

The young producers of VN were attempting to make contact with the Freemason's Grand Master via his daughter, Jacoba.

The plan was to set up an espionage group, which would inform the Dutch people by countering German propaganda.

Initially, Hermannus was reluctant to join but he then changed his mind and gave a typewriter and a mimeograph for the production of VN's first edition.

After the first edition had been published (on 31 August 1940), he increased his support, offering not only money but also contacts within the masonic network.

When that required travelling, he would ask his daughter Jacoba.

As a result, she became acquainted with many masonic brothers and this was to benefit her resistance work in the following years.

In October 1940, her father was arrested by the Germans.

He died in Sachsenhausen in March 1941.

In the same spring of 1941, the Germans arrested sixty-five people who had been working for the underground press.

Most of them worked for VN.

Jacoba lost all her contacts within that publication.

She broke all further contact with VN, to ensure that no one would hear about the contacts between the paper and the Freemasons.

In 1941, the Germans abolished the Central Care for the Unemployed.

All social workers were redeployed by the Dutch Churches at ‘Special Family Care’, which was run by the Churches.

In 1990, Yad Vashem honoured Jacoba van Tongeren as Righteous Among the Nations.

Jacoba van Tongeren was the daughter of Hermannus van Tongeren and Jeanne Holle.

In her younger years, her father would raise her and this would have a bearing on the rest of her life.

Her father was an engineer in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and as such responsible for building railway bridges in Sumatra, in the former Dutch East Indies.

As a child, she would live together with her father in a moveable home for army officers in the tropical rainforest, close to the bridge under construction.

She never went to primary school but received what we can call a ‘military education’ from her father.

Part of that involved inculcating military norms and values, such as great discipline and sense of responsibility.