Wally van Hall

1. Wally van Hall The Nederland resistance banker Clarita-Efraim pps

3. Wally came from a large family. He became a sailor and later a banker. When the war broke out in May 1940, he lived with his wife and children in Zaandam.

4. Wally and Tilly van Hall and the children Mary-Ann, Attie and Aad, 1940 City Archives Amsterdam

5. Banker and "oiler" Wally van Hall was more than a banker of the resistance. He was also a binding figure. In 1944 he took the initiative to De Kern, a weekly meeting of resistance groups that dealt with people in hiding and forgeries. Armed actions and liquidations were also discussed here. Because of his charm and leadership, Wally always managed to come up with a lubricated solution for thorny issues. This earned him the nickname De oilman. The combination of banker and "oil man" made Wally van Hall a central figure in the resistance. This meant that he was constantly on the road from 1943, stayed at hiding places and surfaced everywhere as a spider in the web. Headers of the NSF The National Support Fund (NSF) was founded in 1943 by Wally van Hall and Iman van den Bosch (1891-1944). They have both been working since 1941 for the Zeemanspot, a fund for helping women of sailors led by the Rotterdam captain Abraham Philippo. When the resistance increased in 1943 and more and more people needed help, Wally van Hall and Iman van den Bosch decided to expand the help. The most important leaders of the NSF were: Wally van Hall, Iman van den Bosch and Andreas J. Gelderblom. They met in Utrecht every week. Iman J. van den Bosch was director of foreign expedition at Philips in Eindhoven. He became involved in espionage activities and went into hiding in Groningen in October 1942 to escape arrest. Van den Bosch was arrested on October 18, 1944 and shot on October 28, 1944 in Westerbork. Andreas J. Gelderblom also worked at Philips, as chief of the Industry Department. He led the NSF in the south of the Netherlands.

6. Gijs van Hall played a crucial role in taking out millions of loans and was the inventor of the exchange trick with treasury papers. After the war, Gijs van Hall was mayor of Amsterdam from 1957 to 1967. The money flow from the NSF De Zeemanspot provided secretly monthly payments to around 6,000 women of sailors and naval personnel who no longer received a salary. To whom, how much, why; everything was kept up to date. The NSF worked more or less in the same way, but supported many more people: Jewish people in hiding, men who refused to work in Germany, families of imprisoned resistance fighters and, for example, officials who were fired for their anti-German attitude. In the course of the war, more and more money was needed to finance the resistance. In May 1945, the NSF - the resistance bank - had distributed more than 83 million guilders * among many tens of thousands of people who needed help and resistance groups. Almost nobody knew where all that money came from. Income and expenditure were strictly separated, so that the two would not endanger each other in the event of discovery. Only Wally van Hall knew everything from both sides of "the bank". Together with his brother Gijs, he managed the income department of the NSF: the Disconto Institute. Gijs van Hall

7. Counterfeit treasure chest, 1944.

8. Notebook with notes of payments on behalf of railway strikers and resistance groups, 1944/1945.

9. There were 23 NSF districts throughout the country, with district heads, cashiers, administrators and money walkers. They mainly focused on spending. Altogether about 2000 employees who transported suitcases of money, brought pay bags to home, supported resistance groups or did the bookkeeping. The monthly payments to thousands of families, spread across almost the entire country, were registered with receipts and kept in a card system. In addition to supporting the victims of the occupation, the NSF financed countless resistance groups, such as the Personal Evidence Center, the National Organization for Helping People in Hiding, espionage groups, illegal newspapers, fighters and later the Dutch Forces.

10. Managing an illegal bank To keep the flow of money going, Wally van Hall insisted that from now on only large amounts of at least 25,000 guilders should be borrowed. He also hoped to reduce the risk of discovery. Together with his brother Gijs, he introduced a system into a complex web of illegal loans. All loans were administered in code. Everything was also precisely recorded on the expenditure side of the NSF, where most NSF employees worked. Applications for support were checked. And all payments were registered, so that account could be given to the Dutch State after the war.

11. Guarantee from London Wally and Gijs van Hall borrowed millions from banks. They promised the bank directors that they would get their money back after the war. In January 1944, the NSF received an official guarantee from the government in exile. The Dutch government guaranteed 30 million guilders. A secret agent delivered this document on microfilm to Wally van Hall, although he had been ordered to deliver it to Iman van den Bosch. In London it was thought that Van den Bosch was the leader of the NSF. But the secret agent did not have an address from Van den Bosch and managed to find out the address of Walraven van Hall in Zaandam. In the last months of the war, the expenditure of the NSF increased explosively. The government in London raised the guarantee to 80 million guilders. In May 1945, the NSF had contributed 83 million guilders to the resistance. Forged identity card of Wally van Hall, 1944

12. Bank fraud for the good cause On 17 September 1944, the Dutch government in London called for a strike by the Dutch Railways to halt the transport of German troops. The strike lasted more than seven months. The NSF paid the salaries of the 30,000 strikers. How did the NSF obtain so much money at the end of 1944? De Nederlandsche Bank - back then at the Rokin in Amsterdam - kept treasure chests: short-term government loans that were worth 100,000 guilders each. Wally and Gijs had treasure chest prizes copied. They exchanged these for the real ones, with the help of C.W. Ritter, principal cashier of De Nederlandsche Bank. They could now cash in the real promisses at other banks. For example, 51 million guilders were taken from the safe of De Nederlandsche Bank. (See the info chart for detailed information on the exchange trick.) Accounts were opened at five banks in the name of the Fund companies, main group Industry. Gijs van Hall had "borrowed" this name. It seemed like a rich fund from which wages were paid. In reality it was empty. The NSF cashed in on behalf of this fund. In notebooks the amounts were kept under the code name "Aunt Betje".

14. After the war. Immediately after the war, the settlement of all financial transactions of the NSF was started. Loans were repaid by the Dutch State and the exchange trick with the treasury promises was straightened out. The NSF - now a foundation - still had 22 million guilders in cash after the war. With this money, financial contributions were made to the construction of the National Monument on Dam Square and the establishment of the National Institute for War Documentation. The NSF Foundation was dissolved in 1953. A monument to Walraven van Hall Wally van Hall was arrested on 27 January 1945 by the Germans on the Leidsegracht. Initially they did not know who they were in, because they were looking for a certain Van Tuyl. However, Wally was betrayed in prison. Wally van Hall was shot on 12 February 1945 on the Jan Gijzenkade in Haarlem. In March 1945, the Resistance newspaper Free Thoughts contained an In Memoriam, which Walraven van Hall described as "one of the leaders of illegality, whose authority was not disputed by anyone." Shortly after the liberation, Walraven van Hall was reburied at the Eerebegraafplaats in Bloemendaal. Now, 65 years after the liberation, he has received a monument at an appropriate place, on Frederiksplein in Amsterdam, diagonally opposite De Nederlandsche Bank: a bronze tree lies like a felled giant beside the fountain. Look at:

15. Walraven van Hall was arrested by the German and executed on 12th February 1945. On September 3rd 2010 in honor of Walraven van Hall a monument was revealed on the Frederiksplein in Amsterdam. It is situated next to the Dutch Central Bank where Walraven van Hall, in favor of the resistance , organized the largest bank fraud in Dutch history. The monument is a fallen tree of bronze. It symbolizes Walraven van Hall as a "fallen giant". The artist is Fernando Sánchez Castillo from Spain.

16. Walraven van Hall Monument The monument is located in Frederiksplein (Frederiks square), under and among the trees. You would not directly notice it as it looks like a fallen tree, cutting down from the tree stump. This life size fallen tree is surrounded by a half round wall and outside the wall, is the tree stump. This bronze monument is designed by Fernando Sánchez Castillo, a spanish artist. The monument is dedicated to the memory of Walraven van Hall, a Dutch banker and resistance leader during the occupation of the Netherlands in World War II

17. YadVashem Hall van FAMILY Hall van Walraven (1906 - 1945 ) Rescue Story Hall van, Walraven Walraven van Hall, known as Wallie, and I.J. van den Bosch* initiated the NationaalSteunFonds (NSF, National Support Fund) in 1942. Wallie was responsible for the western part of the country, which included Amsterdam. According to estimates, the NSF supported about 8,000 Jews during the second half of the war. Wallie, a broker from Zaandam, North Holland, was a member of a prominent Dutch family. His career included a stint in the Royal Dutch Merchant Marines and in 1942 he was asked to join the Zeemanspot (Seamen's Fund), the illegal fund that supported the families of men who were at sea when war broke out and were now fighting on the Allied side. The Zeemanspot was the precursor of the NSF. Under Wallie’s efficient organization and leadership, the NSF extended its horizons beyond the Zeemanspot, its new objective being to provide financial support to Jews and non-Jews who had been singled out by the German authorities and were therefore living underground. In order to protect the organization from upheavals in the case of arrest of key people, Wallie separated the departments dealing with income and expenditure. The members of one branch knew nothing about the other one. Only Wallie had the complete picture. Several of the members of the organization were asked to collect money from their fields of business acitivity. Finally, the big banks were approached and asked to extend loans of 200,000 florins. A method was devised to handle these loans without their appearing on regular balance sheets. The banks were told that the Dutch government-in-exile was the guarantor of these loans. The money was distributed in cash. During all this time, Wallie and van den Bosch traveled across the country soliciting funds for the NSF from banks and individuals. The NSF had a special subdivision called Vakgroep J that had been established in late 1943. Vakgroep J managed funds for between 800 and 900 Jews in hiding. Wallie headed it and it had a board of directors. The money was distributed to small illegal groups, of which there were over 50 in Amsterdam alone. On January 27, 1945, Wallie was arrested by the SD, but they were unaware that they had caught the notorious van Tuil (Wallie’s alias). However, another prisoner betrayed him and thus his fate was sealed. He was executed on February 12, 1945, near Haarlem. Van den Bosch had been executed a few months earlier. All in all, 85 of the people involved in this work were caught and executed by the Germans. On September 26, 1978, YadVashem recognized Walraven van Hall as Righteous Among the Nations.

18. BANKER TO THE RESISTANCE The greatest resistance story never told In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, bankers Walraven and Gijs van Hall face their biggest challenge when they decide to help finance the Dutch resistance.

19. Netherland’s Academy Award Entry for Best Foreign Language Film: ‘The Resistance Bankers’ An Interview with director JoramLürsen of ‘The Resistance Banker‘/ ‘Bankier van het Verzet’Slow and mysterious, music and water segue into men filing into a conference room to hear a story they know nothing about. Water, the national symbol of Holland, a land forever waging a strategic battle with water, plays a thematic role in this film that only at the end becomes clear in its meaning of kinship and brotherhood.Coming from an aristocratic Dutch banking family, brothers Walraven and Gijs van Hall risk their families and futures to slow the Nazi war machine by creating an underground bank to fund the Dutch resistance in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Actually they rob the Dutch National Bank, something that to this day is not discussed as such although the heroism of the men has finally been acknowledged.SydneysBuzzz: I have never heard this story before. Why is such an important and really gripping story so unknown? JoramLürsen: This is a true story but even in The Netherlands it is not known. The Dutch resistance was the richest of all the resistance movements in Europe during World War 2. Walraven van Hall knew everyone in the resistance but no one knew him as he went by many different names. In 2010 (65 years after his death) a monument was erected and the producer read about it and wondered why he didn’t know anything about this before. Either the government did not want to reveal that bank fraud had been so successful or the Van Hall family, an old aristocratic family, did not want the notoriety and as is typical of the Dutch, they did not want to brag or even talk about themselves. Also finance is not a very sexy subject. That was, in fact, the biggest problem in making this film understandable. How they laundered money. The financial transaction in the movie was only one of 17 such transactions… The focus was more on the tension between Walraven and his wife and his brother.

20. I thought the drama and mystery lay in the recurrent scenes of water whose meaning was only understood at the end as well. JL: We felt we needed something poetic and mysterious. The main theme is, in fact, about the two brothers. You see it in the final dilemma of Gijs who must decide whether to take all the money to bribe the Nazis (who in those last days were stealing everything they could) to free his brother. He chooses not to do it and sacrifices his brother to the greater cause. How much do you know about the hero? JL: Walraven did not really want to be a banker like his father. He wanted to be a sailer and actually did sail around the world as a helmsman on large ships. But his eyes were bad and was not able to join the navy. His father in the 30s told him to go to his brother on Wall Street and when the two of them returned to Holland, he got a small bank to run. Dutch National Bank today is the Allard Pierson Museum

21. Because it was known how much he loved water and sailing, in 1942 he was recruited by the Seaman’s Fund to set up the first underground finance scheme. The merchant marines were offshore when the Nazis invaded Holland and they did not go home, but went to England and set up the resistance with the Dutch government which was also there. Wally was moved by what was happening in Holland to his Jewish colleagues and with racist bankers collaborating with the Germans to fund the Resistance by buying false shares in the Seaman’s Fund. The expenses of running the Resistance were covered by loans that were guaranteed reimbursement at the end of the war by the Dutch Government in exile.

22. The financing part of the story was very complicated for me but I did understand that Walraven was so good at asking for loans from friendly bankers that he raised more than the original goal of 500,000 guilders. JL: The Germans knew there was money circulating secretly and so they changed the system and got rid of large bills. By the end there were 50 million guilders from bank loans to help other organizations which were not associated with his original plan. Other organiztions were separate and he combined them all into one National Resistance Organization. It was a huge achievement and took great skill. It was a very big secret. He had six names and no one knew who he was until September 1944. The Allies invaded Normandy in July that year. They were in Antwerp, Belgium by September and everyone in Holland thought the war would end, so the government told the railroad to stop helping the Germans by going on strike. The head of the railway was very arrogant and also a collaborator with the Nazis. Walraven had to rob the bank to pay for the strike. And after all that, the Allies did not liberate the Netherlands.

23. In light of the all-too-recent massacre in the U.S. which left nine murdered Jews and two murdered policemen in an attack on a Pittsburgh Synagogue and in light of the demagogue’s response to it, this film seems like a possible blueprint if we need to fund resistance in a possible similar scenario today. With all the money manipulation in the stock market and banks today, this story does not seem as far-fetched as it was in the 1940s when it took place. JL: Yes there is a lot to be learned from this story. The locations were stunning. I would like to know where they all were so I could visit them one day. I especially liked that elevator with no doors where you step in and out while it is moving. JL: The Resistance Banker shows aristocratic and palatial art deco settings in both Netherlands and Belgium. The scene with the elevator was actually shot in several different buildings in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Most World War 2 films are very gray and show 19th century buildings. But I wanted to capture the look of the time which showed wealth and the bank and the architecture of that time.

24. The elevator, called a Paternoster, still works. We found it at the Amrat Hotel on Prinz Henrik Kade in Amsterdam, one of 17 other cities in Holland and Belgium with great architecture where we shot the film. The Dutch National Bank today is the Allard Pierson Museum. The architecture was important because the story told about two very wealthy men who could have gone to the UK any time like their own government did but they stayed and continued to live in wealth …though with less and less heat, food… I noticed the film was made with support of the Netherlands Film Fund and NL Film and the Belgian Tax Shelter and the Evangelistic Church of Holland. You must have done so much research on this story… JL: Yes I like research. I made another film called A Noble Intention shot in 1888 Amsterdam which called for a lot of research as well. I would love to see that film too. I adore Amsterdam and lived there for a year myself. JL: The van Hall family was also very important. Walraven’s son, Aad, is now 83 years old. He was a little boy in the film. It was made together with the still living members of the family, written in cooperation with them who still feel the pain of losing their father. The family was often on the set. They were very sweet and respectful of us as filmmakers. While the biographies of the brothers has been written, the family is still very private. We offered to show the family the film first and imagined about 30 people attending. But there were so many members of the family — about 300 people — all van Halls — -so we rented the beautiful art deco Tuchinski Theater.

25. Thank you for this! Friday’s screening at Soho House where I did a 20 minute Q&A with you was a great success. At the reception afterward, one Academy member said he was glad his wife did not come as she was very sensitive about the subject. She was German while he, the husband was Jewish. Her own father was killed while working with the German Resistance. Another couple of Academy members who met five minutes after I met them, discovered both of their mothers had survived Dachau. The Resistance Banker

26. Monument for those who died in the Second World War

27. . Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walraven_van_Hall https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/es http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Van_Hall-11#Biographies https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/nl/exposities http://walravenvanhall.nl/#home www.walravenvanhall.nl http://walravenvanhall.nl/#album-page2 http://walravenvanhall.nl/onderwijs/WvH_ Clarita-Efraim pps: www.clarita-efraim.com chefetze@netvision.net.il May 2019