Adriaan van Hees

Adriaan Nicolaas Johan van Hees (3 May 1910 – 2 December 1976) was a Dutch actor and member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB). Van Hees was trained in Amsterdam and Germany, and spent a few years in theater and film. He quit professional acting to join the NSB, giving speeches and overseeing the organization's theater division, arguing that the change he thought necessary in Dutch drama had to come from political revolution. He became depressed and suicidal when he discovered he was part Jewish; still, he tried to join the SS but was denied. After the war, he was banned from the stage for ten years, and sentenced to five years in prison.

Biography Early career Van Hees was born in Rotterdam, the son of a theater director from Haarlem. He attended the Theaterschool in Amsterdam from 1927 to 1929, but left for Germany, claiming the quality of education was inferior in Amsterdam. In Germany, he attended drama schools in Düsseldorf and Berlin. From 1931 to 1934 he worked under with the , a company that also featured Piet Rienks and . After an argument with van der Lugt, he left for Berlin again in March 1933. When he returned in May 1933 he joined the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB), and argued that the drastic improvement necessary in Dutch theater could only come about after a revolutionary change in Dutch politics and society.

In July 1933 van Hees toured the Dutch West Indies with the company De Dietsche Spelers and from 1933 to 1935 he performed in various plays, but he quit the theater in 1935 to focus exclusively on his party work for the NSB. He suffered from severe depression when he found out, in 1934, that his grandfather on his mother's side was Jewish, making him one quarter Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws. He contemplated suicide

He performed in a few pre-war movies, and participated in theatrical events organized by radio stations. For the NSB paper he wrote theater reviews in which he connected theater with national-socialism. In 1937–1938 he did a fourteen-month tour of the Dutch East Indies with Cor Ruys's company. With the rank of opperhopman, van Hees led the singing school of the Weerbaarheidsafdeling (WA), and he functioned as theater advisor to the NSB leadership, writing a book, Nieuw tooneel voor een nieuw publiek ("New drama for a new audience"). an NSB member who later became mayor of Zaandam and then Alkmaar, and they had a son the next year. In July 1942 he began working for the Nederlandsche Omroep, the Dutch media outlet installed by the occupying Germans in 1940 on the model of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft. One of his radio programs was a course in elocution.

Despite his non-Aryan background he volunteered in August 1942 for the Waffen-SS unit Germania. By August he had been banned from the stage for ten years.

Van Hees had intended to leave Europe if the Germans won the war. He was sentenced in 1949 to five years in prison; In his defense he said he joined the NSB to "exorcise a demon". He died in Vlissingen in 1976.

Filmography Malle Gevallen (1934) as Piet Janssen (the Klit) (1935) as Heer Bergman Jonge harten (1936) as Hans Zomerzotheid (1936, based on a Cissy van Marxveldt book) as Gerrit-Jan (final film role)