Betje Wery

Elisabeth Wery (26 August 1920 – 16 October 2006) was a Dutch Nazi collaborator who is best known in the Netherlands for collaborating with the Nazi (SD) to locate as many Dutch Jews as possible and have them delivered to Nazi concentration camps during the occupation.

Biography Wery was the eldest daughter of a family of two children to Roosje Boers (1896–1997) and Ferdinand Werij (1894–1969). Her mother was Jewish and her father half-Jewish. She attended domestic science school for two years and advanced primary school for three years. In early 1940 she worked in a Bata shoe store in her hometown of Rotterdam.

Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, Wery was initially registered as fully Jewish but successfully challenged this registration. She stated that her maternal grandmother Kaatje Mauritius, born 1864, was an illegitimate child of Arie de Vries, a non-Jew from Utrecht. Her lawyer came up with two very old witnesses from Mauritius' hometown of Gorcum who claimed that "everyone in Gorcum knew that Kaatje was the illegitimate daughter of de Vries". The campaign was successful, as her status was converted to half-Jewish.

In January 1941 Wery met Franciscus Antonius Cornelis "Frans" Tuerlings, whom she married on 17 September 1941. The couple went to live in Vught. Shortly before that, she had joined the Roman Catholic Church so that she would not be given "mixed marriage" status. Nevertheless, Wery was arrested a year later because she was not wearing a star badge and sent to Amersfoort concentration camp. A day later, she was released thanks to her husband's connections. She was able to obtain a Sperre, a document which exempted her from deportation for the time being. In May 1943 she was officially given the status of half-Jewish so that she no longer had to wear a star.

In prison, she had met the former SD , who had been convicted of murder. They married in November 1959 and had two children together. They started a marriage mediation agency, first in Schiedam and from 1967 in Ede, where the family also lived. Wery made headlines again when she introduced single women to Henk van der Meijden's TV-Privé television program at the end of 1979. As a result, her war past was exposed. TROS decided not to ask Wery to appear anymore.

Wery died on 16 October 2006.

Film In September 2016, Riphagen, a film about the life of Dries Riphagen, premiered. The film is based on the book of the same name by journalists Bart Middelburg and René ter Steege. Middelburg interviewed Wery several times in 1989. In the film, Wery is played by Anna Raadsveld.