Dries Riphagen

Bernardus Andreas "Dries" Riphagen (7 September 1909 – 13 May 1973) was a Dutch gangster and 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.

Riphagen would gain the trust of Jews by promising to safeguard their belongings, primarily jewellery, until the conclusion of the war, only to defraud them of their belongings and notify the SD of their location. After the end of war in Europe, he faked his death and went into hiding. He deposited the stolen Jewish belongings and money in an undetermined bank in neutral Switzerland and fled to Argentina, as had many Nazi officers.

He secretly returned to Europe at some point between 1950 and 1970, to withdraw the ill-gotten jewellery. Dutch authorities issued an arrest warrant and bounty on Riphagen in 1988 but it later transpired that he had died at a Swiss private clinic in Montreux in 1973.

Biography

Early life Riphagen was born as the eighth child into a Dutch family in Amsterdam. Riphagen's father worked for the Royal Dutch Navy, while his mother, a homemaker, died when he was six years old. His father married a second time but did not take care of the children because he was an alcoholic. At the age of 14, Dries Riphagen was sent to the notorious merchant-navy training center "Pollux". From 1923 to 1924, he went to sea as an ordinary seaman. He stayed in the United States for two years working for Standard Oil, during which time he came into contact with local criminal circles and learned their methods. His subsequent nickname, "Al Capone", came from this time in the United States.

After his return from the United States, Riphagen joined the National Socialist Dutch Workers' Party (NSNAP, aimed to be the Dutch version of Hitler's NSDAP), an extremely anti-Semitic minor party whose aim was that the Netherlands should become a province of the German Reich. He became one of the foremost figures of the Amsterdam underworld, known among the pimps on the Rembrandtplein, and developed a taste for jewellery, precious stones, gambling, as well as dealing in used—sometimes stolen—cars.

In May 1946, Riphagen was held in Huesca, Spain, because he lacked the necessary personal papers. He was imprisoned but on the intervention of a Jesuit priest he was released on bail, under the order to get his papers rectified. He obtained a Nansen passport and Frits Kerkhoven provided him with clothes and shoes in which diamonds that he had deposited with Kerkhoven were hidden. When he was about to be extradited to the Netherlands—he was now living in Madrid—he flew to Argentina on 21 March 1948 with a friend. His contact address there was also that of a Jesuit priest, but nothing is known of any connection with the ratlines. The Dutch ambassador in Buenos Aires, Floris Carcilius Anne Baron van Pallandt, made a request for extradition, based on lesser offences such as vehicle theft and robbery and which, according to the Argentine judiciary, were already time-barred and for which the submitted evidence was inadequate.

In 2016 the film Riphagen by director Pieter Kuijpers was produced in the Netherlands, the main character being portrayed by actor Jeroen van Koningsbrugge. The screenplay was written by Thomas van der Ree and Paul Jan Nelisse, based on the book by Middelburg and Ter Steege. In 2017, Dutch TV station VPRO broadcast the film as a three part series.