Friedrich Weinreb

Friedrich Weinreb (18 November 1910 – 19 October 1988) was a Dutch economist and narrative author.

Weinreb grew up in Scheveningen, Netherlands, to which his family had moved in 1916, and became notorious for selling a fictitious escape route for Jews from the occupied Netherlands in the Second World War. When his scheme fell apart in 1944, he left his home in Scheveningen and went into hiding in Ede. He was imprisoned for 3½ years after the war for fraud as well as collaboration with the German occupier. In his memoirs, published in 1969, he maintained that his plans were to give Jews hope for survival and that he had assumed that the liberation of the Netherlands would take place before his customers were deported. The debate about his guilt or innocence—called the “Weinreb affair”—was very heated in the Netherlands in the 1970s, involving noted writers, like Renate Rubinstein and Willem Frederik Hermans. In an attempt to end this debate, the government asked the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation) to investigate the matter. In 1976 the institute issued a report (a part of which had already been leaked to the press in 1973), which determined that his memoirs were "a collection of lies and fantasies," and that his collaboration had caused 70 deaths.