Gerrit van der Waals

Gerrit Hendricus Maria van der Waals (24 April 1920 – 11 August 1948) was a Dutch officer of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and a member of the wartime resistance.

After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, he escaped from a German POW camp in 1943 and later was active in anti-Nazi resistance in Hungary. Arrested by the advancing Soviet forces in late 1944, he was imprisoned in Moscow, accused of aiding anti-Soviet forces, and died there in 1948. He was posthumously awarded the Dutch Bronze Cross.

Biography Van der Waals was born in Surabaya, then part of the Dutch East Indies. (Meanwhile, in July 1940, van der Waals was commissioned as tweede luitenant—Dutch equivalent to second lieutenant.) He was sent to the POW camp Stalag 371 at Stanisławów (now Ivano-Frankivsk). After trekking more than 100 km on foot across the Carpathian Mountains, he reached what was then neutral Hungary, arriving in Budapest on 1 September 1943.

During the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, van der Waals, along with other Dutch officers who had arrived after him, engaged in resistance activity—described in various sources as , Dutch, —and cooperated with members of the Swedish diplomatic mission involved in aiding Jews in Budapest.

Accounts of his subsequent fate vary, but all agree that he was arrested by Soviet forces toward the end of 1944. Having failed in earlier attempts to reach Allied lines via Yugoslavia or Romania, he tried again in December 1944 by contacting Soviet troops advancing south of Budapest, hoping for help. In exchange, he provided information on German-Hungarian troop dispositions and anti-aircraft defenses around Budapest (see Siege of Budapest).

For years Soviet authorities denied knowledge of his fate. Only on 28 August 1955 did they acknowledge that Gerrit van der Waals had died in Moscow; his remains were cremated, and the location of the urn is unknown. In October 1958 the Dutch (War Graves Foundation) received permission to place a symbolic stone (cenotaph) bearing his name at Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

Legacy His fate has been compared to that of the better-known Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who organized aid to Jews in Budapest and was likewise seized by the Soviets.