Anda Kerkhoven, student and resistance fighter
A pacifist until death
Door Rob Siebelink
By Rob Siebelink
It must have been dark the night of March 19, 1945, when, a little over three weeks before Groningen was liberated, a German Jeep was driving along the Hereweg in a southerly direction. Just before the village of Glimmen, the car turned right and stopped at the Quintus woods down the road.
Three Dutch members of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and their two passengers got out of the car and walked into the woods, the latter two in front. Then, in quick succession, two gunshots. Gerrit Boekhoven, also known as Henk de Groot, leader of the De Groot resistance group, and UG student Anda Kerkhoven, a member of that group, were dead.
Their bodies were thrown into a shallow grave and covered. In June 1945, months after the liberation, one of the SD members pointed out the grave and their bodies could be identified.
Double murder
This cold-blooded double murder is described in the book Anda Kerkhoven, een student in het Groningse verzet (‘Anda Kerkhoven, a student in the Groningen resistance’), written by father and son duo René and Jesper Westra (born 1950 and 1992, respectively), who both once studied at the UG; René studied biology in the late sixties, while his son studied history approximately forty years later.
The more we discovered about her, the more we admired this young woman
~ The authors
Father Westra became fascinated with the resistance fighter’s short but eventful life when he attended a lecture on Kerkhoven in the Academy building. His son Jesper also became interested and together they dug into the archives, which ultimately resulted in them writing a book.
‘The more we discovered about her, the more we admired this young woman with her strong principles against violence which ultimately cost her her life’, they write in the book’s introduction.
Traces of Anda Kerkhoven
The reception room at Groningen city hall was named after her.
The new classroom building north of the UMCG will be called the Anda Kerkhoven Centre (AKC). It will house the Faculty of Medical Sciences and the pharmacy department from the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
There are three memorial plaques in the Quintus forest, dedicated to Kerkhoven, Boekhoven, and the latter’s wife Diny Aikeman (who was arrested together with her husband and shot to death on March 24).
There is a Stolperstein in front of De Ranitzstraat 3a, where Kerkhoven lived and was arrested.
The Academy building features five memorial stained-glass windows made by Ploeg artist Johan Dijkstra. Window V pictures Kerkhoven, together with Aletta Jacobs.
Dutch East Indies
Anda Kerkhoven, born Melisande Tatiana Marie, was only twenty-five years old when she was shot to death; she would have turned twenty-six just a few weeks later. She had moved to Groningen from the Dutch East Indies, where her rich parents owned a quina and rubber plantation on Java, in 1938.
That wasn’t a coincidence, but a choice, albeit not an entirely voluntary one. She had started her medical studies at the Medische Hogeschool in Batavia (currently Jakarta) in 1937. But Kerkhoven, a devout vegetarian, refused to participate in animal testing. The UG was the only Dutch university that would allow her to study there without performing any vivisections.
She moved into a room above a bicycle repair shop in the Oude Kijk in ’t Jatstraat and joined Magna Pete, the student association for women.
She didn’t go unnoticed among the students of Groningen, although she was a bit of an outsider, likely due to her Indonesian looks (the Westras discovered her paternal grandmother had been Chinese Indonesian), but also because of how passionate she was. Her principles were so strict that her fellow students said she ‘wasn’t entirely connected to reality’.
Student magazine
Not long after she’d arrived in Groningen, she joined the writing staff of Der Clercke Cronike, where she wrote about all the things she was passionate or worried about. One of those things was pre-war Nazi Germany.
In 1938, she wrote: ‘In Germany, the majority of the population supports the persecution of Jews. An example of insanity. Anyone who uses injustice and violence to extend their own life loses their honour. Things that aren’t allowed aren’t allowed, no matter the cost.’ She ends the article with one of her own strong principles: ‘Vivisection shouldn’t be allowed, either!’
Things that aren’t allowed aren’t allowed, no matter the cost
~ Anda Kerkhoven
Not everyone appreciated the uncompromising views she published in Der Clercke Cronike, especially after she continued to defend not using violence when Austria and Sudetenland had been incorporated into Nazi Germany and a new European war was inevitable. Pacifism, she said, didn’t mean she ‘couldn’t stand the sight of blood’; instead she had ‘a sense of justice and honour, as well as love, for natural beauty’.
‘I love freedom. More than any patriot. But I hate fighting, because wars aren’t fought against actual tyrants; instead they are fought against victims, the conscripted soldiers’, she wrote. This was followed by her now famous phrase: ‘No tyrant will be able to subdue me, make me obey him or commit moral suicide by using combat methods I detest against either him or his slaves.’
Awe
UG historian Klaas van Berkel, who wrote Universiteit van het Noorden: vier eeuwen academisch leven in Groningen (‘University of the North: four centuries of academic life in Groningen’), described Kerkhoven as someone who ‘lived in awe of everything that was alive’, but also as someone ‘who said and did the right things for the wrong reasons’: ‘She was what communists would call a useful idiot.’
The book’s authors feel this assessment is too rash. ‘It’s true that Anda was incredibly principled, and she always took into account that she would have to pay the ultimate price for those principles: death.’
Nevertheless, even they are critical of another piece she wrote for Der Clercke, in which she tries to stand up for Jews but ends up falling for the same anti-Semitic trap that Nazi propaganda uses.
Anda always took into account having to pay the ultimate price
~ The authors
In the article, she wrote that because the Jewish people have always been persecuted, they were forced ‘to gain power through the use of money…’ People criticised her heavily for this. ‘A true showcase of nonsense’, one reader commented. ‘The writer demonstrates a strong case of anti-Semitism that even comrade Julius Streicher would be praised for.’ Streicher was infamous for publishing the extremely anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.
Even when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940, Kerkhoven stayed true to her pacifist ideals. ‘Anyone who can risk their lives for a military defence can also do so for a pacifist one!’ she wrote in one of her last pieces for Der Clercke, which was discontinued by the German occupiers in 1941.
That same year, Kerkhoven graduated from the university with honours. It’s not entirely clear how she ended up as part of the resistance around that time. The book’s authors think it might have something to do with the contacts she had in the Social-Democratic Student Club. Later, she moved to De Ranitzstraat 3a, moving into a room with Karel and Else Hendriks, who were part of the De Groot resistance group.
Death penalty
She still turned her nose up at any violent action. She helped spread illegal pamphlets, even writing some of them, distributed food stamps and false identity papers, and escorted people wanted by the German occupiers to their safehouses. ‘Even though these were not violent acts, they were still punishable by death’, the authors write.
It all went well for years. But a combination of happenstance and betrayal led the Germans to finding her. On December 27, 1944, four armed SD members forced their way into the house at De Ranitzstraat. When Kerkhoven got home a little less than an hour later, all four trained their guns on her. She and the Hendriks couple were taken away in handcuffs.
She was locked up at the prison at the Helperlinie, which today is part of the Van Mesdag clinic. She was questioned for hours, called a katjang because of her Indonesian looks, bullied, and tortured. But she never broke.
Nevertheless, not long after, on January 12, 1945, resistance leader Gerrit Boekhoven was also arrested. It signalled the end of the resistance group; one after the other was picked up by the SD. With the war only months from ending, only ten out of the group’s thirty members survived.
Anda Kerkhoven was reburied on June 22 at the Noorderbegraafplaats in Groningen, in the presence of many university students and staff. In his eulogy, rector magnificus Cobertus Willem van der Pot said that she was the only female student the Germans had executed for her resistance activities. In 1967, her remains were transferred to the memorial cemetery for war victims in Loenen.
‘Anda Kerkhoven, een student in het Gronings verzet’, by René and Jesper Westra, foreword by former rector Cisca Wijmenga. Price: 24.50 euros. ISBN: 97890 5452 431 1 / NUR 681. Uitgeverij Passage.
What happened to the murderers?
Mijndert Vonk shot Anda Kerkhoven in the Quintus woods. He was sentenced to death for her murder, as well as for another one. His sentence was commuted into life in prison, and he was released early. He died in 2009, aged eighty-nine.
Harm Bouman shot Gerrit Boekhoven. The Special Criminal Division in Groningen sentenced him to life for this and other crimes, but he was released in 1964. He died in 2001 at age eighty-four.
Pieter Schaap gave the order to shoot Kerkhoven and Boekhoven in the woods. He was also involved in the murder of Boekhoven’s wife Diny Aikeman, as well as dozens of others. After the war, he was sentenced to death. He was executed at the Rabenhaupt barracks shooting range at the Hereweg. He was forty-seven.
Robbert Lehnhoff, whose nickname was ‘the executioner of Groningen’, was a German SD officer. He issued the order to shoot Anda Kerkhoven and Gerrit Boekhoven. In May 1949, when he was forty-three, he was sentenced to death by the Groningen arm of the Special Criminal Division of the Leeuwarden court. He was executed on July 24, 1950.
Zacharias Sleijfer, who tortured and questioned Kerkhoven, convinced Robbert Lehnhoff to order her death, because he was afraid that she would take revenge. After the liberation, a psychiatric evaluation showed that Sleijfer was significantly diminished in his mental capacity. He was confined to a psychiatric institution, where he committed suicide in 1953, a few days after his forty-second birthday.