• Den Haag in de Tweede Wereldoorlog

Date of birth:

June 4th, 1904 (Amersfoort/Utrecht, Netherlands)

Date of death:

March 11th, 1941 (The Hague/South Holland, Netherlands)

Buried on:

Dutch Honorary Cemetery Bloemendaal
Plot: 40. 

Nationality:

Dutch

Lived in Amersfoort, Snouckaertlaan 14. Son of merchant Joseph Klein (30 July 1862 Amersfoort – 19 November 1926 Amersfoort) and Sara Rosenboom (8 May 1875 Zevenaar – 23 April 1943 murdered in the German extermination camp in Sobibor).

Married on 4 June 1930 in Utrecht to Judik van Coeverden (7 July 1904 Coevorden – 17 September 1943 murdered in Auschwitz). His daughters Gertrude Sonja (10) and Josephina Louisa (8) were killed in Sobibor on 21 May 1943. Second-hand bookseller/market trader. Dutch-Israeli. He was a well-known boxer at the time.

He fulfilled his military service obligations in 1924. During the German invasion in May 1940, Klein fought as a soldier in the area around the Grebbeberg near Rhenen. Member of the resistance. He mapped German military objects around the Soesterberg airfield. He told his family and friends that he was in direct contact with the British secret service. After receiving an anonymous warning that he was in danger in his hometown of Utrecht, he moved to Amersfoort in early 1941.

On Monday 10 March 1941, he had a meeting in The Hague. It is thought that the meeting was about illegal activities. What happened exactly is unclear. On 12 March 1941, Wilhelmus Johannes Innemee, a funeral director in The Hague, reported to the registrar that Klein had been found dead at six o'clock in the morning the previous day in The Hague. In his book about the persecution of the Jews in Amersfoort, Ribbens writes that Klein had been arrested for unknown reasons and taken to the offices of the Sicherheitspolizei.

On 11 March 1941, the Amersfoort police were informed by telephone that he had ‘committed suicide by hanging himself at midnight last night’, according to the historian, who bases his information on the archives of the municipal police in Amersfoort. Heere and Vernooij, on the other hand, report that his wife received the devastating news that he had died as the result of an accident in The Hague from a German organisation on the same 11th of March. His bloodstained clothes were delivered to her home.

One of the witnesses who was questioned suggested that he had been betrayed. The alleged traitor was a man who was trusted by the Amersfoorter, but whom the witness considered very untrustworthy.

Klein was cremated on 13 March 1941 at Westerveld crematorium in Driehuis-Velsen under number 11979. The urn with Klein's ashes was placed in the General Niche and later reburied on 27 November 1948 in grave section 40 of the Bloemendaal Cemetery of Honour.

In the spring of 1947, the director of the crematorium sent a ‘List of those executed and others who were cremated at the Velsen crematorium during the war’ to the Foundation for the Cemetery of Honour in Bloemendaal. Klein was second on this list after Leendert Schijveschuurder (2 December 1917 Amsterdam), who was arrested on 5 March 1941 for putting up a manifesto calling for a strike and was executed the following day.

His monument in Bloemendaal bears the striking text: ‘They are the sowers of the seed, that is the deed’. A memorial stone has been placed in front of the building at 14 Snoukaertlaan where Simon Klein lived with his family at the time.

His younger brother Salomon Klein (28 January 1906 Amersfoort) was shot and killed by a rural policeman shortly before the liberation in Hooglanderveen. Only a sister, who had married a non-Jewish man, survived the war. (1*)

(1*) After distributing communist literature, her husband was sentenced to twelve years in a penal institution. He remained imprisoned until the end of the war.

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• Photo 1: Eerebegraafplaats Bloemendaal
• Photo 2: Arjo Eijgelsheim
• Peter H. Heere en Arnold Th. Vernooij, De Eerebegraafplaats te Bloemendaal, SDU Uitgevers, Den Haag, 2005; Kees Ribbens, 'Zullen wij nog terugkeeren.....' De jodenvervolging in Amersfoort tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Uitgeverij, 2002, pag. 33, site knaw.nl; Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Bureau/Sectie Gravendienst van de Afdeling Sociale Zaken van het Ministerie van Oorlog/Defensie, Dienst Identificatie en Berging (DIB) van de Koninklijke Landmacht, nummer toegang 2.13.5220, inventarisnummer 262 (Lijst van gefusilleerden e.a., die tijdens de oorlog 1940-1945 in het crematorium te Velsen zijn verast); Oorlogsgravenstichting; site wiewaswie.nl (waaronder overlijdensakte 198/1941 gemeente Amersfoort en 826/1941 gemeente 's-Gravenhage); Stichting Herdenkingsstenen Amersfoort. - Eerebegraafplaats Bloemendaal
  

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