Nazi commemoration at graveyard

Searchlight - July 2007

On 2 June the Dutch People's Union (NVU) organised "a march of mourning" for the deceased Nazi widow, Florrie Rost van Tonningen, in the small town of Rheden.

NVU boss Constant Kusters claimed that he had been asked by the "Black Widow" herself to honour her memory with a march for the whole nazi movement and that he was told to take the lead in organising the march, because "almost nobody has the experience and expertise to organise such an event and to challenge a probable ban".

In the days before the march, however, this reasoning came under challenge from Joop Glimmerveen, the "grand old man" of the Dutch national socialist movement. Glimmerveen, who was leader of the NVU in the 1970s and 1980s, is a convinced nazi and known for his sharp pen. In 1996, after years of inactivity, he approached Kusters and Elite Homan to urge them to revive the NVU. Some years later, though, Glimmerveen admitted his mistake in involving them and attacked Kusters for his stupidity, blaming him for the demise of the party.

In the week before the march, Glimmerveen stepped up his attack on Kusters by posting his views on the fora of the National Alliance with which he more or less sympathises - at least with the leader Jan Teijn - and Stormfront.

Glimmerveen accused Kusters of lying about what Van Tonningen had really wanted and stated that she thought that Kusters was a moron. The Black Widow evidently thought that Kuster's "biography" (he is 36, but thinks he will be executed in the future!) was a shameful copycat pamphlet. Glimmerveen also laid into Kusters for plagiarising his work and passing it off as written by him.

The main issue between the two feuding nazis, however is Rost van Tonningen's legacy: which of the two did she love more?

Meanwhile, the major of Rheden was banging his head on the wall over the march. Immediately after the death of Rost van Tonningen, he organised meetings for the population and the people living in the vicinity of the graveyard, assuring them that the city council would do everything to prevent the grave from becoming a place of pilgrimage for nazis.

However, because he knew that banning events like the mourning march is well-nigh impossible, he called for a state of emergency and laid down tough conditions for the event.

For example, he banned such symbols and signs as the swastika, SS runes, the Wolfsangel, C18, Blood & Honour and the 14/88 code. Only black flags were allowed and no banners. All this rules were a farce in the circumstances, because this time the NVU did not need a slogan like "Against the casino capitalism" to hide behind. On the contrary, this march was a glorification of national socialism in itself, for a woman who never let Adolf Hitler down and always publicly displayed her loyalty to Nazism.

No ban was issued and thus the march could become one of the first legal and public displays of national socialism in the Netherlands since the German occupation.

At the end of May, Glimmerveen called for a boycott of the march. Florrie Rost van Tonningen, claims Glimmerveen, thought Kusters was only a nazi for his own glory and thought he was a wimp who brought shame to the national socialist movement. She was also afraid that her grave and remains would be attacked or removed when attention was drawn to it by a demonstration. The C18-group Aktion Front calls off its participation in the march after Glimmerveen's statement.

Jeroen Bosch for Alert! and Antifa-Net