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Printing firm played key role in huge wartime counterfeit scheme

Translated excerpts of the May 1969 issue of Goed Nieuws / the Windmill Herald


Tags: Excerpts from the Windmill Immigration History

AMSTERDAM - The wartime German occupation was very much on the mind of the printer Wil C.L. Keet (80) when his former employer Amsterdam commercial printer C.A. Spin en Zoon celebrated its 150th anniversary.

The highlight of Keet’s career is his late 1944, early 1945 stint as counterfeiter when he printed falsified financial papers, worth 80 million guilders, for senior official Walraven van Hall at De Nederlandsche Bank who clandestinely aided the Dutch resistance. Sometimes after the surrender of the Nazis, Keet learnt that the funds obtained with these papers had financed an aid program for the families of the striking railroad personnel, who had gone in hiding. Keet called his work for the resistance among the most dangerous since it all was carried out at one commercial location, making it more difficult to conceal when uninvited people showed up. German officials regularly went next door to De Telegraaf offices, a newspaper supervised by censors. As was often the case with resistance people, Keet said in the full front page wire service feature article that he could not remember how he got involved with the underground.

Among the area news items, is one which reports an accident which on April 16 claimed the lives of three young Haney, BC, area Dutch Canadians, Frank de Jonge (23) and his cousin Hank Ridder (17). Recent immigrant Arend (Art) Oenema (26) was hospitalized with critical injuries but who died four days later. The vehicle in which they traveled ran into a parked truck in Surrey.

The first issue edited by Albert van der Heide also announced the news that Princess Beatrix expected her third child. The paper, then still called Goed Nieuws, was mailed third class with a postal permit for 5 cents a copy, carried CP air and KLM advertisements, along with invitations to patronize Blom Stores, Holland Shopping Centre and B and Y Agencies (an acronym honouring the firm’s founders Bakker and Ydenburg), and others. The latter two firms supported this community production with their advertising dollars from the papers beginning to its very end fifty four years later. Blom Stores shut down years ago.