The Muur van Mussert ("wall of Mussert") is all that remains of a rally ground with buildings and monuments planned by

Anton Mussert Anton may refer to: People *Anton (given name), including a list of people with the given name *Anton (surname) Places *Anton Municipality, Bulgaria **Anton, Sofia Province, a village *Antón District, Panama **Antón, a town and capital of th ...

and his

National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands ( nl, Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland, ; NSB) was a Dutch fascist and later Nazi political party that called itself a " movement". As a parliamentary party participating in legisl ...

(NSB) to house party meetings and hold national events to celebrate national-socialist thought in the Netherlands. The wall was built in 1938, on a plot of land the NSB had acquired near

Lunteren Lunteren is a town in Gelderland, the Netherlands. It has a railway station on the line between Amersfoort and Ede. It is well known for three conference centres in the vicinity, including ''Het Bosgoed'', which mostly hosts academic conferences ...

in Gelderland, in the center of the country, and was inspired by the

Nazi party rally grounds The Nazi party rally grounds (german: Reichsparteitagsgelände, literally: ''Reich Party Congress Grounds'') covered about 11 square kilometres in the southeast of Nuremberg, Germany. Six Nuremberg Rally, Nazi party rallies were held there betwe ...

Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...

. Between 1936 and 1940, the NSB organized annual ''Hagespraken'' at the location, open-air propaganda meetings based on a supposed Germanic ideal and modeled after similar meetings in Germany. The place was visited by tens of thousands of NSB members, though the atmosphere was more that of a boy scout jamboree. One of the speakers at the (last) meeting on 22 June 1940 was

Adriaan van Hees Adriaan Nicolaas Johan van Hees (3 May 1910 – 2 December 1976) was a Dutch actor and member of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB). Van Hees was trained in Amsterdam and Germany, and spent a few years in theater and film. He ...

, who called for vengeance for the death of eight NSB members who had been executed during the German invasion of May 1940. After 1940, mass gatherings of a political kind were forbidden by the German occupying forces; after the war, the wall fell into disrepair. the wall, overgrown in places, is little more than a boundary for a local campground; the masonry is crumbling and the associated buildings are ruined. NL-HaNA 2

In the early 2000s, the municipality of Ede wanted to have the wall declared a monument but backtracked, after protests by war veterans and others (including the

Centrum Informatie en Documentatie Israël (Latin for ''center'') may refer to: Places In Greenland * Nuuk Centrum, a district of Nuuk, Greenland * Centrum Lake, Greenland In the Netherlands * Amsterdam-Centrum, the inner-most borough of Amsterdam, Netherlands * Rotterdam Centrum, a borou ...

(CIDI), an organization founded by the Dutch Jewish community), some of whom feared that the place would become a gathering point for the extreme right. In the 2010s, the wall again attracted attention in the media, prompted by the publication of ''De muur van Mussert'' (Boom, 2015) by Rene van Heijningen, a historian associated with the

NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Dutch language, Dutch: ''NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies'') is an organisation in the Netherlands which maintains archives and carries out history, historical s ...

References

External links

* {{Coord, 52, 5, 45, N, 5, 38, 43, E, type:landmark_scale:5000_region:NL, display=title Netherlands in World War II Ruins in the Netherlands Buildings and structures in Ede, Netherlands