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 quit professional acting to join the NSB, giving speeches and overseeing the organization's theater division, arguing that the change he thought necessary in Dutch drama had to come from political revolution. He became depressed and suicidal when he discovered he was part Jewish; still, he tried to join the SS but was denied. After the war, he was banned from the stage for ten years, and sentenced to five years in prison.

Van Hees was born in Rotterdam, the son of a theater director from Haarlem. He attended the Theaterschool in Amsterdam from 1927 to 1929, but left for Germany, claiming the quality of education was inferior in Amsterdam. In Germany, he attended drama schools in Düsseldorf and Berlin. From 1931 to 1934 he worked under Cor van der Lugt Melsert with the Vereenigd Rotterdamsch Hofstad Tooneel, a company that also featured Piet Rienks and Annie van Duyn. After an argument with van der Lugt, he left for Berlin again in March 1933. When he returned in May 1933 he joined the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB), and argued that the drastic improvement necessary in Dutch theater could only come about after a revolutionary change in Dutch politics and society.

In July 1933 van Hees toured the Dutch West Indies with the company De Dietsche Spelers and from 1933 to 1935 he performed in various plays, but he quit the theater in 1935 to focus exclusively on his party work for the NSB. He suffered from severe depression when he found out, in 1934, that his grandfather on his mother's side was Jewish, making him one quarter Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws. He felt he suffered from a split personality, being so fully convinced of the racial politics of which he himself was the intended victim. He contemplated suicide to escape what he called "the conflict of the bastard", but after the war the judge who presided over his case sneered that this was nothing but "third-rate theatrics".

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