The Westerweel Group (Dutch: Westerweel Groep) was a small resistance group with non-Jewish and Jewish members that operated during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Led by a Dutch Christian Joop Westerweel and Jewish German refugee Joachim Simon, the group was initiated in August 1942 and its first objective was to hide a Jewish youth group of "Palestine pioneers" whose members were ordered to be deported to the Nazi Westerbork transit camp. They were Primarily young Jews from Germany and Austria who had fled to the Netherlands after 1933 where they followed an agricultural training to settle in Palestine. When threatened with deportation, the resistance group helped them to find hiding places and some of them were brought to Spain via Belgium and France.
Background
Around 450 Jewish teenage boys and girls were living in the Netherlands as refugees from Austria and Germany. They planned on making aliyah to the Land of Israel and called themselves the "Palestine Pioneers" or Hechalutz. The teenagers were split into groups throughout the Netherlands, including one in Amsterdam and one in Loosdrecht, a village in North Holland. The group in Loosdrecht, which consisted of around 50 teenagers, worked on farms or with other agricultural related work in preparation for kibbutz-life in Palestine.
The initiative to form the group arose in August 1942 when the Nazis began ordering the deportation of Jews in the Netherlands and they started concentrating Jews in the Westerbork transit camp. From there, a first transport to Poland departed in mid-July. Part of this was a group of 22 underage German pioneers, who lived without family in the Netherlands in an Amsterdam boarding house. The Loosdrecht group, living together in an Aliyah center, chose to go into hiding instead of reporting for deportation. Of this group, some 50 pioneers between the ages of 15 and 19 stayed in the Pavilion, a former shelter for young people. They were in the same position as the Amsterdam group, but were accompanied by some older pioneers, who were determined not to let them be deported. They went looking for hiding places, but only found a few. One of them, the teacher Mirjam Waterman, decided to ask Joop Westerweel, a local Dutch Christian opposed to the Nazis, who agreed to undertake the mission of finding hiding places for the entire group. They had to find and organize different addresses, forge identification cards and travel documents, raise money, and arrange ration cards.
Westerweel Group then began assisting Palestine Pioneers members located in Amsterdam.
The group then decided that it would be less dangerous for the escapees if they were smuggled outside of the Netherlands' borders. This was because their housing, which was temporary, required that they move frequently from one place to another, thus increasing the chances of being betrayed by locals or caught by the civilian police.
They first attempted to move twelve teenagers to the neutral Switzerland, but they were caught by the Nazis. The group assumed they were betrayed by one of the people they asked for help, and they resolved to avoid using unknown outsiders.
Their second escape route, planned by Joachim Simon, was through Belgium to France and then to Spain over the Pyrenees mountain range.
The Hiding Operation
Joop and his wife Wil Westerweel rejected any form of anti-Semitism imposed by the occupiers. They were involved in a protest against the dismissal of Jewish officials in the autumn of 1940 and helped a Jewish family to find a hiding place. But these were individual actions. They were not part of a resistance group. The request for help from Mirjam Waterman at the end of July 1942 was therefore very welcome to Joop.