Gerrit van der Waals
Dutch military officer and resistance member (1920–1948)
Gerrit Hendricus Maria van der Waals (24 April 1920 – 11 August 1948) was a Dutch officer of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and a member of the wartime resistance.
After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, he escaped from a German POW camp in 1943 and later was active in anti-Nazi resistance in Hungary. Arrested by the advancing Soviet forces in late 1944, he was imprisoned in Moscow, accused of aiding anti-Soviet forces, and died there in 1948. He was posthumously awarded the Dutch Bronze Cross.
Biography
Van der Waals was born in Surabaya, then part of the Dutch East Indies.
After finishing secondary school (HBS) in 1937 he moved to the Netherlands to enter the three-year program at the Royal Military Academy in Breda. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands and occupation, the cadets (including van der Waals) and other Dutch professional officers were arrested by the Germans and, in 1942, deported from the Netherlands. (Meanwhile, in July 1940, van der Waals was commissioned as tweede luitenant—Dutch equivalent to second lieutenant.) He was sent to the POW camp Stalag 371 at Stanisławów (now Ivano-Frankivsk).
On 21 August 1943 he became the first Dutch officer to escape from that camp; he was also the first Dutch prisoner of war to reach Hungary. After trekking more than 100 km on foot across the Carpathian Mountains, he reached what was then neutral Hungary, arriving in Budapest on 1 September 1943.
“Gerrit van der Waals” enters the record as dutch military officer and resistance member (1920–1948). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gerrit, Waals and Dutch can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2622655. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1948, 1940 and 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerrit van der Waals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.