The fallen resistance people in Limburg

Daniël van Vugt (Daan)

Het Grote Gebod – L.O.

Wikimedia
Memorial chapel with the graves of Daniel van Vugt and other victims of “Ederveen”

Gynecologist Daniel van Vugt collaborated with the resistance group within the Nijmegen police. He also participated in the medical resistance. Married with Antoinette P.M. Schaepman (1901-1987) in 1924 in Zwolle. In 1929 he settled as a gynecologist in Nijmegen, from June 1932 in the Sint-Annastraat 25.
In the May days of 1940 he spent days operating on wounded soldiers behind the Grebbe Line. In November 1940 he decided to resign from the Nederlandse Unie (Dutch Union). In and around Nijmegen he played an active role in Medisch Contact, the national medical organization that opposed all kinds of measures taken by the German occupation.
Daniel van Vugt was arrested on September 23, 1943 as a result of infiltration by a traitor who called himself Ederveen, because he was suspected of being directly involved in acts of resistance in Nijmegen. Nineteen long months of imprisonment (in Arnhem and in the Vught camp) and privations in various German camps (Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme) followed. In April 1945, exhausted and deathly ill, he arrived with the umpteenth horror transport at the Sandbostel camp (near Bremervörde), where he died. Two friends from Nijmegen, Guus Boelaars and police inspector Frans Prick (later: Perrick), whom Van Vugt had helped to go into hiding in September 1943, immediately found an opportunity to bring his corpse back home. Amid great public interest, the religious funeral service and inhumation took place on May 25 at the Heilig-Landstichting. A year later, a memorial chapel was built next to the grave, where the Nijmegen policemen Albert Marcusse, Bart Hendriks and Wim Beerman, executed on June 5, 1944 near Overveen, were to find their final resting place as well. This chapel has a bronze memorial plaque since 2005.
More details: oorlogsgravenstichting.nl, see link below.
Until 1997, an annual memorial service for the fallen was held in the memorial chapel of Dr. Daniel van Vugt in the cemetery of the Heilig Land Stichting (Holy Land Foundation).
More on the Ederveen case in the introductory text about Nimwège.

Sources & Literature

• ‘Vugt, Daniel van (Rotterdam 2 mei 1896 - Sandbostel 23 april 1945), gynaecoloog en verzetsman’, door A.E.M. Janssen in: Jaarboek Numaga 53 (2006), p. 136-137.
• Weusten, Brigitte, Vraag niet alleen om mijn bevrijding. Het leven van Daniel van Vugt 1896-1945 (Ask not only for my liberation. The life of Daniel van Vugt 1896-1945), Nijmegen 2005.
• Vrijheidsmuseum in Groesbeek.
• Oorlogsgravenstichting.nl
• Wikipedia NL: Begraaf- en Gedenkpark Heilig Land Stichting