Helm, van de Krijn, under the aliases Krijn and Jansma, born 19-10-1912 in Amersfoort/Utrecht,
Netherlands, the son of Krijn Johannes van den Helm and Sieuwke Lyclama à Nijeholt. Krijn was married to Johanna Cornelia Logtenberg.
Van den Helm was a clerk at the Tax Office in various municipalities, including The Hague, Leeuwarden, and Amersfoort, and was under the command of the well-known and important organizer of the Frisian resistance, Jan Evenhuis,
working with him at the Tax Office in Amersfoort.
Jan Evenhuis was arrested and transferred to Camp Vught,
where he.age 48, was executed by the Nazis on 18-08-1944, along with other Frisian resistance fighters. The executions were likely a reprisal after a failed attack on 14-08-1944, by the Frisian resistance on Zacharias Sleijfer,
a Dutch SD
officer in Leeuwarden, and after the shooting on 15-08-1944, of an SD officer from German counterintelligence and a Dutch SS officer in Birdaard. In addition to his activities in the NSF and the National Organization for Assistance to Refugees (LO), Evenhuis was also active in the underground press and the National Resistance Committee, an illegal extension of the London government in the Netherlands.
Zacharias Sleijfer, one of the German police organizations under the authority of Heinrich Himmler
and together the notorious quartet of Friesland,
with Lucas Bunt,
Frans Fransoos” Exaverius Lammers,
and Jan Meekhof,
he was part of the notorious quartet of Friesland. Bunt on 23-09-1947, was sentenced to death for collaboration. Later, the death penalty was commuted to a life sentence. In 1959, he was released. “Bunt died on 21-04-1981 at the age of 74.
For his war crimes, Frans Lammers was prosecuted and sentenced to death in March 1950 by the Special Court in Leeuwarden. In November of that year, he was granted clemency and after a 14-year stay in the Breda prison, he was released on the condition that he would not appear in Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, and eastern Gelderland. He continued to live in Breda until his death on 24-07-1971, age 70.
After the liberation in 1945, Zacharias Sleijfer was arrested and imprisoned in Groningen. A psychiatric examination ordered by the judge showed that Sleijfer was significantly diminished in his ability to be held accountable. He was ‘dangerous and unstable.’ Therefore, he was admitted to a closed psychiatric facility, where he made several suicide attempts. Sleijfer died, age 42, in 1953 from the effects of prostate cancer.
Meekhof was sentenced to death after the war, on 19-11-1946. He participated in the executions in Herbaijum in November 1944 and in Dokkum on 22-01-1945, during which 20 men were killed. That was also the first death sentence pronounced by the Special Court in Leeuwarden. This death sentence was commuted to a life sentence in 1947 thru a pardon. In 1959, he was released and died age 71 on 17-04-1994 in Utrecht.
During the German invasion, Krijn van de Helm fought at the Grebbelinie,
where he was injured and where the cousin of my mother Florentius Johannes Maria “Jan” Ackermans,
would die. During the early years of the occupation, Krijn was the founder of the first resistance groups in Friesland. An important action was, among others, the raid on the employment office in Leeuwarden.
Death and burial ground Helm, van de Krijn.
Van de Helm would later become the provincial leader of the Communist Party in Friesland. He was also an employee of the LO, helped more than 200 Jews go into hiding, and served as a contact person for an Amsterdam resistance group that hid Jewish children. In addition, he provided false papers and ration coupons. He also helped Allied pilots escape. On 25-08-1944, he was shot and killed during a scuffle at his hiding place in Amersfoort by the Dutch SD agent Pieter Johan Faber.
Pieter Johan Faber (Haarlem, 20-10-1920 — Groningen, 10-07-1948) was a member of the NSB
under command of Anton Mussert.
and, during the occupation, served as a sergeant in the Sicherheitsdienst and was implicated in at least 27 murders. He was involved in Operation Silbertanne. Operation Silbertanne was the code name for a series of assassinations and ambushes carried out by Dutch SS members and Dutch veterans of the Eastern Front between September 1943 and September 1944. Within a year, 45 anti-German Dutch people were murdered.
Pieter Johan Faber was later found guilty of 27 murders. After the war, the brothers were sentenced to death. Pieter Johan Faber was executed by firing squad on 10-07-1948, at the age of 28, in Groningen. His brother Klaas Carel Faber’s
death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. On 26-05-2012, Faber’s wife informed that he had died of kidney failure on 24-05-2012, age 90, at the hospital in Ingolstadt.
A long search was conducted after the war for the body of Krijn van den Helm. It was found in a mass grave near Camp Amersfoort. On 01-12-1945, Krijn van den Helm was reburied in Leeuwarden, at the Noorder Cemetery alongside other fallen resistance fighters, in the presence of the entire Frisian resistance. His son Krijntje was buried with him.








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