WALLY VAN HALL | The Resistance Banker

Tilly and Wally van Hall,
married, March 1, 1932

March 28, 2021—I have seen "The Resistance Banker" three times. The first time was in Zaandam, in April 2018, a month after it first came out in Holland. It was then available only in Dutch with English subtitles. It was a great movie even when seen in Dutch. I was impressed.

It was the most-watched movie in Holland in 2018. It won the Dutch equivalent of the Oscar, the Golden Calf, and it grossed $4 million, which is good for a movie in Dutch.

The main heroes are Walraven (Wally) van Hall and—in real life and in the movie—his wife Tilly den Tex van Hall. Netflix dubbed the Dutch movie in English. It is available to anyone with a Netflix account here: https://www.netflix.com/title/80244019.

I watched the Netflix version twice this week, once alone and two days later again with my wife Alice. This movie is excellent for two kinds of people: (1) Those who think they know a lot about World War II, and (2) Those who don't. It gives a vivid idea of what Resistance in Holland meant, and this is not something that World War II buffs generally know much about.

The movie has great value as a reminder of what the Greatest Generation in Europe faced on the home front—for Europeans, World War II in Europe was not just, or even primarily, about the battlefields. As a military force, the Dutch did not last long. The Nazi Occupation took them by surprise (they had been promised the right to remain neutral, as the Dutch were nominally in World War I) and the war played out in homes and workplaces. 

A True Hero

There were many who would like to be remembered as heroes, but the documented heroes are few in number. Mostly people put their heads down and just tried to survive, which was not easy. Many collaborated in one way or another, usually because they were afraid of their lives and the lives of their families. A few felt they had to do their duty as Dutch citizens, which meant resisting the Nazi occupation.

Wally and his brother Gijs van Hall succeeded in raising today's equivalent of one billion dollars. He did this in part by counterfeiting Treasury bonds and substituting the fake bonds for real ones in the vaults of the Dutch central bank. The proceeds of the sale of the real bonds went to Resistance groups and people entitled to pensions and salaries that the Nazi government would not pay. He also borrowed money from prominent Dutch people, giving them out-of-date stock certificates or one-guilder notes, keeping track of the numbers so they could be redeemed after the war. 

When the Queen returned to Holland after the war, she repaid every obligation. All the money was accounted for. We know all this because of the meticulously documented work of the late Dr. Louis (Loe) de Jong (1914-2005). He wrote—in Dutch only, alas—a formidable 14-volume history of World War II in Holland. 

Dr. de Jong was not given to lavish praise of many of the Dutch Resistance leaders.  But because the Nationaal Steun Fonds (National Support Fund, NSF) enabled so many other activities of the Dutch Resistance, de Jong considered Wally to be Holland's most important underground worker during the war. 

In his Erasmus Lectures on the Dutch Resistance given at Harvard in 1988, de Jong was cautious. He quoted Dutch historian Johan Huizinga: "History, like good sherry, should be dry" (de Jong, Erasmus Lectures, Harvard, 1988, 30). However, on the subject of Wally's stewardship of Resistance funds, de Jong is sweet:

[T]he underground movement in the Netherlands was unique insofar as it numbered one secret organization whose sole task was to collect the money needed to keep all other groups in action and to provide financial support to many of the thousands in hiding. [...] The total expenses of this financial organization alone amounted to a [1988] value of perhaps $500 million [i.e., more than $1 billion in 2021 using the BLS inflation calculator], and when liberation came, all expenses were accounted for, not a single dime having been misappropriated, and all the people and companies from whom money had been borrowed were repaid by the government (de Jong, 46-47).

Coming from a dry historian who is careful with his words, such high praise of Wally is astounding.

The Dutch put "The Resistance Banker" up for an Oscar as the best foreign film of 2018.  It did not win. At the end of this post I suggest a few reasons why not, and why the world needs an American version of the movie.

The Resistance and the Holocaust

The horror of the Holocaust in Holland is told in the movie in three ways:

• First, near the opening of the movie, Wally's fellow banker Isaak Meijer, who is Jewish, misses an appointment with him. Wally is concerned and walks to Isaak's  house. He finds Isaak hanged and his wife and daughter dead in front of cups of tea.  On the table is the Occupation's instructions for them to leave their home and turn off utilities. Their house has been taken over, as happened to all Jewish Amsterdammers not living in the confined ghetto. Knowing what they faced, the family chose to end their lives. At this point, Wally is recruited by a Resistance leader with a naval background to raise money for Dutch merchant-marine pensioners whose stipends have been cut off.
• Later, a freight car filled with people passes a passenger car. These are prisoners headed for the deadly concentration camps.  The passengers, realistically, averted their eyes. Tragically, social-service records in Holland were kept by religion, since welfare was distributed through church institutions. This made it easy for SS trackers in Holland to pursue their genocidal mission. In other occupied countries, the Wehrmacht was in charge; they were more interested in waging war than racial extermination. 
• The movie alludes briefly at the end to how much Wally and the Resistance did to hide or find safe passage for Jewish targets. He received a posthumous Yad Vashem award after the war, and these have not been given out lightly.

What did the Resistance do about the Holocaust? It found hiding places for some Jewish families. It forged papers for them. It managed to get some out via train to Belgium and France; they had a connection in Paris who would meet the trains. It provided information to the Jewish community. It bombed record centers where the Nazi administration was preparing its systematic genocidal program. It targeted Dutch collaborators and S.S. officers. These are some of the activities of the Resistance that Wally van Hall's money financed. The total amount that Wally obtained was one hundred million Dutch guilders, or half a billion euros in today's money.

The moment when Wally is captured in a roundup of Resistance workers is economically captured by his son Aad falling out of a tree and Tilly dropping a plate. Tilly is credibly played by Fockeline Ouwerkerk. Wally's brother Gijsbert ("Gijs") van Hall is well portrayed as less brave than Wally, but someone who came through for him in many ways. Gijs survived to tell the story and was elected Mayor of Amsterdam after the war. 

Family Connections

When I was in Holland in 2015 and 2018, I visited with two of Wally's three children (Adrienne, Aad and Mary-Ann). All three are now deceased. The two older ones, Adrienne and Wally, are shown at the beginning of "The Resistance Banker." All of them are shown as children in a photo of Wally and Tilly and family, posted by a Florida-based blogger named Toritto.  https://toritto.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/banker-to-the-resistance-walraven-van-hall/. I mention also in my 2015 visit with a van Hall daughter relative, Ellen van Wurpel. https://inezmb.blogspot.com/2016/03/boissevain-american-descendants-of.html.

Also, I have previously posted about Tilly van Hall. Her maiden surname was den Tex (in Dutch it would be hyphenated with the husband's name first: Tilly van Hall-den Tex). My 2015 post about Tilly is here: http://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2015/07/anna-mathilde-tilly-den-tex-1907-1988.html. It shows, with help from my cousin Charles Leidschendam Boissevain, also alas deceased, how the children of Charles Boissevain the newspaper editor, my grandmother Olga's father, are related in multiple ways to the van Halls and den Texes, on both sides of the marriage.

My mother, Hilda van Stockum, had many Dutch relatives who wrote to her about Wally and Tilly van Hall. These letters were used when she wrote her two books on the Dutch Resistance and the Holocaust, The Winged Watchman (Farrar Straus 1962 and Bethlehem Books/Ignatius Press, 1995) and The Borrowed House (Farrar Straus 1975 and Purple House Press, 2016).

Need for an American Version of the Movie

As someone said to me, "for a Dutch movie, this is a great production." I agree. Also, to my mind, Netflix did an excellent post-production job getting the film ready for an American audience, although there were a few lapses, as when the American-English-dubbed voice of Wally (played by Barry Atsma) refers to Jaap (pronounced Yaap in Dutch) using the English pronunciation of "J".

Here is a review that suggests some reasons. The first half is a bit slow in building, and for an American audience the movie might be puzzling because the things Americans  remember most about World War II are the U.S. military intervention and the encounters such as the Normandy landing. The concept of Nazis being put in charge of institutions, and how that works out in practice, might be more understandable in 2021 than it was in 2018, as we better understand the extent to which a misinformation campaign can capture people's minds.  https://readysteadycut.com/2018/09/12/the-resistance-banker-review/.

The Dutch movie misses the full potential of the story for American and British film audience. It would be helpful to elaborate on connections that the historical characters had with the rest of the world. For example, Wally and Gijs went to work for Wall Street in the period before and after the Crash of 1929. This is not mentioned and is a glaring omission. Imagine what that must have been like for them. How much they must have learned about downsides to the stock market...

Something about that year could usefully substitute for the fuzzy-boat images that the Dutch version uses—they might be heart-warming for some, but for others they might seem lazy. A blockbuster American feature film could be made out of this idea of a banker risking his life to help the Resistance, under the nose of the Nazis. The Anglo-American view of bankers as benignly addicted to acquisition could do with this portrait of someone at a bank selflessly serving his country. I posted something along these lines in 2018: http://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2018/05/wally-van-hall-movie-in-english.html.