Siebren Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema (3 April 1917 – 26 September 2007) was a Dutch writer who became a resistance fighter and RAF pilot during the Second World War. Near the end of the war he was adjudant (assistant) to Queen Wilhelmina. He was made Knight 4th class of the Military William Order. He is perhaps best known for his book (Soldier of Orange) which described his experiences in the war. His book was later made into a film. The book and the film about it eventually were made into the most successful Dutch musical ever, running from 30 October 2010 until 12 July 2026.
Early life
Roelfzema was born in the former Dutch East Indies in Surabaya, on Java, when it was under colonial rule. He was from a patrician family, which is listed in the . He was the second child of Siebren Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema and his wife Cornelia Vreede. His older sister, Ellen, had been born two years before. His father managed rubber and coffee plantations. In the 1930s the family returned to the Netherlands so the children could be provided with a good education. They initially moved to The Hague, and later moved on to Wassenaar. He played soccer and was a member of the Hague Football Association.
Roelfzema started writing in his teens. From 16 years of age onward he was committed to becoming a writer. He attended Leiden University and was a member of the Leidsch Student Corps Minerva society while living at Rapenburg 56 across the canal from the . During his hazing initiation, the president of his student corps, Ernst de Jonge, threw a soup tureen at a group of new students, striking Roelfzema in the head and cutting his scalp. De Jonge had been an Olympic rower at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, and was very popular among the students. His accidental wounding of Roelfzema was the basis for their forming a friendship.
After completing his first year of study, Roelfzema took time off to travel to the United States and crossed the country by freighthopping and hitchhiking. In 1939, he wrote a book of this experience, titled Rendezvous in San Francisco, which became a bestseller in the Netherlands.
War in Europe Following his trip abroad Roelfzema returned to Leiden University to continue his studies. When war broke out in Europe in September, 1939, Roelfzema and his fellow students supposed Holland would remain neutral as it had during the First World War. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November he traveled there to cover the conflict, working as a war correspondent for the , the and the . Afterwards he wrote a book about it, titled (The Smoldering Fire).
Following the conclusion of the war in Finland in March 1940, he returned home and resumed his life as a student at Leiden. He was there at the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. Roelfzema joined the Dutch army reserve, but the Netherlands was overrun by the German army in five days, bringing the war to a close before he was deployed. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands fled to London to establish the government in exile there.
Roelfzema continued his studies during the occupation and became involved in the Dutch underground. In October, the faculty at Leiden received a letter demanding to know if they were of Jewish heritage. On 23 November all the Jewish staff at the university were dismissed. The dean of the Law School, Professor Rudolph Cleveringa, gave a speech on 26 November 1940 condemning these dismissals. He and several other of the law professors were arrested. This instigated a 48-hour strike by the students. In response the Germans closed the university.Het Vaderland: State and Literary newspaper, 28 November 1940
In February 1941, Roelfzema wrote his 'Leids manifesto', which criticized German demands of excluding the Jewish students from the student societies. It called upon the students of Leiden to resist the policies of the German occupiers. He printed it at his own expense, and, during the night of 14/15 February, Roelfzema and eleven of his compatriots posted it all over Leiden. Ten days later, the board of the university made a request of the students that they resist the German occupiers no further. Roelfzema wrote a reply on 6 March, pledging in principle to commit no more opposition at the university. In April he was arrested by the secret police and held for a week at the notorious "Orange hotel", a political prison run by the Germans in Scheveningen.
In the midst of the unrest and disruption, the Germans re-opened Leiden University for ten days. As it happened, Roelfzema had been studying hard and took this opportunity to take exams. Taking his exams in formal tuxedo, as was the custom of his student society, Minerva, he passed and was awarded his doctorate in law on 10 June 1941. He was the first member of his class to attain the degree. Leiden University was closed again soon afterwards. Three weeks later, he was an , a Dutchman who escaped Nazi control by finding a way to reach England. Roelfzema, Peter Tazelaar, Bram van der Stok, Gerard Volkersz and Toon Buitendijk posed as crew members aboard the , a Swiss freighter bound for New York City. The ship was intercepted in the North Sea by the British cruiser , suspecting her to be a German supply ship. The Devonshire escorted her to Tórshavn, in the Faroe Islands, were the stowaways were brought ashore. Roelfzema persuaded the captain of the British cruiser to give them passage to Britain.
Activities in England
Once in London, Roelfzema became involved in a secret service group of escaped young Dutchmen called the Mews, after Chester Square Mews, the neighborhood in London where they lived. The group was being run under the direction of François van 't Sant, director of the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (CID, ). The agents were trained under Colonel Euan Rabagliati of MI9. Their operation was called 'Contact Holland', whose goal was to establish links with the disparate Dutch resistance groups, support them and coordinate their activities in the Netherlands. Most agents were brought into the Netherlands by parachute drop. This required the agent to be trained in parachuting and exposed them to the risks of doing so at night. Roelfzema, Peter Tazelaar and Chris Krediet came up with an alternative method of insertion. They proposed gaining access to the Netherlands by sea. They would use a Motor Gun Boat (MGB) to cross the English Channel, covering the last stretch of water by taking a small boat and rowing into shore.
Due to internal politics Van 't Sant was required to step down from his position with intelligence and control of the CID was transferred to Colonel Mattheus de Bruyne of the Dutch Marine Corps. De Bruyne lacked experience in intelligence work and did not have a good grasp on the subtlety required. He failed to recognize the fact that his agents were often arrested and yet were continuing to broadcast messages, except now they were under the control of the Germans. The usual procedure for transmitting messages was to include small errors. If an agent was forced to work for the Germans, he would leave out the errors. The result should be that contact was aborted immediately. De Bruyne concluded that the agents simply forgot to use the security-checks and even sent messages to remind them. This would tip-off the German intelligence and the agent would be replaced with a German and sent off to a concentration camp. Other intelligence mistakes by De Bruyne included attaching detailed maps of the landing sites at Noordwijk, Scheveningen and Walcherento to the walls of his London office and leaving them up. Observing this, Louis d'Aulnis, an agent of the CID, elected not to announce where his landing place would be beforehand, a measure which ended up saving his life.
In their first mission, Peter Tazelaar was to deliver radio equipment and bring two men, SDAP politician Herman Bernard Wiardi Beckman and captain Paul Maria Hubert Tielens back from the occupied Netherlands to join the government-in-exile in Britain. Roelfzema had met Tazelaar when the two men had worked as stokers on the St. Cregue during their escape. Roelfzema had often spent time at the seaside resort of Scheveningen and knew that every Friday night a large party was held at the Kurhaus of Scheveningen (Grand Hotel) which had been taken over by the Germans as a headquarters. Their plan was to approach Scheveningen late at night and take Tazelaar into shore by dinghy.
In the pre-dawn hours of 23 November 1941, Tazelaar, Roelfzema, Krediet and Lieutenant Francis 'Bob' Goodfellow rowed in on a small dinghy. When they neared the surf, Roelfzema and Tazelaar slipped off the boat and waded onto the beach. Tazelaar was then helped out of his wetsuit to reveal the black tuxedo he was wearing beneath it. Roelfzema then poured a generous amount of brandy over Tazelaar and left him, returning to the dinghy. Reeking of brandy, Tazelaar managed to pass himself off as a drunken party goer and staggered past the sentries stationed around the hotel. Two months later he returned to the beach with three others for a return to England. They were waiting on the beach for Roelfzema but the arrived on the scene first. Tazelaar and one other were able to escape. With no contact to England, he had to return overland, taking his chances traveling through Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal, before reaching England three months later.
Roelfzema led fifteen small-boat missions to the shores of the Netherlands. He was in charge of the insertion mission, while a Royal Navy lieutenant was in charge of the Motor Gun Boat carrying them. The small group would wait for the dark of a moonless night to attempt their missions, with Roelfzema going ashore with whoever was being dropped. 108 such returned to the Netherlands by parachute or boat to support the resistance. Only half survived the war.
On 22 February 1942, Roelfzema's 'transport service' performed an infiltration for his friend Ernst de Jonge. They rowed ashore at Katwijk. Roelfzema had already become suspicious that something was amiss with their insertion operations. He feared they were being betrayed by Nazi sympathizers present amongst the officers of the exiled government. Some three months after De Jonge's drop, a courier on his way to England was picked up by the secret police. He was carrying detailed reports written by De Jonge that had been transferred onto three roles of microfilm. De Jonge heard about the arrest but refused to go into hiding. Three days later, on 22 May, De Jonge and two of his fellow agents were arrested at an apartment in Rotterdam. They were brought to Kamp Haaren. From there they were transferred to Assen. Roelfzema did not hear from him again; De Jonge and a group of 52 others were sent to the Rawicz concentration camp in Poland. Of that group, 47 were sent over to Mauthausen, where they were executed. Ernst de Jonge remained with six others at Rawicz and died there in September 1944; he has no known grave.
With the capture of De Jonge, Roelfzema blamed de Bruyne. When de Bruyne instructed Roelfzema to provide information to another branch of the exiled Dutch government, Roelfzema refused for fear that it had been infiltrated by Nazi sympathizers. De Bruyne was angry with this insubordination and moved to have Roelfzema court-martialed. Queen Wilhelmina intervened and recommended him for the Netherlands' highest honor, the (Military Order of William). The court-martial proceedings were set aside and the was bestowed upon Roelfzema in the summer of 1942 by the Queen. Following this he met with Dutch Navy minister Johan Furstner and the court-martial was cancelled. Roelfzema had had enough of working with the secret service. He resigned from the Mews and volunteered to serve in the Royal Air Force.