Siemensstraat 17

Martinus Letterie came from an SDAP family. But when he lost his job in 1935, he joined the Friends of the Soviet Union, the VvSU. He was probably even chairman of the Hilversum department for a while. He was a convinced pacifist and called himself an anarcho-syndicalist. When he got a new job as a warehouse clerk at the NSF in Hilversum around 1938, he canceled his membership and returned to the SDAP.

In the years before the war, he offered illegal shelter to a German political refugee as part of the Red Aid. In February 1941, he actively participated in the February strike. Moreover, he distributed illegal pamphlets and leaves of the resistance group Spengen, which was already active in Hilversum in 1940.

On June 25, 1941, he was taken away by order of the Sicherheitsdienst by the Dutch police as part of the CPN-Aktion. In two days 400 communists were arrested by order of the occupying forces, after he had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Sicherheitsdienst probably based its arrests on a list drawn up by the Dutch Central Intelligence Service.
Martinus was immediately taken to Camp Schoorl, on August 18, 1941 he was one of the very first prisoners of Camp Amersfoort. He had camp number 6 there. On December 13 he was deported to Neuengamme, where he died January 25, 1942 five weeks later.
He was cremated in the city crematorium of the city of Hamburg, because at that time there was no crematorium on the Neuengamme camp site.
After the war, the urn with ashes was buried in a grave on the Dutch War Cemetery of the Dutch War Graves Foundation, located at the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg.

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