The Body Of A Resistance Fighter Shot By The Nazis Has Been Identified 77 Years After His Death

A DNA comparison of the victim’s remains with that of a living relative made this formal identification possible.

A man whose body was found in a mass grave next to one of the worst Nazi prisons in the Netherlands after World War II has finally been identified 77 years after his death. After a lengthy investigation worthy of a detective story, a DNA comparison of the victim’s remains with that of a living relative made this formal identification possible, according to a foundation dedicated to finding the war disappeared.

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The man is a certain Cornelis Pieter “Kees” Kreukniet, around 50 at the time of his death, a resistance fighter who was involved in printing an underground newspaper distributed in The Hague, investigators said on Saturday. He had been arrested by the Germans in October 1944 after a failure in the delivery of the paper required for the newspaper alerted the secret services.

Shot by firing squad

The inquest revealed that he was shot by a firing squad before being thrown into the mass grave outside Scheveningen prison in The Hague. His body had been discovered in 1947 along with eight others and all buried as unknown. But the foundation, chaired by Ronald Klomp, together with the military service responsible for identifying the bodies, followed the lead from the remains of clothing to a shop near where the victim lived, studied the prison registers – which reported that the latter prisoner had died of pneumonia.