Museum to glorify Nazism is goal of Dutch Nazi widow

AMSTERDAM, July 13 (JTA) — The woman known here as the “Black Widow” is planning to turn her villa in the Dutch town of Velp into a museum for the glorification of Nazism. Florentine Rost van Tonningen-Heubel, 83, has the pillars outside her spacious home painted black and red, the colors of the Nazi flag. Large candles inside the home are decorated with swastikas. The interior of her villa contains busts, photographs and portraits of Adolf Hitler and other top Nazi officials, including her late husband, Rost van Tonningen, a Dutch Nazi who committed suicide in 1945. Nazism was a “system of honesty, reliability and ethics,” she recently told Dutch journalist Jack Kooistra. In 1992 Tonningen-Heubel created a foundation with the goal of turning the villa into a museum. For the past five years, the foundation has been collecting photographs, books, magazines, pamphlets and other documents about Nazi leaders and their ideology. Officials from the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank Foundation believe that the authorities will intervene if the museum is ever established, because propagating Nazism is prohibited under Dutch law. But such considerations are not stopping the Black Widow from going ahead with her plans. Tonningen-Heubel recently ran an appeal in Der Freiwillige, a German monthly magazine for former members of the SS, to donate memorabilia to her planned museum. Some of the $250,000 needed to open the museum has already been raised, she told Kooistra, adding that she has received financial backing from sympathizers in Switzerland, France, Belgium and Canada.