After 1945, more than 100,000 Dutch were imprisoned on suspicion of treason, aiding the enemy, joining a foreign army, personal enrichment or acts of violence. Many were detained in camps without a clear notion of the legal consequences. In this legal no man's land guards could act independently and take violent and humiliating sanctions against prisoners. An alleged target of this (partly) private justice was Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, virulent antisemite, prominent member of the National Socialist Movement (nsb), mp and chairman of the Dutch National Bank during the occupation. After the war, his wife, F.S. (Florrie) Rost van Tonningen-Heubel (1914-2007), embarked on a personal campaign to prove that her husband had been terrorised and either killed in imprisonment or driven to commit suicide. There is no evidence for this allegation, says Van Tonningen's biographer David Barnouw, but the widow's campaign does reflect a broad-based, deeply-felt sense of injustice among ‘war veterans’ and political delinquents. ‘Black Widow Rost van Tonningen’ became a key figure in one of these small groups of ‘war veterans’ as well as an icon of the persistent yet marginal presence of National Socialism in postwar Dutch society. In 1969, the Dutch public was first introduced to this stately lady and her posh accent in a documentary on Anton Mussert, leader of the nsb, by the starting director Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938). More media appearances ensued. Rost van Tonningen consistently played down the Holocaust, praising Adolf Hitler, expressing resentment about the handling of her husband and complaining about the incessant misreading of the honest intentions of her ideological kin. Her villa Ben Trovato in the small town of Velp became a meeting place for neo-Nazis and Flemish nationalists. Under the name ‘Consortium De Levensboom’ (‘The Tree of Life Consortium’), the villa doubled up as the distribution centre of publications about neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial, including Die Auschwitz-Lüge by Thies Christophersen, published in 1973. Rost van Tonningen was handed several convictions for distributing these publications as well as for the publication of her autobiography.

Thanks to her extravagance and elitist diction, the ‘black widow’ seemed able to neutralise the weight of postwar neo-Nazism. As if by celebrating the summer solstice – big news in 1983 – Nazism became German folklore celebrated by naive people.