Dries Riphagen

Bernardus Andreas "Dries" Riphagen (7 September 1909 – 13 May 1973) was a Dutch gangster and Nazi collaborator who is best known in the Netherlands for collaborating with the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD) to locate as many Dutch Jews as possible and have them delivered to Nazi concentration camps during the occupation.

Riphagen would gain the trust of Jews by promising to safeguard their belongings, primarily jewellery, until the conclusion of the war, only to defraud them of their belongings and notify the SD of their location. After the end of war in Europe, he faked his death and went into hiding. He deposited the stolen Jewish belongings and money in an undetermined bank in neutral Switzerland and fled to Argentina, as had many Nazi officers.

He secretly returned to Europe at some point between 1950 and 1970, to withdraw the ill-gotten jewellery. Dutch authorities issued an arrest warrant and bounty on Riphagen in 1988 but it later transpired that he had died at a Swiss private clinic in Montreux in 1973.

Biography

Early life

Riphagen was born as the eighth child into a Dutch family in Amsterdam. Riphagen's father worked for the Royal Dutch Navy, while his mother, a homemaker, died when he was six years old. His father married a second time but did not take care of the children because he was an alcoholic. At the age of 14, Dries Riphagen was sent to the notorious merchant-navy training center "Pollux". From 1923 to 1924, he went to sea as an ordinary seaman. He stayed in the United States for two years working for Standard Oil, during which time he came into contact with local criminal circles and learned their methods. His subsequent nickname, "Al Capone", came from this time in the United States.