Queer Places:
Herengracht 401, 1017 BP Amsterdam, Netherlands
Simon van Keulen (born November 13, 1926) is a Dutch painter.
Wolfgang Cordan writes in his diary: “Ommen, 30 July 1944 (more likely July 25, ed.). Sad symbol: during the night Percy Gothein has been caught in the act / shaven and locked up in the local concentration camp / with him two guys, one of whom was truly the corpus delicti ... this is a crime - not in a juridical but in a philosophical sense ...". Francesca Rheannon explains that Gothein left Amsterdam because of discord with Wolfgang Frommel. The attack on Hitler (20 June 1944) could have been the cause for the arrest. Gothein had connections with the Kreisauer Kreis who prepared the attack. Through him in 1944 a letter for the Britisch Government went to the poet Geerten Gossaert. After 20 June Gothein fled to Castle Eerde in Ommen, where Vincent Weyand and Simon van Keulen were also staying in order to evade forced labour. Gothein knew Simon from a street encounter. They lived in Villa De Esch. The 9 remaining Jewish students of the Quakers school in April 1943 had been transported to camp Vught in April 1943. Maybe Vincent and Gothein thought that De Esch would be safe after the raid.
Francesca Rheannon suspects that Gothein was reported by someone in Ommen. 'The police came to the house where he was with Simon to ask him to come into police headquarters the following day. They found him in bed with Simon, and somehow the news got to the Gestapo'. Simon later claimed that 'he and Percy were in bed together only because there was no other bed around'. But Gothein had been arrested in Germany 2 or 3 times under the infamous anti-gay paragraph 175, and he made no secret of his sexual orientation - possibly one reason why the poet Stefan George rejected him in the 1920's'. George was very secretive about his own gay feelings.
From Castle Eerde Gothein and Van Keulen were transported to the cruel Erika camp, a penal camp in Ommen, manned by mostly Dutch personnel. Four days later, on July 27, Weyand was arrested as well and brought to Erika in the car of camp commander Werner Schwier. Rheannon was told by Vincent's brother Olaf Weyand that the Dutch guards accused the young men of being gay and beat them up. Gays were often beaten up in the camps, by the guards, their fellow prisoners, or both. Gothein had been separated from Simon immediately upon entering Erika. Simon reported seeing him a few days later from a window and that he had looked very 'bad'.
When the news of the arrest of Percy, Simon and Vincent and their transport to the infamous camp in Ommen reached the Herengracht, precautions were taken. Maybe, under torture, information about the circle around Frommel and Gisèle would come out. Friedrich W. Buri and Claus Victor Bock went in hiding elsewhere. The fear turned out to be unfounded and the two returned in September.
During that time they found out, Simon van Keulen was in camp Amersfoort. Gisèle, after waiting a morning at the Sicherheitsdienst, managed to get a permission to visit him. The permit was signed by the chief, Willy Lages. On 12 September she went to the camp by tandem bicycle with Guido Teunissen. She introduced herself as a the friend of Lages, bribed the guards with cognac and cigarettes, made use of the fact that the brute Kotälla was drunk, and had a 5-minute conversation with Simon. She could tell the badly beaten young man that the hiding at the Herengracht still was functioning and that nobody had talked. On 19 October Simon jumped from the train which would have transported him to Germany, and appeared at the Herengracht 'like a ghost' Herengracht.
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