When the Nazis began deporting Dutch Jews in 1942, a group of Freemasons in Amsterdam realized that hundreds of Jewish Masons appeared on the membership registry of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands. If the Gestapo ever obtained the registry, every Jewish Mason in the country would be identified and deported.
The Master of the Amsterdam lodge No. 1, a man named Johannes van Dam, made a decision that put his own life at risk. He ordered the lodge registry to be smuggled out of the lodge building and into the home of a trusted Brother who was not Jewish. Working at night, van Dam and three other Masons began contacting every Jewish Mason on the list and arranging for them to be hidden in the homes of non-Jewish Brothers.
The network operated for two years. Each Jewish Mason was given a new identity, a new address, and, in some cases, a new lodge. The Masonic brotherhood, which spanned denominations and nationalities, meant that a Jewish Mason in Amsterdam could find shelter with a Protestant Mason in Rotterdam or a Catholic Mason in Utrecht. The lodge in Groningen hid 12 Jewish Masons in its cellar. The lodge in The Hague hid 18 more in its library.
By the end of the war, approximately 500 Jewish Masons had been saved through the network. Johannes van Dam was arrested in 1944, tortured by the SD, and executed in the dunes near Bloemendaal. His last words, spoken to the firing squad, were reported by a guard who survived the war: Tell my Brothers that the temple still stands.
The lodge registry that van Dam saved is now preserved in the Masonic Museum of the Netherlands in The Hague. It contains 1,200 names, each one checked with a small pencil mark by van Dam himself, indicating whether the Brother had been contacted and relocated.