Johan Hendrik Weidner

At the 1993 opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. he was one of seven persons chosen to light candles recognizing the rescuers. The Israeli government honored Weidner as one of the gentiles designated as Righteous Among the Nations at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem where a grove of trees was planted in his name on the Hill of Remembrance along the Avenue of the Righteous.

In mid 1946, Jean was suddenly dismissed by the Dutch government, arguing that they needed a professional policeman on the post. After his work with the security he picked up the threads of normal life again, and returned to his import/export textile business. In 1955 he emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in California where from 1958 he and his wife Naomi operated a chain of health food stores.

In February 1944, a young female courier was arrested by the French police and extradited to the Gestapo. Against all rules, she had a notebook with her containing names and addresses of Dutch-Paris members. She was brutally interrogated by a guard that held her head under cold water until she nearly drowned. Under torture she revealed many names of key members of the underground network. As a result, a large number of Dutch-Paris members were arrested (See more details in Suzanne Hiltermann-Souloumiac).

In November 1944, after the Liberation of France Weidner was invited to London by Queen Wilhelmina, to come to tell her about the "Dutch-Paris" escape route, and the situation of Dutch civilians in France and Belgium. In the same year he was made a Captain in the Dutch Armed Forces, after which he could be in charge of the Dutch Security Service based in Paris. His service was in charge of vetting all the Dutch citizens in France and Belgium to look for any that collaborated with the Germans.

At the outbreak of World War II Jean was living in Paris. With the subsequent German occupation of France he fled with several others from Paris to Lyon in the unoccupied part of France. Because he had to abandon his Parisian business, he began a new business in Lyon. In 1941, Jean founded "Dutch-Paris", an underground network of which the location of his Lyonnaise textile business soon became its headquarters. In order to get passes to go in and out of the Swiss frontier zone, he set up a second textile shop in Annecy at the end of 1942.

Around this time he went to Geneva to attend sessions of the League of Nations, and saw firsthand how ineffective that body was in preventing the outbreak of war in 1939.

Following his education at French public schools, he attended basic courses at the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary in Collonges-sous-Salève. His father Johan Hendrik Weidner Sr. who studied at the University of Geneva, and had been a minister for the Seventh-day Adventists in Brussels and Switzerland, hoped Jean would follow in his footsteps. To his father's regret, he decided to go into business, and in 1935 he established a textile import/export business in Paris, France.

Johan Hendrik Weidner (October 22, 1912, Brussels, Belgium - May 21, 1994, Monterey Park, California, United States) was a highly decorated Dutch hero of World War II.