How to survive a war, how to become a legend of your team and other stories
One day in July 1944 Frederik Jacques “Frits” Philips was at the office of the now world-famous company in Eindhoven when someone he knew informed him that the Nazis had decided to arrest him and send him to a concentration camp in Germany. “Frits,” as everyone called him, managed to escape capture by climbing out of a window and remained hidden in friends attics until the liberation of the city by Allied forces roughly two months later. That tip-off saved his life, but before that, he had already ensured the survival of hundreds of others.
The son of Anton Philips, one of the two founders of the company bearing the family name, Frits was born in 1905 and was destined from a young age to take over the family business. However, before that happened, he spent some of his time supporting the football team founded by his father’s employees in the early 1910s, with the support of the company’s management. In fact, it was Frits Philips who kicked the first ball at the opening whistle of the first-ever match in the history of PSV Eindhoven, held on the site where the team’s stadium stands today. He was only five years old.
“Mr. Frits” was particularly loved in Eindhoven because he treated everyone the same, whether they were regular workers or board members. This was his general approach to life. Even at the football stadium, although he was considered the team’s “No. 1 fan,” he never wanted to stand out. Though his family had access to the best suite, he never set foot there. Instead, he sat in a regular seat in the main stand, right next to the other anonymous fans. After his passing, a few months after the 2005 championship celebration—during which Mark van Bommel climbed into the stands to let Frits hold the trophy—the club placed an honorary plaque above his seat to remind everyone that a man who lived his entire life beside his beloved team had sat there. From the first kick-off to the club’s 35th title nearly a century later!
The greatest achievement of his life was neither in business nor football. In the mid-1930s, Frits Philips became deputy director of Philips, but the situation drastically changed a few years later when World War II broke out. After Hitler’s invasion of the Netherlands, all members of his family fled urgently to the USA. Frits was the only one who chose to stay behind to try and keep the business alive. In the end, he accomplished much more than that.
When the Nazis occupied the city, they demanded that Philips manufacture various electronic components for the Germans. Since some of the company’s factories had been destroyed, a special manufacturing division was set up inside the nearby Vught concentration camp, which was controlled by the SS. Through this, Philips found a golden opportunity to save as many Jews as he could.
Like another Oskar Schindler, he convinced Nazi officials that his workers were irreplaceable, ensuring them larger food rations and, most importantly, keeping them alive. Every few weeks, hundreds of prisoners from Vught—mainly Jews and dissenters from the Netherlands and Belgium—were transferred to concentration camps in Germany and Poland, where survival chances were slim. Almost all of those who worked for Philips were spared from this selection process, even though many had little to no relevant experience, having been hired only to avoid deportation to Germany.
For several years, Frits Philips struggled daily to maintain a delicate balance, often “cooking the books” of the company’s numbers. On one hand, Philips had to ensure it did not meet its production targets to avoid indirectly supporting the German war machine. According to some records, many products produced during that period were defective, and this was no coincidence. On the other hand, he had to show some results to convince the Germans that keeping hundreds of his workers alive was worthwhile. “It’s very difficult to hunt rabbits with unwilling dogs,” was the phrase he used to describe the situation.
In 1943 Philips stood by his workers even when the entire country went on a general strike. For his failure to force his employees to comply, he was arrested and spent five months in the concentration camp—this time as a prisoner. It is estimated that out of 469 Jewish workers, he managed to save 382 through various means. In 1996, some of those he saved nominated him for the Yad Vashem award, which is given to people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. At the award ceremony, Frits Philips stated that he did not consider himself a hero, emphasizing that many people collaborated to ensure the survival of his workers.
Around the same time that Frits Philips was hiding in an attic, 111 kilometers away in Amsterdam, Jaap van Praag sat motionless in a dark attic, trying to avoid any noise that might give him away. For 2.5 years!
Van Praag, who owned a music store before the war, experienced the same nightmare as thousands of other Dutch citizens of Jewish descent. According to some statistics, of the 80,000 Jews living in Amsterdam in the 1930s, only 20% survived! In the first months after the start of the persecutions, the 30-year-old took advantage of his close relationship with Ajax and found refuge in the home of one of the club’s players. When things became more dangerous, some friends helped him hide in the abandoned attic of a nearby photography studio, where he spent the next 2.5 years. During workdays, he avoided any movement that might make noise, as the shop owner had no idea about his uninvited guest.
When the Germans left the Netherlands and van Praag finally emerged from his hiding place, he discovered the extent of the personal tragedy that had unfolded within the broader global catastrophe. His parents and sister had been murdered in Auschwitz, many of his friends had disappeared with no trace of whether they were dead or alive, and his wife had left him for his best friend!
After the war, it took Jaap van Praag a few more years to regain his footing, but once he did, his return to public life was impactful. In the 1960s, apart from running his store, he had his own television show, and in 1964, he made one of his dreams come true by becoming the president of Ajax. During his 14 years at the helm, Ajax experienced its best period in history, dominating both domestically and internationally, winning three consecutive European Cups. Van Praag’s success was largely due to a smart decision at the start of his presidency: at the end of his first season as president, he hired 37-year-old former Ajax player Rinus Michels as coach. Michels, combined with the rise of a skinny young player from the academy named Johan Cruyff, took Ajax to new heights.
Jaap van Praag was killed in a car accident in Amsterdam in 1987 at the age of 77. Frits Philips passed away in 2005 at the age of 100, due to complications from a fall in his garden. Both men survived the horrors of World War II in almost cinematic fashion, lived full lives, watched their beloved teams dominate Dutch football by winning numerous titles, and earned a special place in their teams histories.
