History
The party was founded as a political party in 1971 by Guus Looy, with as key purpose to rehabilitate convicted WW-II war criminals. In 1973 Roeland Raes, of the Belgian Vlaams Blok, becomes vice-president (reflecting the desire of both parties to unite the Netherlands and Flanders) and later that year Joop Glimmerveen took over the position of president. During the 1970s, the party became increasingly militant as younger neo-Nazis joined its ranks.
When Glimmerveen revealed his sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Anton Mussert and the NVU became more and more a Nazi party, support for the party collapsed and in the end it was forbidden. Due to a mistake in the law, the NVU managed to continue after it was forbidden. Some members formed the Centrumpartij (CP), which later split into the Centrum Demokraten (CD) and CP'86. In the mid-eighties, the NVU collapsed completely.
In 1996, a few young neo-National Socialists asked Joop Glimmerveen, then 68 years of age, to start the NVU again and he did. In 1998, they tried to enter the city council elections in Den Haag and Arnhem, but did not succeed. At this moment, the NVU is the most active party on the extreme right in the Netherlands and gets support from the Aktiefront Nationale Socialisten (ANS), a small organization of activists who claim solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians and other groups which they consider to be anti-imperialist. The number of members of the NVU is unknown.
Read more about this topic: Dutch Peoples-Union
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