Wilhelmus Antonius Sassen (born 16 April 1918 – died 2002) was a Dutch collaborator, Nazi journalist and a member of the Waffen-SS.
He was raised in a traditional Roman Catholic family in North Brabant and attended a gymnasium in Neerbosch near Nijmegen and in Breda.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, Sassen was a member of the 7th Field Artillery regiment and was taken prisoner by the Germans for a short time.
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), and Sassen volunteered for the German Eastern front.
He was a SS-Kriegsberichterstatter (SS-war reporter) with the SS-division Wiking in the southern sector of the front and in the spring of 1942 witnessed the offensive in the Caucasus.
In April 1943, he was promoted to SS-Unterscharführer (the lowest rank of non-commissioned officer, comparable to a US Corporal) and assigned to an SS armoured division near Kharkov.
On 6 June 1944 (D-Day), Sassen was at the front in Normandy reporting the battles around Caen, Bayeux, Saint-Lô, Avranches, Falaise and Lisieux.
Sassen remained in the Netherlands, reported the airborne landings around Arnhem and became the editor of the newspaper Het Nieuws van den Dag in Amsterdam.
At the beginning of 1945, Sassen was asked to participate in a Werewolf organisation in case the allied forces overran the German Army in the Netherlands.
Together with his girlfriend, Miep van der Voort, their daughter Saskia, and some former SS men and collaborators, he departed in the coastal vessel The Eagle under the command of former U-boat captain Schneider to Argentina.
The Sassen family lived first in Ciudad Jardín Lomas del Palomar in Greater Buenos Aires, where their second daughter was born.
[citation needed] He was asked to represent Merex AG, which was a cover for the illegal arms trade controlled by the German secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst.
[3] Sassen was interviewed for an edition of the British World in Action (Granada/ITV, 1978) about his connections in Argentina with Josef Mengele; the fugitive Auschwitz concentration camp physician was still alive in a then unknown location.