1. George John Lionel Maduro was a Dutch law student who served as an officer in the 1940 Battle of the Netherlands and distinguished himself in repelling the German attack on The Hague.
11 Facts About George Maduro
1. 2.
George Maduro was posthumously awarded the medal of Knight 4th-class of the Military Order of William, the highest and oldest military decoration in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
3.
George John Lionel Maduro was born on 15 July 1916 in Willemstad in the Dutch colony Curacao and Dependencies.
4.
George Maduro was the only son of Joshua and Rebecca Maduro, a couple of Sephardic Jewish descent.
5.
George Maduro was 23 and a law student at Leiden University when Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940.
6.
On 15 May 1940, upon the capitulation of the Dutch military, George Maduro was captured by German troops and jailed in the Oranjehotel in Scheveningen.
7.
George Maduro refused to do so and joined the resistance movement.
8.
George Maduro became active in smuggling Allied pilots into the United Kingdom via Spain.
9.
In February 1945, barely three months prior to the liberation of the camp by American troops, George Maduro died of typhus.
10.
George Maduro is the only Dutch person of Antillian descent to have been awarded the Knight 4th-class of the Military Order of William, which was awarded posthumously.
11.
On 1 September 2022 an opera about George Maduro premiered in the Hague.