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Baron Aarnoud Jan Anne Aleid van Heemstra was born in 1871 into an aristocratic family of Frisian origin in the Netherlands. His great uncle, Schelto van Heemstra, had been Prime Minister of the Netherlands in the early 1860s. Aarnoud van Heemstra was born in Vreeland, a village in the province of Utrecht, and was the second son of Wilhelmina Cornelia de Beaufort (a minor noble) and Baron Hendrik Philip van Heemstra, a town mayor.
Van Heemstra earned his law degree from Utrecht University in 1896. For the next 14 years, he worked as a prosecutor and then as a judge in several Dutch cities. In 1910, he was elected mayor of the city of Arnhem, where he improved public housing, recruited several new businesses to the city, and served as a capable administrator through the turmoil of World War I. He resigned as mayor in 1920 after a budget dispute, complaining that his poor salary no longer allowed him to perform his duties adequately - although he was personally wealthy and lived on a large country estate called Zijpendaal, where he maintained a stable of fine horses and was known for throwing lavish parties.
Queen Wilhelmina appointed the newly unemployed Baron van Heemstra to be the governor of the colony of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), and he arrived...