<br/> »The foundation is named after Benjamin Telders, a lawyer and philosopher, who was chair of the Liberal State Party (a predecessor of the VVD Party) and who, during World War II, was arrested by German (Nazi) occupiers. He died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before The Netherlands were liberated. The Prof.mr. B.M. TeldersStichting was founded in 1954 as a completely independent liberal think tank by a board under the chairmanship of Johan Witteveen, a Professor in economics who was to become vice-prime minister of The Netherlands in the 1960s and director of the International Monetary Fund in the 1970s. In 1972, the Prof.mr. B.M. TeldersStichting established a link with the VVD, but, as an organisation and in its policy formulation, the think tank remained independent. The current president of the board is Frans Engering, who earlier was Director-General Foreign Economic Relations at the ministry of Economic Affairs and Dutch ambassador to South Africa. The director of the Prof.mr. B.M. TeldersStichting is Patrick van Schie, a historian who wrote his dissertation on the history of Dutch liberalism from 1901 until 1940. <br/> The Prof.mr. B.M. TeldersStichting publishes policy papers and books on all kind of political and societal topics, from the market economy to environmental issues and from crime fighting to defence policy. In addition, together with a commercial book publisher, the foundation publishes books for a wide audience on the history of liberalism and its leaders, on the political philosophy of liberalism and on the leading minds in liberal (political and economic) theory«<ref>http://www.liberalforum.eu/en/about/member-organisations.html</ref>