Quote (balrog66 @ May 4 2020 09:43pm)

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In January 1945, in the middle of the Hunger Winter, the official daily ration is ca. 500 calories a person. Without extra food extreme malnutrition is threatening the population. In that final year of war a large proportion of the population is dependent on local soup kitchens. Long queues form there. Meat, butter, cheese and lard have almost entirely disappeared from the rations. The war diet consists of potatoes, sugar beets, brown bread and legumes, as a basis for a watery soup. Everything edible is cherished, as seen in this picture where a mother and her child gather the grain kernels that fell off a transport truck.

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The Allied planes that flew to Germany, often had to take extra fuel to return to their bases in England. They often dropped their reserve tanks above the Noordoostpolder. For the polder inhabitants this could be dangerous, as they fell down at extreme speeds. But they were also useful, as the rests of kerosene was used as fuel for heaters and lighting, and the empty tanks could be repurposed as canoes.

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These POW's were part of a group of 101 Soviet soldiers that were transferred to Camp Amersfoort on the 27th of September 1941. As living propaganda material they were paraded through the streets of Amersfoort. The German command, wanted to show the populace that they were Untermenschen and expected a sympathetic response from the Dutch. This completely failed. The people of Amersfoort were shocked and showed pity. The Soviets were treated worse than other POW's; 24 died of hunger and abuse in the camp. The other 77 Soviet soldiers were executed on 9 April 1942. All soldiers were buried after the war at the Soviet Honor Field in Leusden. As far as we know this is the only picture of these soldiers.

Quote (balrog66 @ May 4 2020 03:22pm)

There's a picture of that too:

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Even in 1945 bicycles are seized and loaded on a cart. Onlookers are standing at distance, whilst a German patrol on horseback passes by. Already in July 1942 the German Wehrmacht is ordering the citizens of Hoorn to surrender their men's bikes. The hunt for bicycles intensifies as the war goes on, as the German army has a large shortage of vehicles. This hit the population heavily, as pretty much all other forms of transport were extremely scarce.

Pretty much all Dutch people I know still joke to Germans if and/or when we can have our bikes back. When I was a kid that wasn't a joke.

Quote (Santara @ May 4 2020 11:57pm)

Excellent thread.



Poignant.

Quote (dro94 @ May 4 2020 11:18pm)

What was the prevailing mood of ethnic Dutch at the time of occupation? Were they left alone by the Germans and would they have constituted part of the Nazi empire if they won?

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Initially, the Netherlands was placed under German military control. However, following the refusal of the Dutch government to return, the Netherlands was placed under control by a German civilian governor on 29 May 1940, unlike France or Denmark which had hteir own governments, and Belgium, which was under German military control. The civil government, the Reichskomissariat Niederlande, was headed by Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The German occupiers implemented a policy of Gleichschaltung ("enforced conformity") and systematically eliminated all non-Nazi organizations. In 1940, the German regime immediately outlawed all Socialist and Communist parties. In 1940, it forbade all parties except for the NSB, the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands.

Gleichschaltung was an enormous shock to the Dutch, who had traditionally had separate institutions for all main religious groups, particularly Catholic and Protestant, because of decades of pillarisation. The process was opposed by the Catholic Church in the Netherlands, and, in 1941, all Roman Catholics were urged by Dutch bishops to leave associations that had been Nazified. A long-term aim of the Nazis was to incorporate the Netherlands into the Greater Germanic Reich. Hitler thought very highly of the Dutch people, who were considered to be fellow members of the Aryan "master race".

Initially, Seyss-Inquart applied the 'velvet glove' approach; by appeasing the population he tried to win them for the national socialist ideology. It meant that he kept repression and economic extraction as low as possible, and tried to cooperate with the elite and government officials in the country. There was also a realistic reason behind this: the NSB offered insufficient candidates and had no great popular support. The German market went open and Dutch companies benefited greatly from export to Germany, even if this might be seen as collaboration in case of goods which might be used for German war efforts. In any case, despite the British victory in the Battle of Britain, many considered a German victory a realistic possibility and it would therefore be wise to side with the winner. As a result, and due to the ban on other political parties, the NSB grew rapidly. Although gasoline pumps were already sealed in 1940, the occupation seemed tolerable.

This rosy picture ended with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and the subsequent German defeats at Moscow and Stalingrad. Germany was now fighting a mighty enemy in the East, and in order to defeat it, occupied territory had to make its contribution. Economic extraction increased, production was limited mostly to sectors relevant for the war effort as it was simply impossible to produce guns and butter. Repression increased, especially against the Jewish population.

After the Allied invasion of June 1944, due to the railroad strike and the frontline running through the Netherlands, the Randstad was cut off from food and fuel. This resulted in acute need and starvation: the Hongerwinter. The German authorities lost more and more control over the situation as the population tried to keep what little they had away from German confiscations and were less inclined to cooperate now that it was clear that Germany would lose the war. Fanatical Nazis prepared to make a last stand against the Allied troops, followed Berlin's Nerobefehl and destroyed goods and property (battle for Groningen, destructions of the Amsterdam and Rotterdam ports, inundations). Others tried to mediate the situation. Eventually, in April and May 1945, the Netherlands was liberated by the Canadian troops.

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The Arbeitseinsatz—the drafting of civilians for forced labour—was imposed on the Netherlands. This obliged every man between 18 and 45 to work in German factories, which were bombed regularly by the western Allies. Those who refused were forced into hiding. As food and many other goods were taken out of the Netherlands, rationing increased (with ration books). At times, the resistance would raid distribution centres to obtain ration cards to be distributed to those in hiding.

For the resistance to succeed, it was sometimes necessary for its members to feign collaboration with the Germans. After the war, this led to difficulties for those who pretended to collaborate when they could not prove they had been in the resistance — something that was difficult because it was in the nature of the job to keep it a secret.

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Shortly after it was established, the military regime began to persecute the Jews of the Netherlands. In 1940, there were no deportations and only small measures were taken against the Jews. In February 1941, the Nazis deported a small group of Dutch Jews to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The Dutch reacted with the February strike, a nationwide protest against the deportations, unique in the history of Nazi-occupied Europe. Although the strike did not accomplish much—its leaders were executed—it was an initial setback for Seyss-Inquart. He had intended both to deport the Jews and to win the Dutch over to the Nazi cause.

Before the February strike, the Nazis had installed a Jewish Council (Dutch: Joodse Raad). This was a board of Jews, headed by Professor David Cohen and Abraham Asscher. Independent Jewish organizations, such as the Committee for Jewish Refugees — founded by Asscher and Cohen in 1933 — were closed. The Jewish Council ultimately served as an instrument for organising the identification and deportation of Jews more efficiently; the Jews on the council were told and convinced they were helping the Jews.

In May 1942, Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David badges. Around the same time the Catholic Church in the Netherlands publicly condemned the government's action in a letter read at all Sunday parish services. Thereafter, the Nazi government treated the Dutch more harshly: notable Socialists were imprisoned. Later in the war, Catholic priests, including Titus Brandsma, were deported to concentration camps.

In 1942, the Germans established a transit camp (Durchgangslager) at Westerbork. It converted the pre-war camp opened by the Committee for Jewish Refugees. Concentration camps were built at Vught and Amersfoort as well. Eventually, with the assistance of Dutch police and civil service, the majority of the Dutch Jews were deported to concentration camps.

Germany was particularly effective in deporting and killing Jews during its occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. Of the 140,000 Jews in 1941, inclusive both of Dutch Jews and the refugees ensnared by the German invasion of 1940, about 38,000 survived at war's end in 1945. The survival rate of 27% is much lower than in neighboring Belgium, where 60% of Jews survived. It is also lower than in France, where 75% survived.

Historians have offered several hypotheses about why the survival rate was much lower in the Netherlands than in the other western European countries; including the possibility that the German occupiers in the Netherlands were particularly vigorous in comparison to other occupied countries. The Netherlands included religion in its national records, which reduced the opportunity for Jews to mask their ethnic and religious identity. How much did the cooperation of the Dutch authorities and the Dutch people contribute? Did the absence of forests in the Netherlands deprive the Jews of hiding places? Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes have examined these hypotheses by looking at the variations in survival between the different regions of the Netherlands. They conclude that most of these hypotheses do not explain the data. They suggest that a more likely explanation was the varying "ferocity" with which the Germans and their Dutch collaborators hunted Jews in hiding in the different regions. In 2002, Ad Van Liempt published Kopgeld: Nederlandse premiejagers op zoek naar joden, 1943 (Bounty: Dutch bounty hunters in search of Jews, 1943). It was published in English as Hitler's Bounty Hunters: The Betrayal of the Jews (2005). He had found in newly declassified records that the Germans paid a bounty to police and other collaborators, as in the Colonnie Henneicke group, for tracking down Jews.

A 2018 publication, De 102.000 namen, lists the 102,000 known victims of the persecution of Jewish, Sinti, and Roma people from the Netherlands; the book is published by Boom, Amsterdam, under the auspices of the Westerbork Remembrance Center.

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Many Dutch men and women chose or were forced to collaborate with the German regime or joined the German armed forces (which usually would mean being placed in the Waffen-SS). Others, like members of the Henneicke Column, were actively involved in capturing hiding Jews for a price and delivering them to the German occupiers. It is estimated that the Henneicke Column captured around 8,000-9,000 Dutch Jews who were ultimately sent to their death in the German death camps.

The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands was the only legal political party in the Netherlands from 1941 and was actively involved in collaboration with the German occupiers. In 1941, when Germany still seemed certain to win the war, about three percent of the adult male population belonged to the NSB.

After World War II broke out, the NSB sympathized with the Germans, but nevertheless advocated strict neutrality for the Netherlands. In May 1940, after the German invasion, 10,000 NSB members and sympathizers were put in custody by the Dutch government. Soon after the Dutch defeat, on 14 May 1940, they were set free by German troops. In June 1940, NSB leader Anton Mussert held a speech in Lunteren in which he called for the Dutch to embrace the Germans and renounce the Dutch Monarchy, which had fled to London.

In 1940, the German regime had outlawed all socialist and communist parties; in 1941, it forbade all parties, except for the NSB. The NSB openly collaborated with the occupation forces. Its membership grew to about 100,000. The newcomers (meikevers) were shunned by many existing members, who accused them of opportunist behavior. The NSB played an important role in lower government and civil service; every new mayor appointed by the German occupation government was a member of the NSB. However, for most higher functions, the Germans preferred to leave the existing elite in place, knowing that the NSB neither offered enough suitable candidates nor enjoyed enough popular support.

After the German signing of surrender on 6 May 1945, the NSB was outlawed. Mussert was arrested the following day. Many of the members of the NSB were arrested, but few were convicted; those who were included Mussert, who was executed on 7 May 1946. There were no attempts to continue the organization illegally.

In September 1940, the Nederlandsche SS was formed as "Afdeling XI" (Department XI) of the NSB. It was the equivalent to the Allgemeine SS in Germany. In November 1942 its name was changed in Germaansche SS in Nederland. The Nederlandsche SS was primarily a political formation but also served as manpower reservoir for the Waffen-SS.

Between 20,000 and 25,000 Dutchmen volunteered to serve in the Heer and the Waffen-SS. The most notable formations were the 4th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Brigade Nederland which saw action exclusively on the Eastern Front and the SS Volunteer Grenadier Brigade Landstorm Nederland which fought in Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Nederland brigade participated in fighting on the Eastern Front during the Battle of Narva, with several soldiers receiving the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, Nazi Germany's highest award for bravery.

Another form of corruption was providing goods and services essential to the German war efforts. Especially in 1940 and 1941, when a German victory was still a possibility, Dutch companies were willing to provide such goods to the greedily purchasing Germans. Strategic supplies fell in German hands, and in May 1940 German officers placed their first orders with Dutch shipyards. This cooperation with the German industry was facilitated by the fact that due to the occupation the German market 'opened' and due to facilitating behavior from the side of the (party pro-German) elite. Many directors justified their behavior with the argument that otherwise the Germans would have closed down their company or would have replaced them with NSB members - in this way they could still exercise some, albeit limited, influence. After the war, no heavy sentences were dealt to high officials and company directors.

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Often I have asked myself what the use is of remembering, of gatherings like this. Do we remember because traditions demand us to, or is there something more important at play?

Last spring, during a lecture on the work of Marga Minco and the war - I do not know whether the war chases me or I chase the war - I noticed that remembering should be more than a ritual, that the desire for knowledge should be inherent to it, and that platitudes are thus the enemy of meaningful remembrance. I also noticed that other platitude, that we now know the story of the war and the Jews, has become louder and louder; A presumptuous platitude, which presumes that our knowledge is now complete, that we can divorce from the relatively recent past.

To say that you know the past now is a refusal to gain knowledge of it. And who does not know his past, is doomed to repeat it, as much as he is doomed to not know who he is. Nothing will make people desire for an unwavering identity like the supposition that they have no idea who they are. And often it is the unwavering identity which leads to seeing others as a stranger and an absolute enemy.

After this lecture about Minco a psychotherapist came to me, who said that we need rituals and platitudes to not get sick of remembering. And that we should keep the past at a distance, to not get consumed by it. For sure, but if we do not get sick of the 20th century, I fear nothing is being remembered and nothing has been understood.

Not getting sick could be a symptom of looking away, of denial. If we deny that the sickness of the past century - that of the industrialised totalitarianism, of the genocide causing antisemitism, of the biological racism - is deeply rooted in our culture, we do not know who we are. And especially then we are vulnerable for seductors who tell us who we are and who we should fear. Remembering is too a way to show who you do not want to be, but who you think you could become. No remembrance without this suspicion, no meaningful remembrance without a grounded fear that we could be the future perpetrators and helpers.

Remembering presumes that the past is not complete, that the womb that bore the Third Reich is still fertile.

Censorship and expulsion are no answer to this fertility, but it is a truth that we live in a country where the government does not tell us what moral and immoral thoughts are. But that does not mean that every border should be crossed. Some taboos have nestled themselves in our culture after 1945; breaking these taboos is not always liberating, sometimes it is just a setback.

This memorial is also a warning. The story of the survivors, of many who returned from the concentration camps, Jews, Roma and Sinti, political opponents, among them many communists and social-democrats, is a story of exceptions. Most of the victims left the camp through the chimney. My mother was an exception; her parents, my grandparents, were not.

Remembering also includes speaking on behalf of the dead, and this can only happen through the words of eyewitnesses. I want to mention an eyewitness who was very close to the dead, Filip Müller, a Slovak Jew, member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Sonderkommando primarily consisted of Jews and was tasked with removing the bodies from the gas chambers, cutting the hair of the corpses, pulling the gold teeth from the corpses, burning the bodies. Most members of the Sonderkommando were murdered after a few months. The final Sonderkommando had an uprising in the autumn of 1944, in which almost all members were murdered.

Müller writes in his memoirs about a few Jewish families who were in hiding in bunkers near the Polish town of Sosnowiec. Because of the crying of the children the SS found them. They were taken to Auschwitz. The women and children were asked to undress, standard procedure. They were not gassed, which is exceptional. Possibly there were not enough people to fill the chambers, the precious Zyklon B could not be spilled needlessly.

The murder machine of the nazi's was also an economical affair, a gigantic robbery where the killing and removal of the bodies had to happen as efficiently as possible.

The naked women stand with their children before the execution wall. Müller then writes about a woman with her child in her arms: "Meanwhile Voss, the executioner, paced around the two nervously with his small caliber gun, to find a position to shoot the child. When the mother noticed this she tried with all her power to shield the child, with her hands and arms. Gunfire broke the silence, and the child was struck in the chest from the side. The mother, who felt her child's blood run warm on her body, lost her self control. She threw her child in her murderer's face, who by then had aimed his gun at her. Obersharführer Voss was shocked by this, and petrified. As he felt the warm blood running over his face, he let his gun drop and rubbed his hand over his face. "

It is very telling that we know the name of the Oberscharführer, but that we will likely never know the names of the mother and her child.

If remembering is a desire for knowledge, then details are important. Details constitute knowledge, and we cannot say that we do not wish to hear these details because they might disrupt our sleep.

Before this woman threw her halfdead child in the face of Oberscharführer Voss, there were elections, government orders, willing and less willing helpers, most of them never having been in a concentration camp, never having killed. And it is good to notice that it was not just the Germans who said after the war, that they did not know, that they only followed orders.

Literary scientist S. Dresden wrote in his study Persecution, Extermination, Literature about an incident with the writer K. Tzetnik, pseudonym of Yehiel De-Nur. A group of living gypsy women and children is being thrown into a pit at Auschwitz, because the crematoria are over capacity. A Dutch prisoner gets the order to pour kerosene over the people in the pit. He refuses and is subsequently kicked alive into the flaming pit. "The Dutch "Nee! Nee!" still rings in the writer's ears", Dresden writes.

My mother arrives at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944, shortly after the uprising of the Sonderkommando. She said she was relatively happy in Auschwitz, as she had hope there. She only lost her hope after the war, when the scale of the disaster got to her. She was born in 1927 in Berlin. In 1939 she travelled on the famous ship St. Louis with her parents from Hamburg to Cuba, but Cuba closed its borders, America closed its borders, Canada closed its borders. She washed ashore with her parents in the Netherlands.

My father, born in Berlin as well in 1912, survived the war in hiding at multiple addresses. Often he had to pretend to be a deserted Wehrmacht soldier to be accepted. One of the people who offered him shelter said to him after the war: "If we had known you were a Jew you would have never gotten in."

He went into hiding with a family in Rotterdam, with whom he remained contact. Once a year I went with him to visit them. They had white mice in a cage. There was also a herring vendor near the exchage at the Rokin in Amsterdam. My father took line 25 to that herring vendor, because he knew him from the war, the man was a member of the resistance. I sometimes joined and even though they knew eachother well, they never really talked about the war, they just talked about herring.

That was the war for me as a child: white mice in a cage, a herring vendor at the exchange, the hope in Auschwitz. I had never thought back then that I would receive antisemitic emails just a few decennia later, whilst working as a columnist for a Dutch paper. Back then I thought it was taboo. This was naive.

And it's also clear that when certain communities are being talked about in a way that reminds me of the most dark time in the 20th century, at some point people will talk in the same way about Jews. For me it was clear from the start: When they're talking about Moroccans, they also mean me.

"I cannot understand, cannot endure that a man is not judged for who he is, but for the group they are a part of.", Primo Levi writes in the sixties to his German translator. Words that we should repeat weekly, even daily, if just to remind us how toxic words can be.

A Dutchman having to pour kerosene over women and children in Auschwitz started with words, with speeches by politicians.

Especially in these secularised times, a special responsibility lies with those in power. To lead by example, to not let words become poison, to always keep in mind that the state is necessary but also a potential evil that could destroy people with careless abandon.

The woman who threw her child in the face of Oberscharführer Voss, she warns us.

The Dutchman who yelled "Nee! Nee!", who refused to pour kerosene over living women and children and was kicked into the inferno, he warns us.

Quote (balrog66 @ May 5 2020 08:25am)

I'd also like to post the speech made by Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg, which he did just before 20:00 yesterday. It certainly hit the mark for me.

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Quote (dro94 @ May 5 2020 02:08pm)

What the Germans did was so evil it doesn't seem possible that it happened only 80 years ago.

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It feels odd to be on an almost empty Dam square. But I know that you will be there with me during this National Remembrance, and that we are here together. In these exceptional months we have all had to surrender part of our freedom. We have not had this happen in our country since the war. Now we make the choice to do so, for the sake of our health and life.

Back then the choice was made for us. By an occupant with an ideology without mercy, who caused the deaths of many millions. What was the ultimate lack of freedom like?

There is one witness account I will never remember. It was here in Amsterdam, in the Westerkerk, almost six years ago. A small man with clear eyes, proudly standing straight at 93 years, told us the story of his journey to Sobibor, in June 1943. His name was Jules Schelvis. There he was, fragile but unbroken, in a full church where you could hear a pin drop. He talked about the transport with 62 people in a cattle cart. About the bucket on the bare floor. About the rain that splashed through the gaps in the walls. About the hunger, the exhaustion, the filth.

"You looked like a tramp", he said. And you heard in his voice how bad that made him feel. He talked about watches that were torn from wrists at arrival. About how he lost his wife Rachel in the chaos. He never saw her again.

"What kind of normal human could imagine this? How could the entire world allow us, rightful citizens of the Netherlands, to be treated like garbage?" His question rang between the pillars of the church. I have no answer, I still do not.

What I also remember, is his report of what happened beforehand. After a razzia he was deported to station Muiderpoort together with his wife. I still hear his words: "Hundreds of people looked and did nothing as the overfilled trams carried us away under heavy guard."

Straight through this city. Straight through this country. Before our very eyes. It seemed to happen so slowly. Every time a small step further.
Never allowed in a swimming pool again.
Not being allowed to play in an orchestra.
Not being allowed to cycle on the streets.
Not being allowed to study.
Being cast out into the streets.
Being arrested and deported.

Sobibor began in the Vondelpark. With a sign saying: "Jews not allowed". Certainly, there were many who resisted. Men and women who started swimming against the current, and risked their own safety to save others.

I also think of our civilians and soldiers that fought for our freedom. The young boys that died on the spring days at the Grebbe line. The soldiers who served our military in the Indies and sealed their fate there. The resistance fighters who were executed on the Waalsdorpervlakte or moved to labour or concentration camps. The soldiers who did not return from peace missions or were severely injured in them. True heroes who were willing to die for our freedom and our values.

But there is also another reality. People, neighbours in need, felt abandoned, not heard, not supported, even if it were just with words. Even from London, even by my great-grandmother, resolute in her defiance. It is something that I cannot let go.

Wars carry their scars through the generations. Now, 75 years after our liberation, the war is still part of us. The least we can do is to not look away. To not justify what happened, nor to erase or put it aside. To not normalize what isn't normal. And to protect our free, democratic state and defend it. Because only that will shield us from the arbitrary insanity.

Jules Schelvis made it through hell and managed to make something out of his life as a free man. A lot more than that. "I kept faith in humanity", he said. If he can, so can we. We can, we will together. In freedom.

Quote (balrog66 @ May 5 2020 09:23am)

Because of his warning for toxic words, Grunberg is now called a race traitor and a fascist by the alt-right.

The irony escapes them, sadly.



I'll translate our king's speech too, as that was another one that got me thinking.