A No-Go-Area in Dutch History E-Book

Jurrie Reiding

• Herausgeber: Europa Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Jurrie Reiding studied at Leiden University, graduated in organic chemistry and biochemistry (cum laude), and obtained his PhD at the same university for a study in physical organic chemistry (radical chain processes). For many years, he gave lessons at pre-university schools and wrote textbooks. For some years he was in the employ of Utrecht University (chemistry didactics). Between 1987 and 1997 he lectured at universities in Nicaragua (environmental chemistry) and Mozambique (basic chemistry and bio-organic chemistry). From 1970 to 1977 he was on the board of the Institute for Political and Social Research (IPSO) in Amsterdam, affiliated with the Communist Party of the Netherlands.

The book deals, essentially, with an untold history of Dutch collaboration during the German occupation (1940-1945). Principally, the ruling class and its political institutions must be held accountable for this collaboration.
Immediately after the defeat of the Dutch army in May 1940, the Dutch Queen and the ministers went into exile in London, while the rest of the ministries, headed by the Secretaries-General, remained in The Hague. Officially, the Government-in-exile joined the Allied Forces, but at the same time it allowed the administration in The Hague to establish cordial relations with the occupier, in order to safeguard a proper place for the Netherlands in the “New Europe” in case of a German victory.
This policy of ‘backing two horses’ had to be abandoned at the turning of the year 1942/1943, when the prospect of an Allied victory began to dawn.  
Unfortunately, at that time a substantial part of the Dutch Jewish citizens had already been deported to the German extermination camps, effectively supported by the Dutch administration in The Hague. The ‘London’ Government did not make any attempt to call its subordinates in The Hague to order and made itself an accomplice in genocide.

Leseprobe

MAKE

WORLDS

Jurrie Reiding

A No-Go-Area in

Dutch History:

The Holocaust, the Dutch

Government-in-Exile and

its Administration in

The Hague

© 2024 Europe Books| London

www.europebooks.co.uk | [email protected]

ISBN 9791220145824

First edition: July 2024

Edited by Edward Andrea Sheldon

A No-Go-Area in Dutch History:

The Holocaust, the Dutch Government-in-Exile

and its Administration in The Hague

Preface

At a conference of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) in Amsterdam in July 2019, Dieter Pohl, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) remarked in his keynote address that still much needs to be done, particularly in regard to research the Holocaust in its wider context of World War II, occupation, and collaboration.Bob Moore, Professor Emeritus of the twentieth century European history at the University of Sheffield, wrote in the preface to his book VICTIMS & SURVIVORS – The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945: ‘Yet in spite of all the words, many debates and many facets of the Holocaust in Europe remain confined to the languages of the countries in which they took place. Scholars in those countries have tended to see the persecution of the Jews as a national tragedy rather than one which is of direct interest to the outside world. This is certainly true of the Netherlands, where only few of the major works on the subject have appeared in translation.’

Mindful of these observations this author took them up as a stimulus to write this treatise.

To be involved in genocide is, anyhow, not a minor thing, and the Dutch Government took part in it. One might make an account of how it happened, but that is not enough. The question of why has to be answered, too. Then, explanations like ‘safeguarding the continuation of the Dutch administration in the interest of the population’ are vain or erroneous and are concealing the real motives. In order to unveil what really happened, one has to penetrate into the dynamics of the multifarious processes (political, diplomatic, military), operative at that time. This booklet is trying to do that and emerged as a spin-off from research for my biography on Peter Debye (Being his Own Man – Work and Life of Peter J. W. Debye), that also led to the conclusion that the official narrative of the German occupation of the Netherlands was misleading.  

On January 26, 2020, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized on behalf of the government for the failure of the Dutch authorities to protect the Dutch Jews during the German occupation (1940-1945). This happened during the annual Holocaust commemoration in Amsterdam. One might suppose that Rutte’s address should be principally dedicated to these authorities, what they did and did not do during the occupation. Unfortunately, he confined himself to ill-defined generalities like, ‘we did too little,’ in spite of his assurance that we, ‘must fully acknowledge what happened at that time’. Rutte did not even make mention of the crucial separation of the Dutch government into two sections: in May 1940 the Queen and the ministers of her cabinet went into exile in London, while the other officials of the administration remained in The Hague.Rutte’s apology is not convincing nor upright. It did not occur to him that during the occupation the Dutch government ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds. All unattributed translations from non-English languages in this book are the author’s own.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Every year on the fourth of May the Dutch nation is commemorating the dead of the Second World War, those fallen as members of the resistance during the German occupation or in military action. Thousands of citizens are then streaming to the Dam, the central square of Amsterdam. The Royal Family and other people of prominence are putting crowns of flowers near the war memorial. Normally, there is that day not paid special attention to the Dutch Holocaust victims, but the fourth of May 2020 was different.1 The ceremony took place without the attendance of citizens because of the corona pandemic. For many surprisingly, the Dutch King Willem Alexander addressed the nation from the almost empty Dam which was televised to the citizens. His major subject was the Holocaust. He referred extensively to a speech held some years before by one of the very few Dutch survivors of Sobibor (meanwhile he passed away) which had deeply impressed him. Then he said, ‘Fellow human beings, fellow citizens in anguish, felt themselves abandoned, insufficiently heard, insufficiently supported, though even if it was with words. Also from London, also by my great-grandmother, after all firm in her opposition. That is something that is haunting me. War will carry over into generations. Now, 75 years after the liberation, the war is still within us.’The King’s great-grandmother was Queen Wilhelmina. Three days after the German invasion on May 10, 1940, she escaped with her ministers to London, where the Dutch Government remained in exile till the end of the war. When the King is referring to ‘London’, then he is pointing to this Government-in-exile. At the same time the Secretaries-General (SGs), the senior officials of the various ministries, formed in The Hague the Dutch part of the Government, where they were charged with the care of Dutch interests during the occupation. Almost from the beginning the SGs mistook Dutch national interests for those of the Dutch ruling class. For obvious reasons not controlled by the Dutch Parliament, the Government, residing separately in The Hague and in London, became involved in excessive collaboration which ultimately resulted in the deportation of Dutch Jews to the extermination camps where more than one hundred thousand of them, almost three quarters of the pre-war Jewish population, were murdered without any protest or intervention by the same Dutch Government. This cruel reality is voiced by the King with ‘abandonment’, which is haunting him. His last quoted remarks are alluding to the national trauma of the Holocaust: the war is still within us. In the Netherlands the wounds of the Holocaust still have to be healed, the Dutch nation has still to come to terms with what happened during the German occupation.

David Lowenthal2 wrote: ‘The psychic cost of repressing traumatic memory can be as crippling for nations as for individuals. History is often hard to digest. But it must be swallowed whole to undeceive the present and inform the future.’ In this respect, the King made at least a valiant beginning. For the first time he avows that there is something wrong with our national psyche, which can manifest itself in not immediately identifiable ways. Our national trauma is, above all, caused by the failure of rescuing (more) Dutch Jews. This failure is attended with feelings of guilt. The guilt can be felt personally, but also collectively. Overcoming the trauma is unavailing, and even harmful, when the guilt is sought in wrong places. Because of the occupation, there exists in the Netherlands a very high degree of sensitivity to Nazi collaboration or anything resembling that. In the eyes of the Government and the mainstream media collaboration was principally perpetrated by members of the Dutch National Socialist Party, irrespective of their conduct during the occupation. Another method to lead collaboration astray is to accuse individuals of personal wrongdoing. In the seventies a famous Dutch sports manager who had been three times the chef d’équipe of the Dutch Olympic team, allegedly had been a Nazi sympathizer and subsequently streets and squares bearing his name were renamed. Also in the seventies a prominent Christian-Democratic politician was accused of membership of the Waffen SS during the last year of the war, which was not true. But, true or not true, once your name is associated with the SS, your career is ruined. In 2008 a Dutch singer of 104 was ready for his last performance in his Dutch hometown. The media accused him of having sung at Nazi festivities in Germany during the war. He had to cancel his performance. Seemingly contrary to this is the opinion, also held by some historians, that we are all culpable, that there is a collective guilt of the extermination of the Dutch Jews. Hannah Arendt remarked once that this would mean that nobody is culpable, and that it would be, in fact, a declaration of solidarity with the perpetrator. Both approaches, the individual and the collective one, offer the opportunity to exonerate political responsibility. In all societies some have assumed willingly and knowingly more responsibility than others. Many persons in those positions, as is the case in the Netherlands, had even emphasized their responsibility by swearing allegiance to the Queen or King and to the Constitution. Unfortunately many of those with political responsibility turned out to be of very low moral standards. David Lowenthal had added to his statement up here that since ancient times ‘statesmen have enjoined oblivion –forgetting and hence forgiving divisive grievances- for the sake of national unity.’ The implicit or explicit message when commemorating the occupation is always that the Dutch had endured immense sufferings, but that ultimately a unified nation had thrown off the German yoke. And also that the Second World War represented the titanic struggle between, on one side freedom and democracy, and on the other side oppression and dictatorship. This national sentiment is also stirred up by the musical Soldaat van Oranje (‘Soldier of Orange’), based on the war years of a Dutch student who participated in the resistance movement. He had fled to the UK in 1941 and maintained from there, sustained by the British Navy, a kind of shuttle service by boat to the beach near The Hague in order to drop secret agents in the Netherlands, and take some prominent Dutchmen back. He developed close acquaintanceship with the Queen. This commercial musical production is since 2010 an ongoing success story with scarcely ten years later more than two and a half million spectators. This incredible number indicates that the war is still a major preoccupation of the Dutch population. Answering the question whether the spectators have learned something important about the occupation is simple: almost nothing. The musical might even create the false impression that Dutch resistance was organized from London. The approach of fomenting national unity, or even national pride, leaves little or no room for collaboration of the Dutch administration or the real circumstances that sealed the fate of the Dutch Jews. The Jewish extermination is not so much concealed in the Netherlands, but embedded in a widespread kind of moral complacency that the real evil was always enacted outside our competence or responsibility. The post-war Dutch Governments and the mainstream media nurtured and protected their innocence by a conveniently selective memory. They are eager to sweep the shocking truth of collaboration of the Dutch administration under the rug.

An example of selective memory can be reported already soon after the occupation. In September 1946, the State Institute for War Documentation commissioned Dr A.J.C. Rüter, professor of Dutch History at Leiden University, to prepare a monograph on the general railway strike in the Netherlands from September 1944 till the end of the occupation in May, 1945.3 The strike had been ordered on September 17, 1944, by the Dutch Government-in-exile, and its announcement was broadcast to the Netherlands. The date of the strike was not accidental. The sixth of June Allied troops had landed on the coast of Normandy, and by the end of August Paris had been liberated. Meanwhile the troops were approaching the Dutch border. In consultation with the Allied Military Command was decided on a strike as a means to hamper transport of German troops and military equipment. In the preface to his book Rijden en Staken (‘Riding and Striking’) Rüter admitted that initially he expected to write ‘the epic of a grand achievement of resistance’. When he was studying the matter he soon concluded that he had to cover the whole period of occupation, and that he only could do that if he ‘discarded a myth’. The verb ‘riding’ in the book’s title is referring to the trains which rode for the benefit of the occupier. In May, 1940, the management of Dutch Railways4 had promised its loyal co-operation with the German authorities. In June was agreed that Dutch Railways would execute every German request of transport, without any restriction, on the condition that the management would remain in Dutch hands. And so Dutch trains carried German troops and weaponry, Dutch political prisoners, hostages, forced labourers and, most heinously, more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews to the transit camp of Westerbork in the north of the Netherlands. Not earlier than September, 1944, when the Germans were already brought to their knees, the railway management, in concert with the London Government, was willing to disregard the agreement with the occupier.

Rüter had finished his writing in 1955. And then follows a tussle of nearly five years with authorities of which the account in the preface of his book is only a weak reflection. The wartime management of Dutch Railways, and the new one, formed advisory committees and they brusquely rejected Rüter’s views. Ultimately, in 1960 the book was published after the authorization by the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences. Professor Rüter had made only minor corrections and resisted to the pressure to write, what is sometimes called, ‘sanctioned history’. Another professor, the Prime Minister of the London Government-in-exile, Gerbrandy, addressed the Dutch population via radio on November 21, 1944, with the sole purpose to give information on the Railway strike.5 He talked about ‘this unparalleled achievement of mass resistance’, which, ‘made resonate the fame of the Dutch resistance more fiercely than ever in circles of our Allies and fellow fighters.’ He gave, ‘a respectful salute to the memory of the fallen in this struggle.’ Professor Rüter was much less extravagant. He wondered why Gerbrandy, ‘so suddenly showed the readiness to throw the Railway staff of 30,000 members into a struggle, without taking into account a possible ruthless German counter-reaction.’6 Fortunately, a ferocious German campaign against the railway-men on strike did not occur, contrary to the cruel suppression of former strikes. The occupier might already have been convinced of the military defeat.The English summary of the book, written by the State Institute for War Documentation (RIOD) observed: ‘Professor Rüter is of the opinion that, from a military point of view, the strike has not seriously harmed the Germans. It has demanded a much heavier toll of the Netherlands population... In all, some 15,000 persons died from starvation and cold before Liberation Day arrived.’7The Government-in-exile and the management of Dutch Railways depicted the strike as a heroic event. Owing to Rüter’s tenacity, history judged otherwise. The February Strike of 1941, detested by the London Government, is commemorated every year the 25th of that month, while the Railway strike of September 1944, is not. 

This national self-deception reigns almost every year unchallenged in the beginning of May. But clashes of opposing views regarding occupation and collaboration manifested themselves during the war, after the war, and even seem to intensify the last decades. As a recent example can, indeed, be mentioned the collaboration of Dutch Railways. In September 2005 the CEO of Dutch Railways apologized for the company’s accountability for the deportation of Jewish citizens. In July 2017 an Amsterdam Jew of 81 claimed damages from Dutch Railways because his parents had been deported via the Dutch transition camp Westerbork to Auschwitz where they were murdered. He had calculated that the Germans had paid to Dutch Railways two and a half million euro (present-day value) for the extra trains deporting more than 100,000 Jews. After a legal fight of two years, the railway management pledged to pay 7,500 euro for a living child of Jewish victims. It is estimated that the total number of reparations will amount to some tens of millions of euros. 

The Dutch nation is fighting with itself. Neglect of the political history of the occupation is the principal cause of the lack of unity in this respect. Then, only the truth can set the nation at rest. A British author about collaboration in occupied Europe: ‘However, involving oneself in genocide was a totally different matter from involving oneself in economic collaboration, or patronising a café frequented by Germans, or engaging in a sexual relationship with a German soldier. So, what additional factors help to explain the aiding and abetting of the Holocaust?’8 Being involved in genocide is a very grave charge. But enough time has now elapsed since the Second World War in order to have a try at telling at least a part of the truth. It will far from being ‘sanctioned history’. Writing history, the question is always one of selection and salience. Obviously, in this treatise have been made choices which normally do not appear in the historiography of the German occupation.

Certainly, this piece of work is the result of rather broad research, though almost all resources are easily accessible. No archives have been studied and only incidentally original documents were used. This treatise is a synthesis of separate parts of existing information like chemists synthesize a valuable complex chemical compound from several simpler compounds.Between 1969 and 1991 Louis de Jong, a Dutch journalist and historian, published his massive Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (‘The Kingdom of the Netherlands During the Second World War’). It consists of fourteen volumes (twenty-nine bindings) and counts some 16,000 pages.9 De Jong was, as the first chief of the State Institute for War Documentation, commissioned by the Dutch government to do this work. From July 1940 he had already worked for the Dutch Government-in-exile in London, where he was one of the editors and broadcasters of Radio Oranje (‘Radio Orange’) which transmitted daily from London to the occupied Netherlands. This service had been facilitated by the BBC. There are several reasons to read De Jong’s work well, but not without a critical mind. The essentials are buried in an enormous collection of facts, events and stories, chronologically ordered, and larded with opinions. But opinions and interpretations are different things. In short, the political and historical analysis is shabby. Nevertheless, we assume that the historian did not invent facts, though his references are not always adequate. Facts are for historians what experimental results are for scientists, only with the difference that historical facts are one-off, they cannot be repeated, only interpreted.

A second important book is Jacob Presser’s ONDERGANG – de vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse Jodendom 1940-1945.10The two volumes (more than 1000 pages) were written between 1950 and 1965. An abbreviated English edition was published in 1968, entitled: Ashes in the Wind – The Destruction of Dutch Jewry.11 Presser was professor of History at Amsterdam University. He wrote an elegy in prose, he wanted to be the mouthpiece of the Dutch Holocaust victims, to let them speak, only once, here and now. To let speak all those who left this world as a dense smother which rose above a chimney. To speak also on behalf of that man in his wheelchair, desperately trying to escape deportation, who was addressed: Jud ist Jud, ob mit oder ohne Beine (Jew is Jew, whether with or without legs).

Chapter 2: Backing two horses

Early in the morning on 10 May 1940 German troops invaded the Netherlands. On the evening of 14 May the Dutch army capitulated after the German Luftwaffe had bombed the city centre of Rotterdam that same day. During these five days of war some 2,000 Dutch soldiers fell in battle, the death toll among civilians was about 2,500. The speedy surrender, signed by the Commander-in-Chief general Henri Winkelman, was not expected.The ministers of the Dutch Cabinet and Queen Wilhelmina escaped disorderly on 13 May to England without parliamentary consent. The ministers left their families behind in the Netherlands. After the war, the Minister of Economic Affairs of the London Government-in-exile, Max Steenberghe, considered this during a session of the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (PEC) as, ‘a completely wrong decision.’ ‘One was never fully concentrated because you had unremittingly fears about your family in the Netherlands. Added to this, one imagined of course, that those families were much more vulnerable than was the case in reality.’12 The Queen had decided differently, her daughter and grandchildren fled to Canada. Before the occupation the Dutch Government had put in safety almost all the gold of the Central Bank in Amsterdam, and the ships of the Dutch Navy. Also nearly 500 vessels of the mercantile marine had been successfully evacuated. In April 1940 Dutch Parliament had passed a bill enabling companies to transfer their registered office to the Dutch East or West Indies. The Dutch authorities had neglected preparations in order to take away citizens who could be in danger by a German occupation, for example Jews. During the days of war thousands of them, above all from Amsterdam, hurried to IJmuiden, a nearby fishing port on the North Sea coast, in the hope of getting away by boat. Most of them were not successful. Among the many left behind, rumours were going the rounds that the Dutch Government had provided a special ship to carry Jews to England.

During the First World War the Dutch nation succeeded in maintaining its neutrality. For a small country encircled by three powerful nations that was the preferable policy. Neutrality should also be pursued in case of a new war in Europe, and this took effect after the outbreak of the Second World War early in September 1939. But neutrality with respect to Nazi Germany led to a disastrous lack of awareness among the Dutch population, damaging resistance at least during the first years of the occupation. This state of things had also been fostered by an ideological component. Within the Dutch ruling class Fascism and even some elements of Nazism were widespread. In particular a ferocious anti-Communism proved to be a powerful common bond. We will see in this study that this ideology developed during the war into full-scale collaboration with the occupying authorities.

At the time of the departure of the cabinet, general Winkelman had been charged with the leadership of the Dutch Government. Consequently, the eleven heads of the departments in The Hague, the so-called Secretaries-General (SGs, the semi-permanent highest-ranking civil servants), were subsidiary to him. Soon Winkelman would be sacked and interned by the German authorities after his attempts to prevent military production for the benefit of the German war economy.

Within days after the Dutch defeat Hitler had decided on a civil administration for the Netherlands. From then, the more accommodating Council of SGs had to deal with the meanwhile appointed Reichskommissar, the lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Apparently, Hitler rewarded his fellow Austrian Seyss-Inquart for the latter’s essential role at the time of the German annexation of Austria. On 14 March 1938 he had welcomed Hitler in Vienna and became Austria’s Nazi governor. That same day Seyss-Inquart had as Minister of Justice retired all Jewish civil servants from his department. The days before and after Austria witnessed terrific anti-Semitic pogroms, thousands of Jews fled the country.

A little more than two years later Seyss-Inquart phoned from Poland, where he was the Nazi Deputy-Governor, to his wife: the Führer wants me going to grow tulips in Holland. Shortly after the Nuremberg trial in 1946 where he was sentenced to death by hanging, he referred to another product of Dutch agriculture. He allegedly had said to his lawyer: my noose will be twisted from Dutch hemp.

When Seyss-Inquart came to the Netherlands, he had taken along with him a gang of Austrian Nazis, all in the function of Generalkommissar: Hans Fischböck (Finance and Economy), Friedrich Wimmer (Administration and Justice), Hans Rauter (Security and Police), and Fritz Schmidt (Party Policy and Propaganda). Rauter was regularly instructed by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS in Berlin. Only Schmidt was a native German.

On Wednesday May 29, 1940, scarcely a fortnight after Dutch capitulation, Reichskommisar Seyss-Inquart held his inauguration address in The Hague. The venue of the ceremony was the Ridderzaal (Hall of Knights) up to the present the hall of Dutch Parliament. The majority of the attendants belonged to uniformed members of the occupying forces, but a remarkable group of civilians was formed by the Council of eleven Dutch SGs. One of the most prominent senior officials of this Council was Hans Hirschfeld of Trade, Industry, Water Transport, and also Agriculture and Fisheries. Hirschfeld’s biographers called him The most powerful Secretary-General in war time (this was the title of their fourth chapter).13 As early as a week after the capitulation he had written to the occupying authorities: ‘All members of the Council are ready to the most loyal co-operation with the German occupying authorities, and willing to interpret the instructions given by the old Government so extensively, or after German instructions, that a far-reaching co-operation with the German authorities will be possible,’ and, ‘then there will be formed, so to speak, a kind of Cabinet of functionaries, which will be at the disposal of the German occupying authorities.’14 Hirschfeld is referring here to instructions given by the old Government. These instructions were called Aanwijzingen (‘Assignments’) and had in 1937 been sent in sealed envelopes to the departments and provincial and municipal authorities. Only in case of an occupation (by an unidentified enemy!) there had to be taken note of the contents. Important elements in the document are (1) the civil servants have to stick to their posts in order to keep the administration in Dutch hands which is in the interest of the Dutch population. Only in case of superior interest of the occupying power they are entitled to resign. (2) Citizens not belonging to (Dutch) military forces are not allowed to be involved in any act of violence or resistance.

In this way a complete administration of civil servants was placed at Seyss-Inquart’s disposal, and it was the Reichskommissar who could discharge a Secretary-General (SG), a burgomaster, a police officer or whatsoever member of Dutch public servants when German interests were not secured by them. He was in a position to appoint more German-friendly civil servants or even members of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), which happened from the beginning. The Nazis wanted mastery of the European continent and it would be impossible to do this by always sending in their own people. They should have been withdrawn from Germany, where a shortage of manpower got during the war all the time more critical. To be sure, trying to keep the administration in Dutch hands, would be preferable for many reasons. But then, the crucial question is under discussion: at the cost of what? We will see in this treatise that these costs were and are unbearably high.

We have to make a second observation regarding Hirschfeld’s letter to the German authorities: his statement that there would be formed a kind of Cabinet of functionaries. From the beginning of the occupation the Council of SGs operated as Council of Ministers, contrary to what might be expected from civil servants without political responsibility. Why did they not limit themselves to dealing merely with current business? This looks to be even more strange because general Winkelman had only signed an armistice (for the Army not the Navy), and the Netherlands remained at war with Germany till May 1945. Nevertheless, the SGs made their political decisions completely independent from the politics of the Dutch Government-in-exile in London, but apparently with its consent.

As a matter of fact, the Netherlands had during the war two separate governments, or even three as we will see later on. This was a constitutional monstrosity because the London Government had according to Dutch law to accept full responsibility of the policy of the Council of SGs. But there are strong indications that this splitting of government policy had its own raison d’être. Dutch politics was, generally speaking, before the war -and still is- divided up into two fractions. One fraction oriented towards the Atlantic (Anglo-American) world, and the other one towards continental Europe, principally Germany. This division is closely bound up with economic and commercial interests. In peacetime the two fractions get on reasonably well together. This changed drastically when the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany. Economic relations with the Atlantic world were severely impeded, seaborne commerce came almost to a standstill. In no time Dutch industry was almost exclusively producing for the sake of Germany and its war.Neither the Government-in-exile nor the Council of SGs was able to predict the outcome or the duration of the war. During the days of war in May 1940, the Government had hoped for help from France, but within weeks in June 1940 this country had also been overrun by the German army. From then, almost all Dutch ministers in London as well as the SGs in The Hague were under the impression that Germany would win the war and dominate the European continent for at least a very long time. This prospect permits to understand the splitting up of the Dutch government: in London the Cabinet of Ministers continuing the war in close conjunction with the British, and in The Hague a second ‘Cabinet’ collaborating with the Germans. This looks to be contradictory, but in politics appearances are deceptive. In effect the policy of neutrality of the thirties could be continued by backing two horses. When the German horse would win, one had to make the best of it, in the conviction that a society could also go on, at least economically, without parliamentary democracy, multifarious political parties, trade unions, and civil liberties. Here might be observed that capitalist companies themselves are within living memory managed in an authoritarian way. When the Allied horse would win, the Government-in-exile would return and restore more or less the pre-war conditions. These seemingly contradictory roles of the London Government and the Council of SGs presuppose the absence of communication between the two actors. And so it was, at least during the first years of the occupation.Dutch society was -and is- a class society. Not considering class relations when studying modern history is something like biology without Darwin, or physics without the quantum.The ruling capitalist class is the owner of the means of production and is therefore in a much more favourable position to deal with an occupation than the working class. Big business is able to offer and receive something by negotiation. Hitler and his henchmen had two principal objectives in the Netherlands. First, to press the Dutch productive forces into the service of Germany’s war economy, which succeeded within months. Second, to gain over the ‘Germanic kindred’ Dutch population to accept National Socialist ideology, and its political aims. This objective failed from the start. The German occupier had deprived the working class of its collective means of power. Trade unions and political parties had been eliminated or put under Nazi control, strikes were forbidden, etc. For the maintenance of a capitalist society you need capital and labour. Under Nazi rule labour suffered much more than capital. As a consequence, a substantial part of the Dutch bourgeoisie was prepared, with more or less enthusiasm, to accept a durable life under German domination. The Dutch population in general gave evidence of the contrary. The great majority of the Dutch belongs to the working class and did not have the slightest intention to be involved in the dual policy of collaboration of London and The Hague. Only a class analysis permits to understand in full what happened during the war in Dutch territory. In the beginning of 1943 the German horse was crippled, it stumbled over Stalingrad. This event had a huge impact on the morale of the Dutch population. There sprang up an almost general confidence in a positive outcome of the war. At the same time the interest of the London Government in Dutch internal policy got a boost. The original issue of the Aanwijzingen (‘Assignments’) of 1937 had been rewritten, without, to be sure, addressing the supreme civil servants, the SGs, in a direct way. London prepared the first contacts with the growing Dutch resistance movement. The Council of SGs had to overhaul its objectives after ‘Stalingrad’. The incorporation of the Dutch state into a Nazi dominated Europe was not needed any more. From 1943 its principal aim was to preserve Dutch institutions and Dutch (industrial) infrastructure from destruction by German intervention or by war, till the return of the exiled Government.

The Second World War refuses to become history. Oddly enough, it was more history during the first decades after 1945 than it is today. Moreover, what has come down from the war has radically changed. Until the sixties the Holocaust was a footnote to the war, after that the war became frequently a footnote to the Holocaust. There are youngsters who believe that Hitler started the war because of the Jews.

The death toll of Dutch Jews was among the highest in all of Europe, and certainly the highest of Western European countries. The loss in the Netherlands was a catastrophic percentage of nearly seventy-five: about 102,000 out of some 140,000 living in the Netherlands in 1940. In Belgium this was less than fifty per cent, and France lost about a quarter of its Jews. Often these differences are attributed to the German civil administration installed in the Netherlands, while Belgium and the occupied territory of France were governed by the Wehrmacht, the German army, which was considered less fanatical in political matters. There is at least some truth in this reasoning. Seyss-Inquart’s ‘Danube gang’ had somehow participated in the anti-Jewish street violence in Vienna in March 1938, and learned then that it was preferable to get rid of the Jews in a more astute and bureaucratic way after, as a matter of course, robbing them their property. Adolf Eichmann had visited Austria and taken advantage of this experience. In a subtle graduated manner, isolation passed into repression, repression into persecution, and finally into deportation and extermination.The measures against the Dutch Jews, inclusive the deportations in 1942 and 1943, were facilitated by Dutch civil servants, from members of the High Court and the Council of SGs to Dutch police and railways which inhibited organised resistance. In hierarchical organisations like public institutions, usually the guidance is followed of those who are entrusted with more responsibility. Only now and then the SGs ventilated dissatisfaction or protested which was always to no purpose. Mid-February 1941, the Nazis ordered the establishment of a Jewish Council in Amsterdam. That Council soon formed a third Dutch government, independent from London and the Council of SGs. In the course of time the Council got its own budget, organized its own schools, health care, welfare institutions, register offices, theatres, shops, etc. The occupying authorities had taken every responsibility for the Jews from the Dutch Government, simply because they did not consider them being Dutch citizens. Neither the Council of SGs, nor the Government-in-exile accepted full responsibility for Dutch citizens of Jewish descent, in effect accepting the German point of view. It is hardly possible to get away from the impression that the Dutch Jews have been sacrificed to the maintenance of workable relations with the occupying authorities. More specifically: to backing the German horse, for the deportations got their momentum in July 1942, half a year before Stalingrad. In the course of this discourse this thesis will be substantiated more thoroughly.

Chapter 3: The Secretaries-General and the “New Europe”

Someone wrote in 1988: ‘Collaboration with the German occupiers during the Second World War remains one of the last unresolved and controversial chapters of recent European history’. That is still the case some thirty years later. This treatise intends to be a contribution to elucidate what has really happened in the Netherlands during the war. Time is ripe for having a try to decode what many times has been left unspoken. Every nation has the right to know its history in order to come to terms with it. Regarding the political aspects of the occupation there is still much to do. The first year of the occupation was crucial in many ways. Of paramount importance were the insights that Germany had not yet won the war, and that not the Dutch National Socialists were the principal enemies, but the German Nazis, who had occupied the nation. How did the Council of SGs fare that first year, how did they confront the totally new situation of the Dutch nation?From the beginning of the occupation, in May 1940, contradictions manifested themselves between fractions within the Council. By seniority, the SG of Social Affairs was entitled to assume the chairmanship of the Council, but within weeks this position was granted to Jonkheer Aarnout Snouck Hurgronje, the SG for Foreign Affairs and Government. Moreover, by intervention of Hirschfeld, Jan de Quay15, an industrial psychologist, was employed at the Ministry of Social Affairs as government commissioner for labour questions. Because of De Quay’s conciliatory approach towards the occupying authorities he, and not the SG of Social Affairs, was charged with maintaining relations with them. (After June De Quay left this post because he was full-time busy as one of the leaders of the Netherlands Union, see later). In August 1940, the initial chairman of the Council resigned also from his Ministry of Social Affairs. Robert Verwey took his place after Seyss-Inquart charged him with the leadership of this important department. This new SG had in the thirties many times expressed his admiration for the way in which the Nazi Government in Germany had tackled the problem of unemployment. Verwey would stick to his post till the end of the occupation. The SG of Defence, Cornelis Ringeling, had already been fired in May, 1940, by the Reichskommissar, because he intended to prohibit the acceptance of German military orders by Dutch industry.16 Giving way to these demands had been completely in agreement with the views of the other SGs.

De Jong: ‘The Council of Secretaries-General, and this applied in particular to Hirschfeld, was at that time convinced that Germany could not be defeated any more, how unpleasant this might be. In other words: occupied Netherlands had to accommodate.’17 De Jong continues that military production was considered good for trading profits and the reduction of unemployment, but, ‘One thing, however, it was not: it was no contribution to the liberation, that is to say, to winning the war.’18

In the beginning of August, the SG of Education, Arts and Sciences had been relieved of his office, arrested, and during some months incarcerated as a hostage in a German concentration camp because of his patriotic views. Seyss-Inquart appointed the German-friendly professor Jan van Dam, a Germanic scholar, in his place.

So, during that crucial first year of the occupation, roughly five of the original eleven SGs were running the Dutch business. Their prominence was partially due to the importance of their departments in an occupied nation, but traits of character counted, too. These five men were Snouck Hurgronje as the chairman of the Council of SGs, Hirschfeld in the economic and industrial area, and Verwey for labour and employment policy. Bisides have to be mentioned Leonardus Trip, SG for Finance and at the same time President of the Dutch National Bank, and Karel Fredriks for Internal Affairs. Hirschfeld and Snouck Hurgronje were politically outspoken personalities, and they determined in fact the political line of the Council of SGs. Hirschfeld worked in the twenties as an economist in banking in the Dutch East Indies. From the beginning of the thirties he became Director-General of Trade and Industry in The Hague. He headed several trade missions to Germany and made contacts in German business and government circles. In 1939 the Minister of Economic Affairs in Berlin awarded Hirschfeld a high decoration in acknowledgement of ‘rendering valuable services’.19 At the same time Hirschfeld enjoyed the confidence of almost all Dutch businessmen. He was during the occupation the personification of the continuation of the pre-war neutrality policy of the Dutch Government. In 1940 Snouck Hurgronje was already more than thirty years employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially in the area of foreign trade, which procured him close relations with business circles at home and abroad. He acted during the first year of the occupation as the most important intermediary between the Council of SGs and Seyss-Inquart, and other German authorities. Before the war Trip was President of the Java Bank in Batavia (present-day Djakarta), where Hirschfeld was his subordinate.

The principle political objective of Hirschfeld and Snouck Hurgronje, and the group around them, has been expressed, possibly in its most pregnant form, in the unpublished memoirs of Carel Schaepman: ‘With regard to my work, I behaved, for that matter, according to the line of policy once correctly, and in his own way, formulated by Jhr. Snouck Hurgronje during a talk with him. The task of the gentlemen in London is contributing to winning the war. Our task is, presupposing that we are an occupied country, see to it that in case the war will be lost, our relation to the Germans shall be in such a way, that the Netherlands gets off as well as possible.’20 Before the war Schaepman was head of the economic branch of the Foreign Affairs Department. During the occupation he was the secretary of the Council of SGs and charged with taking the minutes of the meetings of the Council, which had to be signed by Snouck Hurgronje. We have to conclude that during the first weeks and months of the occupation the collaborating fraction within the Council had gained over the more patriotic fraction.21

Once, a journalist asked a British Prime Minister who retired after having been many years in office: which were the most important problems you had to confront? He answered: Events! Events! During war and occupation there are many events. In March 1941 the SG for Finance, Trip, resigned. The event was that Fischböck, Generalkommissar for Finance and Economy had ordered a free transfer of payments between the Netherlands and Germany, being effective from the first of April. This currency merger enabled an unfettered exploitation of Dutch resources. By the unbalanced trading relation, large quantities of German marks threatened to be piled up in Dutch industry, of which the real value was dubious. Hirschfeld about the stepping down of Trip, ‘The retiring of Mr Trip resulted, indeed, in the question whether at that moment, time had come for all old Secretaries-General to resign.’22 The SGs chose their own moments of consideration to quit. Certainly not the moment of a month before when the German police had violently rounded-up some five hundred randomly selected young Jews in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, blatantly violating the Dutch Constitution and international law. The SGs had their own priorities. In the course of 1941 the Council of SGs lost more members. The SG of Justice left mid-March, and Seyss-Inquart appointed a member of the NSB, Jaap Schrieke, in his place.23 He was the first National Socialist joining the Council of SGs. Then, by the end of July, Chairman Snouck Hurgronje resigned, so that only four of the original SGs remained: Hirschfeld, Frederiks, and the SGs for Colonies and for Public Works. In August 1940 Verwey had already joined the Council as SG of Social Affairs.Snouck Hurgronje was, apparently, in a position to provide for his own successor: Knight Huyssen van Kattendijke, a pro-German high-ranking civil servant of his Department of Foreign Affairs, ‘who was on terms of some intimacy with the representative of the Berlin Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bene. It has been reported that in the private domain they even paid visits to each other.’24Snouck Hurgronje’s political role had not finished at all. Hirschfeld commented on his resigning, ‘It is especially since then that I intensified very much the contacts with Mr. Woltersom and Mr. Jongejan. Snouck Hurgronje and Trip were constantly drawn into our confidential deliberation.’25 The men mentioned here formed the de facto governing clique. They decided about the attitude towards the occupiers, and how, eventually, to curry favour with them. We will still meet H.L. Woltersom, a Rotterdam banker, and W.G.F. Jongejan, a former colonial industrialist, in the course of this account. The last year and a half of the occupation Hirschfeld and his cronies had free play. In the beginning of the occupation the SGs were called for a meeting at least three times a week, but after October 1943 the meetings fizzled out. We continue with some examples of proactive policy which attempted to adapt Dutch society to the state of affairs supposedly reigning in a Nazi-dominated “New Europe”. At the same time these attempts acted as means which might help to ingratiate the SGs with the Germans. But all these attempts in order to take the political initiative outside their own specific sphere of responsibility failed.

Historically viewed, parliamentary democracy in Europe is, above all, an achievement of the working class and its organizations. Parliamentary democracy guarantees that class interests can be expressed in all shades of political opinion. During the Great Depression of the thirties of the last century, class contradictions deepened, and tendencies appeared within the ruling class to limit, or even abolish the influence of the Parliament. The German occupation offered the opportunity to reinforce these political objectives, which also prevailed in the Council of SGs. The council was well aware of the necessity to get at least some support within Dutch society in order to legitimate its overtures made towards the occupying authorities. This support was expected from the Nederlandse Unie (‘Netherlands Union’, NU), which came already into being in the summer of 1940. The NU was headed by a triumvirate: Jan de Quay, Louis Einthoven who was a former police commissioner, and Hans Linthorst Homan, a Commissioner of the Queen, the highest provincial administrator. Snouck Hurgronje was prepared to recommend the union to the Germans, he arranged a meeting between the leading men and Generalkommissar Schmidt in order to get permission for making their plans public. On 23 July the three men presented a draft of their public announcement to Schmidt. He was satisfied with the contents: not any reference to the Royal Family, national independence or democracy. He agreed with the cited prospect of an organic ordering of society without class contradictions, led by a powerful and resolute authority. And, needless to say: nothing about the Dutch Jews. The next day De Quay gave an account of the successful meeting in the Council of SGs, and Snouck Hurgronje congratulated him with the result.26 The three men did not, possibly, realize that their policy was, of itself, an expression of class contradictions. De Quay was considered the principal political instigator. In the beginning of August the NU held its first public meeting in The Hague, where De Quay delivered a speech. He said, among other things: ‘But look, neighbouring us is now a dynamic people, that expects from us to co-operate in establishing at a rapid rate the new order. That especially applies in the social-economic area...’27 In a treatise he wrote that his ideas on social order went the most in the direction of the Portuguese society. The pre-war Dutch political parties had been declared defunct, the NU was intended the sole political movement of the people. De Quay borrowed, as a catholic devotee, his reactionary ideas in part from the papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931), in which a corporatist ordering of society without classes was promulgated. Corporatism was widely adopted in Catholic-fascist nations like Portugal, Italy and Spain. For certain, within months hundreds of thousands of citizens joined the NU, but from the beginning there was a yawning abyss between the motives of the leaders and those of the adherents. The latter saw the union as a counterpoise against the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB). A high Union official observed, ‘The population with its own instinctive feelings of hatred and aversion for the occupier and its henchmen dominated the Union, and not the Union the population.’28 Therefore, the combined efforts of the Council of SGs and the NU to create some kind of mass movement failed almost immediately. The occupying authorities were fully alive to this situation, and consequently the NU scarcely survived the first year of the occupation.The leaders of the NU said that they hoped for some unspecified form of independence for the Netherlands in Nazi-dominated Europe, after an eventual ‘compromise peace’. This was more than an illusion, it was a negation of what they already knew about the fate of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Immediately after the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies had ordered the internment of German nationals staying or living there. Seyss-Inquart retaliated by arresting hundreds of Dutch hostages, almost all of them officials from the East Indies on leave, who were deported to German camps.29 The names and the addresses of the hostages had been given by the Council of SGs.30 In June the occupying authorities had requested from the SG of Colonies a complete list of Indian people temporarily residing in the Netherlands. The Council of SGs was of the opinion that this could not be refused.31The affair was a thorn in the flesh of the Council. Jointly with Schmidt and Bene32 a telegram was sent to the Governor-General in Batavia (present-day Djakarta) in order to set the internees free. In the summer of 1940 the Council of SGs even decided to send a special mission to the East Indies: Jongejan, a former president of the syndicate of sugar manufacturers in the Dutch colony, and M. Boerstra, a retired commander of the Royal Netherlands-Indian Army. This plan was laid on paper before the occupying authorities by Snouck Hurgronje and the SG of Colonies. It hinted to a more general problem, viz. the future geopolitical position of the East Indies. They wrote, among other things, that: ‘Before the Indies, and in particular the Governor-General, will be put in the picture what happens in Holland, not in the least concerning the relations on the European continent, and how these will develop for the future.’ The letter finishes by wishing ‘to convince the Dutch Indies and our fellow citizens living there of the necessity of a determined contribution to the “New Europe’.’33 After the consent of Seyss-Inquart and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, the two men left in November for the Far East by way of Tokyo. There they learned that the Governor-General was not willing to permit the mission’s entrance into the colony. He only offered to send one of his civil servants to Manila for consultation. This was in agreement with the Government-in-exile in London which gave permission for the voyage to the East. George Hart wrote on 20 November, 1940, in his London-diary: ‘The “problem” of the trip of Boerstra and Jongejan had been discussed by Welter, Van Kleffens and Gerbrandy with the Queen. Initially, Her Majesty fiercely disagreed, but conceded when first Van Kleffens and then Gerbrandy accepted the proposal to send Idenburg to Manila.’34But, the US authorities, warned by the British, denied the mission’s application for visa for the Philippines. Ultimately, the meeting took place in Shanghai, at that time occupied by the Japanese. The mission members had drafted an extended memorandum, intended for the Governor-General. It stated that, in case Germany would dominate the European continent for long, the Dutch should uphold a mutually favourable atmosphere with the Germans. The creation of such an atmosphere could be advanced because of ‘the interest of the Dutch Indies for the “New Europe” (economically, historically, culturally, strategically, race), together with the conviction, prevailing on the German side, that one needs the Netherlands in order to keep the Indies’.35 And, as a matter of course, the two delegates stated that the liberation of the German nationals would predispose the Germans in favour of Dutch interests.In March 1941 the two men made a second trip, now to Lisbon, in order to meet the Ministers of Exterior and of Colonies, Eelco van Kleffens and Charles Welter. These ministers of the Government-in-exile left London on March 6 with the ultimate destination of the Dutch East Indies. On their way to the East they would also visit the USA, where Van Kleffens had agreed with the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, on a conversation on March 19. The delegates from the Netherlands left their country by train on March 12, with visa provided by the German authorities.36 Apparently, their voyage was delayed, for they arrived not earlier than March 14 at Lisbon, while Van Kleffens had to leave a day earlier for the US, mindful of his appointment with the US President. Therefore, only Welter and his aide participated in the conversation with Jongejan and Boerstra. Already on March 18, Welter informed Prime Minister Gerbrandy, referring to his interlocuters, that the occupier had suggested the incarceration of 3000 Dutch hostages if the German nationals in the East Indies would not be released.37Odd enough, Radio Oranje broadcast to the Netherlands on March 10, that Van Kleffens and Welter had left London on their way to the East Indies, and that they would arrive at their destiny via the USA. De Jong: ‘That they would call first at Lisbon, was not added’.38Already in July, 1940, the Minister of Exterior had written a memorandum on the future of the Dutch East Indies in which he warned against a possible break-up of the Dutch Kingdom.39 When a ‘compromise peace’ between the United Kingdom and Germany would be concluded (or when Germany would continue its domination over the European continent for a long time), the Dutch Kingdom would disintegrate: the European part (the Netherlands) under the influence of Germany, while the Indies would be controlled by the British. The memorandum had not been discussed in full because of contradictions within the Government-in-exile. The repercussions in the Netherlands following the surprise attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, were largely determined by someone’s class position. In Amsterdam a history schoolteacher had been arrested because the days after the attack he had lectured on the downfall of Napoleon which began with his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Schaepman gives an impression of the opinions prevailing in the Dutch ruling class: ‘Many elderly persons of the property-owning class continued to hope in their hearts for a compromise between England and Germany, taking into account the German order and zest for work which had impressed them always so much, and which should triumph. Indeed, they even would prefer Nazism rather than Communism’.40 One might add here that not seldom the idea caught on, also in government circles, that the Nazis had already beaten Communism in their own country, and therefore had to be considered as Europe’s stronghold against the Bolshevik danger.Seyss-Inquart had publicly exclaimed: ‘Look to the East’, and the Council of SGs did so.41Within weeks after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union, Hischfeld and his staff took the initiative, with the approval of the Council of SGs, to establish a ‘committee for posting farmers into Eastern Europe’.42 The responsibility for food supply was in Hirschfeld’s portfolio and Ukraine was called the ‘granary’ of Europe.Cornelis Staf43 the director of the Nederlandse Heidemaatschappij (the Dutch association aimed at developing agricultural land), agreed to preside the committee. Hitler’s main colonial goal was to create Lebensraum (living space) in the occupied east, and to send Germanic peoples there as settlers after rigorous ethnic cleansing. The Dutch initiators reckoned on many thousands of participants, but only some five hundred were interested, almost exclusively Dutch National Socialists. Towards the end of November 1941, director Staf said goodbye to the first group of around one hundred of settlers, setting out for Ukraine, the intended granary for the benefit of the German people, while Hirschfeld had announced that the Dutch would also get their share. The British historian Adam Tooze wrote: ‘The German invasion of the Soviet Union is far better understood as the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism. Destroying the Jewish population was the first step towards rooting out the Bolshevik state.’44The group of Dutch settlers arrived at Kiev only two months after ‘Babi Yar’,45 and only days before Joseph Stalin ordered the successful counter-offensive of the Red Army around Moscow after having consulted Marshal Zhukov and his General Staff.Also this Dutch contribution to the “New Europe” failed completely. Local Dutch agricultural organisations had refused to participate. The Council of SGs could only join in with Dutch traitors which made the gap with the great majority of the Dutch people unbridgeable. De Jong commented on Hirschfeld: ‘Till the end of 1941 he had been convinced of a German victory – that had activated him to help along to insert the Dutch industry into the German one, which he considered for the time being as inevitable’.46 Apparently, Hirschfeld was also considering inevitable the participation in Hitler’s colonial objectives. If not prompted by the expectation of a sure German victory over the Soviet Union, this should be incomprehensible. There are no indications that the London Government-in-exile intervened in this disastrous policy. The Dutch Government should have had a ponderous reason for doing so: since June 1941 the Soviet Union was an Ally in the war against Nazi Germany. Was the neglect due to the still supposedly undecided race between the two horses? The British did not have that problem. The thirteenth of December, Klin, a town some one hundred kilometres North-West from Moscow, had been re-conquered. Immediately, the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden paid a visit to the liberated town. After that, the Pravda published an interview with him, ‘I was happy to see some of the feats of the Russian armies, feats that were truly magnificent.’47Hitler had aimed at compelling the British at least to tolerate German dominance on the European continent after the defeat of the Soviet Union. But ‘the USSR’s refusal to give in turned the European war into a global one. In August 1941, less than two months after the German invasion had begun, Churchill and Roosevelt had little confidence in the durability of the Bolshevik regime... By December, they had changed their minds... The campaign that had been designed to force the British to capitulate had in fact cemented the new alliance that would ultimately defeat Germany’.48Undoubtedly, Eden was also delighted by another major event. ‘Pearl Harbour’, the Japanese attack on the US Navy on the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, precipitated the entrance of the United States into the war. The Nazis were well aware of the enormous productive potentiality of American industry. The US Government only had to direct crucial branches of this industry at warfare.

There were still other ways available for the SGs to appease the Germans. In the fall of 1940 Seyss-Inquart proclaimed the establishment of the Nederlandse Winterhulp (‘Dutch winter relief’), a charitable institution modelled after the German equivalent Winterhilfe.49 The Dutch population should contribute to a relief fund in aid of families in need. A Committee of Honour, with Snouck Hurgronje and Trip as members, insisted on the Dutch citizens to go out and about with collecting boxes. Frederiks urged to support this action by way of a broadcast talk. Not surprisingly, the NU supported the fund raising. After three or four issues with poor results in the first winters of the occupation, Seyss-Inquart had to admit that also this German initiative had failed.