Fighting on all Fronts (28 page)

On 29 April 1945 Amsterdam inhabitants were celebrating on the streets because of the rumours of negotiations on capitulation. On 4 May, after capitulation, the same happened, and both times the Nazis opened fire. On 6 May BS troops went out onto the streets in uniform, but unarmed. They proceeded to arrest 12,000 people, NSB members and others chosen partly based on lists held by their own administration.
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By the end of the war there was a real vacuum in the Netherlands. It was, however, much less a physical power vacuum than an ideological one. The bearer of traditional ideology and authority, the Dutch state was in the eyes of many wholly discredited. This was why the Allied forces had to proceed cautiously but also rapidly. And in their role as “benefactors” they were to some degree forced to act after moving in. Finding the Northern Netherlands looking like one large concentration camp fanned the anti-war mood of Canadian, British and American soldiers. Any plans there might have been to alter the initial post-war division of Europe and pursue war against Stalin’s Russia thus became impossible. Workers, the oppressed and ordinary soldiers in Europe were fed up.

If liberation meant an end to Nazi rule for ordinary people, for the Allied governments it was an opportunity to re-establish former glories—in the Dutch case this meant Indonesia. On 7 December 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, prime minister Gerbrandy declared war on Japan. The Japanese army conquered Indonesia in the following three months. One writer summarised the process: “As Germany stormed across Western Europe in the spring and summer of 1940, the weakness of the European colonial powers encouraged the Japanese Chiefs of Staff to think that they could take over the entire south east Asian treasure house of resources”.
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In a radio speech in December 1942 Queen Wilhelmina had already mentioned plans to create a Commonwealth of the Netherlands, Indonesia, Surinam and the Antillean Islands after the war.
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A year later she signed two Royal Decrees sanctioning the restoration of Dutch authority in Indonesia. On 28 September 1945 war minister Meijnen announced the despatch of 27,000 troops to suppress “extremists”. As volunteers quickly ran out conscripts were sent. One hundred and thirty thousand soldiers were eventually despatched to Indonesia.
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Opposition to this came from the Union Netherlands Indonesia (VNI) founded at the end of 1945 by communists and non-communists. Despite its formal policy on Indonesia being equivocal, the communist movement was pushed into this position by the spirit of the resistance, while the SDAP supported intervention. The number of people avoiding call-up swelled into the thousands, in response to which the military police conducted raids. At the end of 1946 anarchists and communists in Friesland revived the wartime underground organisation for hiding people to assist avoiding call-up. The police uncovered the organisation in 1947 and its members were imprisoned.
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In September 1946, 30 percent of one contingent of conscripts failed to turn up, causing panic in the war ministry. Lieutenant General Kruls then addressed the nation: “There are irresponsible groups that try to mislead our conscripts, using propaganda and untrue slogans”.
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When, three days later, a conscript was denounced to the military police in Amsterdam, riots ensued. One demonstrator was killed, another wounded.

In response the CPN called a strike which “was heeded on a massive scale. City tram workers took the lead. The strike soon spread to other companies”,
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Fokker, Schiphol, Verkade, Bruynzeel, and cities, Delft, Enschede, Groningen, Rotterdam, The Hague, Velsen and Zaandam. In Amsterdam people started to erect barricades and 20,000 strikers joined the protest on Waterloo Square which was attacked by the police. A national poll in July 1946 showed the majority of the population was against the intervention. In November the VNI presented a petition to parliament signed by 200,000 arguing for a peaceful solution.

That month a military court opened a special chamber in Rotterdam for the trials of those who refused the call-up to fight in Indonesia. A significant group had highly politicised views, comparing occupation of Indonesia to the occupied Netherlands. They were punished almost as harshly as the war criminals of the 1940-1945 period.
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In 1949 the Netherlands received 430 million dollars in Marshall Aid, 68 million of
which was for intervention in Indonesia. Yet despite this and the combined efforts of Dutch, British and Japanese troops, in that same year Indonesia gained its independence after nine years of intense war and occupation.

Racism was not regarded as an issue immediately after the war, it being claimed to be a “non-Dutch” question. But anti-Semitism had never left: “After the liberation in 1945, there were polemical articles in the press and in letters to editors, with questions such as ‘How many Jews didn’t betray their hosts?’ and comments about Jews digging up their money, driving big cars and securing the best jobs”.
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Post-war anti-Semitism, according to De Gans, performed two functions: “First, a psychological one, blaming the victim because Jewish survivors, purely by coming back, reminded Gentiles of their own failure. But above all, anti-Semitism performed a social-economic function in a post-war society of scarcity and upheaval”.
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It was also of use to business and authorities who had profited from the Holocaust as this denied the Jews their original possessions. This psychology amounted,
de facto
, to a
reversal of responsibility
. An excellent and painful example was the removal of the two communist aldermen L Seegers and B Polak from their functions by the Dutch Labour Party in 1948. When Polak returned from hiding to reoccupy his pre-war position,
Het Parool
commented: “Mr Polak left his post during the German invasion without any particularly pressing reasons.” When
Het Vrije Volk
suggested it might be because he was a Jew,
Het Parool
considered that a “side matter” and pointed to his supposed “lazy life in South America”.
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Official prejudice against Roma, Sinti and other travellers also continued after the war. At a meeting of the Commissaries of the Queen on 10 February 1946 the various mayors argued to reimplement the Nazi law of 22 June 1944, concentrating travellers in camps once again.
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On the parliamentary front there had been a political shift. In November 1945 the Dutch parliament reassembled in a lame rump institution; 40 out of 150 seats in the First and Second Chamber together were unoccupied due to death, purges or resignations. After a long delay elections were finally called. On the right the ARP once again posed as the party of “law and order”, calling for the “maintenance of authority” and extending this to Indonesia. The voters rewarded them with defeat. The party declined from its 16.4 percent in 1937 to 12.9 (17 to 13 seats).
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On the left the CPN vote rose due to its role in the resistance and, in particular, the February 1941 strike. The first post-war commemoration of this event, on Monday 25 February 1946, was huge: “Large companies and firms in the city shut down and tram traffic was halted. Long queues
of working men and ex-strikers journeyed to Waterloo Square…50,000 people, the papers said”.
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While the social democrats claimed the strike had been “spontaneous”, the CPN could legitimately lay claim to having called it. It commanded so much respect they got three extra seats in the Amsterdam city council, plus, for the first time, an alderman. CPN leader Wagenaar was offered a ministerial post, albeit without a budget (
zonder portefeuille
). In the May 1946 elections the CPN proudly raised the slogan “Forward with the party of the February strike”, and gained ten seats (up from three in 1937). However, it was excluded from the cabinet that was formed. In the summer of 1946 the CPN became the biggest party in Amsterdam, gaining 15 of the 45 council seats and getting two aldermen.

In terms of purges, the number of “political criminals” jailed for collaboration with the enemy in August 1945 was about 90,000, of whom 23,000 were women. Mr Nagel, a member of three purge committees, wrote in retrospect:

The result of our work is rather laughable. As the chairman of a purge committee for building I got a big entrepreneur in front of me who, amongst many other things, had constructed air plane hangars for the enemy and defended himself now with the assertion he had constructed them so badly they could neither open nor shut the doors when they had finished. An excursion to the airport took place; one could open and close the hangar doors with one mere finger. The defence was therefore not accepted and the verdict was corresponding. Not long after, this industrious entrepreneur again was the biggest builder of his region and far beyond.
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Capital punishment was pronounced in 140 cases. The main blame was shifted to a minority of NSB members and collaborators. Mussert was executed, and his right hand Van Geelkerken got a life sentence. That the persecution of Jewish Council leaders Asscher and Cohen was eventually stopped was solely due to “the interests of the Dutch elites; too much incriminating material on Dutch non-Jewish individuals and institutions would be macerated with it, so those would be questioned”.
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Thus “the members of the Supreme Court, after ‘purging’ of some councillors, were left off freely. The same applies to the Secretaries-General, while for example Hirschfeld was directly involved in the ‘legalisation’ of the authority of Seyss-Inquart and economic extradition of the Netherlands to Germany. With the top of the Nederlandse Unie it was no different. They could all ‘wash themselves clean’ because almost
everyone had dirty hands in the higher echelons”.
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Hirschfeld became post-war general director for Marshall Aid and later left for Indonesia as economic adviser to Lieutenant Governor-General Van Mook.
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After the war 25 percent of the Dutch police force was sacked and disciplinary punishment meted out against another 22.4 percent.
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Because of the inefficiency and hypocrisy of the purges, scandals erupted. On the request of post-war prime minister Schermerhorn, a commission was established to “investigate” the Union. Strong evidence suggests that the commission was actually intended to clear the names of prominent Union members. Indeed, two former Union members were on the commission itself.

During the war the priorities of the Nazi economy meant street terror and insane mass murder—for ordinary people. But the elite were treated more carefully because of Nazi respect for their wealth and authoritarianism. Although the spirit of the resistance imposed limits, in their barbed-wired backroom at Sint Michielsgestel big business and politicians successfully concocted institutions, parties and union structures for post-war Netherlands. It was a fundamentally undemocratic process which allowed most of the authoritarian oriented figures to join the “underground” (though, it must be stressed, they had not been part of the resistance).

Furthermore, post-war “justice” whitewashed the crimes of war criminals and collaborators. The top industrialists, monarchy, police, politicians, scientific elite and judiciary were too intertwined with the far-right and enmeshed in economic collaboration for a more thorough purging. Postwar society was founded on a sort of corporatism based on class collaboration that had been developing before and during the war. It is true that, for a time, the Nazis had modulated this with another more extreme type, stretching the concept to the extreme to increase exploitation. Yet, to quote Jan Rogier, ultimately: “there is no break between past and present. There is no significant difference in the system of rule of past and present authorities”.
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For the establishment, then, fascism had just been an intellectual phenomenon. But in the February strike, and beyond, the working class fought fascism
physically
.

1
      In 1939, under the increasing threat of war, a new regiment was created. In May 1940, shortly before war broke out, the brigade was increased to a “Light Division” (“Lichte Divisie”), totalling 5,190 soldiers.
www.benvanhelden.nl/Condorclub/Fiets/Holland/Army%20Bikes%20Holland.html

2
      “It would appear that only in the 1880s was the demand for labour balanced by the supply, a situation that had already occurred in Belgium in the 1850s.” While in Belgium 46 percent of the population worked in industry in 1910, in the Netherlands this was only 33.4 percent (E H Kossmann, “The Low Countries 1780-1940”, in
Oxford History of Modern Europe
[Oxford University Press, 1978], p216).

3
      River transport increased from 4.7 million tons in 1880 to 9.9 in 1895, and about 30 in 1910. Rhine vessels carried ores and wheat upstream, and coal downstream—J C Boogman et al (eds),
Geschiedenis van het moderne Nederland. Politieke, economische en sociale ontwikkelingen
(De Haan, 1988), p259.

4
      Kossmann, p553.

5
      Kossmann, p620.

6
      Ton Geurtsen,
Sociaaldemocratie in Nederland—Een geschiedenis van verloren illusies
(De Papieren tijger), pp72-74.

7
      Wolf Kielich,
Jordaners op de barricaden. Het Oproer van 1934
(De Walburg Pers, 1984), p61.

8
      Igor Cornelissen, Ger Harmsen and Rudolf de Jong (eds),
De taaie rooie rakkers. Een documentaire over het socialism tussen de wereldoorlogen
(AMBO, 1965), p41.

9
      On 5 October 1920 the bosses’ Metal Union decided to actually impose a wage cut of 10 percent for adults and 20 percent for youth—Ger Harmsen and Bob Reinalda,
Voor de bevrijding van de arbeid—Beknopte geschiedenis van de Nederlandse vakbeweging
(SUN, 1975), pp140-141.