by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
Ignoring the truth of its past enables the Dutch government and parts of the political system to act as moral judges over others, with Israel a prime target.
The synagogue in Veghel, the Netherlands. All the Jews in the town of Veghel
were killed during the Holocaust. Photo via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,068, January 20, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
Netherlands’ attitude towards the Jews reveals Dutch society to be
profoundly hypocritical. The Dutch government remains the only one in
Western Europe that consistently refuses to admit, let alone apologize
for, the massive failures of its predecessors towards the Jews during
WWII. Ignoring the truth of its past enables the Dutch government and
parts of the political system to act as moral judges over others, with
Israel a prime target.
The Netherlands is a profoundly hypocritical
society. To prove such a statement in detail would require a lengthy
book. One shortcut to support this claim is to look at the history of
the relationship between Dutch Jews and the society at large.
The extreme behavior of the Dutch is not readily
visible. The Netherlands isn’t particularly hospitable to its Jews, but
neither can one rank its attitude towards them among Europe’s worst.
Only a handful of foreign correspondents are based in the country, so
negative aspects of the Netherlands rarely make it into the
international media.
In May 1940, the Netherlands was occupied by the
invading Germans within a matter of days. In the years to follow, more
than 70% of its 140,000-strong Jewish population were murdered after
having been sent to German camps, mainly in Poland. In the preparatory
activities for what would lead to genocide, the Dutch authorities
followed Nazi orders. Dutch police arrested Jews, including babies,
simply for being Jews. Dutch railways transported Jews to the Dutch
transit camp Westerbork, and from there to the German border. Dutch
police guarded the Jews in the camp.
The Dutch government in exile in London gave no
instructions to the bureaucracy in their occupied country. One
government employee in London, Henri Dentz, wrote a report in December
1943 that stated that most Dutch Jews had already been murdered. This
report was sent to all ministries and to a number of other Dutch
institutions in London, including the Red Cross. After the war, Dentz
testified that nobody wanted to read it.
While authorities in the occupied Netherlands
assisted the Nazis, a small minority of good Dutchmen helped 24,000 Jews
to hide. A third of these were ultimately betrayed. According to a
historian with whom I spoke, the Netherlands was the only occupied
country in which a group of volunteers and a special police unit were
paid to hunt down Jews in hiding.
In spite of all this, the Dutch government remains
the only one in Western Europe to consistently refuse to admit the huge
failures of its wartime predecessors towards the Jews. Even the small
states of Luxembourg and Monaco have admitted their wartime misconduct
and offered apologies.
In an interview with an Israeli government radio
station in 2000, then Dutch PM Wim Kok said: “The Dutch have never been
responsible for the misconduct of the Germans in the Netherlands during
the war.” He made no reference to the responsibility for wartime
misconduct towards Dutch Jews by Dutch authorities, institutions, and
many individuals. It was a classic straw man argument. No one accuses
the Dutch of committing the Nazis’ crimes, only of committing their own.
This absence of admission and apology for crimes
and negligence is a key element of the hypocrisy of Dutch society. That
hypocrisy can be seen in Dutch behavior elsewhere. The Netherlands
committed major war crimes in the military campaigns of 1947 and 1948 –
euphemistically known as “police actions” – in its then colony, the
Dutch Indies, now Indonesia.
Over the decades, hardly anyone has cared about
those Dutch crimes, even after the publication of information about
them. Consider, for example, the case of Dutch officer Raymond
Westerling, who was in charge of “pacifying” parts of the island of
Sulawesi during the Indonesian war. An interview with him in which he
admitted to war crimes was filmed in 1969. Not a single Dutch TV station
agreed to broadcast it. It was finally shown in 2012. In 1971,
Westerling told a journalist over a glass of diluted whisky that he had
court-martialed 350 captives and personally executed them. Again, no
action was taken by justice authorities. In the late 1960s, a young
Dutch historian, Cees Fasseur, was officially charged with investigating
these “police actions.” He later admitted the superficial nature of his
research.
In 1997, historian Ad van Liempt wrote a book, The Train of Corpses,
in which he detailed how the Dutch starved to death about half of the
local captives on a train transport during that war. Van Liempt told me
that many had found it scandalous that he had written the book. A Dutch
filmmaker known personally to me made a movie in 1995 about the Dutch
army’s mass killings of hundreds of men in the village of Rawagede on
the island of Java. He told me the locals spoke of similar crimes that
had taken place in nearby villages.
In 2017, Dutch-Swiss historian Rémy Limpach
published an 870-page book – with more than 2,400 footnotes – about
Dutch war crimes that had been committed in 1947 and 1948 in the Dutch
Indies against independence fighters and criminal bands. He concluded
that these crimes were structural, not incidental, as had been
previously claimed. The book gives many examples of the soldiers
committing arson, torturing and shooting prisoners, and killing women
and children. It also mentions their rape of minors. Several reviews
were published, but there were no major reactions in Dutch society.
I asked two leading Dutch historians why the
Netherlands is so indifferent towards its problematic past. Frank van
Vree answered: “The history of war memory shows that the Netherlands is
willing to look at the weaknesses of its society. But at the same time
the obstinate thought exists that the Netherlands has erred in many
ways; but all in all it has done many things better than others…The
feeling of ‘if we haven’t done it well, we’ve done it better than
others’ is deeply ingrained in Dutch culture. On the one hand there is
acknowledgement, on the other hand there is glossing over.”
Hans Blom said, “The Netherlands is a country
where the need to make compromises was present very intensely early in
its history. In addition one can say that the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th century has developed a tradition to think that ‘we’ are a country with very high moral standards. In the 19th
century it became unavoidably clear that the powerful Netherlands of
the Republic of the United Netherlands was no longer a significant
factor…In these small Netherlands a self-image emerged that it is nicer
to be the world’s most moral nation, rather than the most powerful. In
such a tradition of high moral self-image, it is more difficult to
publicly and properly treat events where that is evidently not the
case.”
In this environment of make-believe, Dutch PM Mark
Rutte even dared, in 2015, to say about the Netherlands: “We have a
marvelously perfect country, full of energy and creativity.”
The above are only some examples of Dutch
indifference to its own criminal past. Many others can be added.
Neglecting this past enables the Dutch government and parts of the
political system to act as moral judges over others. Israel is a prime
target.
This is an edited version of an article published by Algemeiner on January 11, 2019.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is a Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center and a former chairman of the Steering Committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He specializes in Israeli–Western European relations, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism, and is the author of The War of a Million Cuts.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/netherlands-hypocrisy-jews/
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