Netherlands

Netherlands

1. Introduction

A democratic kingdom of nearly 9 million people, whose overseas possessions of the Dutch West Indies and the Netherlands East Indies brought it considerable wealth. The Netherlands had never been at war with another state since it was founded—to replace the ancient and warlike Dutch republic—in 1815. By 1939 its politicians and diplomats had become obsessively neutral and no plans for concerted military action were made with any neighbouring state, not even with Belgium.

After war broke out in Europe in September 1939 the Dutch queen, Wilhelmina (1880–1962), joined with King Léopold III of Belgium in an autumn appeal to France, Germany, and the UK to make peace; which had no effect. Hitler sent the queen a personal assurance that he would continue to respect Dutch neutrality.

The war cost the Netherlands 220,000 lives and the loss of 33% of its gross national product.

2. Domestic life, war effort, and economy

Dutch dairying and horticulture had developed, during the 1920s and 1930s, so far that the country had a large export surplus of butter, cheese, fruit, and vegetables; under the occupation all this was siphoned off to Germany, where it helped the Germans to maintain an agreeable diet and hindered the UK's blockade (see economic warfare). The German war economists took care to pay for what they took at prices which the Germans could easily afford, while they offered no prosperity to Dutch farmers or gardeners—part of the Germans' usual doctrine of vae victis, ‘woe to the conquered’. They tried moreover a few large experimental collective farms, as convenient testing-grounds for various Nazi agricultural fads, without bothering to consult the convenience of the landowners.

To conform with what was already happening in Germany, various Dutch professions were Nazified; all Jews in these fields had to abandon their work. The non-Jewish professors in the University of Leyden objected to this measure and the university was thereupon closed down. A great many doctors, architects, lawyers, and so on, sooner than join the appropriate Nazi-dominated body, simply resigned from their jobs, and either lived on what savings they had, or took some quite different employment; or they went into hiding (diving under, onderduiken, was the Dutch term).

religion had a good deal to do with such decisions. A great many Dutch citizens lived in Calvinist families, with strong traditions of Bible reading and correct conduct; the Roman Catholic minority, though it read the Bible less, was no less concerned with behaving ethically; almost all Dutch Christians abominated Nazism as ungodly, and many Dutch ministers and priests were ready to take risks in anti-Nazi activity. Nazi doctrines and methods were often denounced from the pulpit.

Some 104,000 Dutch Jews were deported to concentration camps, while 36,000 more saved themselves, or were saved by their neighbours, by going into hiding. One of the deported Jews became world famous after her death— Anne Frank the schoolgirl diarist, who had been born in Germany and whose father had not moved far enough away from it. She and her family duly dived under; after four years a neighbour gave them away.

Nazi theory held that the Dutch were of Aryan race, close cousins to the Germans, with whom they would in the end become absorbed; meanwhile they would have to put up with being treated strictly, as second-class citizens. Strictness, persecution, deportation were wholly strange to the Dutch, who had regarded themselves as a cultivated, Christian, and easy-going people. Severity used by Nazi gangs at an early round-up of Jews in Amsterdam brought on a great strike in February 1941. Although it was inspired by the local communists (the party had secured 4% of the votes in 1937), every class took part and it spread for a few days to most of the large towns. It was followed by seventeen executions of Dutchmen who were already in prison (fifteen of them, saboteurs from a shipyard downstream of Rotterdam, had done their best to wreck a cruiser under construction for the German Navy). These executions appalled the bulk of the Dutch, who had abolished the death penalty in 1870.

On 17 September 1944, the opening day of the airborne attack on Arnhem (see MARKET-GARDEN), a BBC broadcast by P. J. Gerbrandy, prime minister of the Dutch government-in-exile (see below), ordered the Dutch railways to come out on strike, which they duly did. The Germans, in retaliation, cut off the movement of food by canal, hitherto regarded as indispensable to feed the large cities in the western part of the kingdom. The winter of 1944–5 is still remembered as the Hunger Winter. In some parts of the country there was at times no food at all, not even sugar beet or tulip bulbs, and 16,000 people died of starvation in one of the most fertile countries in the world—an instance of the absurdities of war.

3. Government

(a) Occupation

The Dutch parliament did not meet during the war, Queen Wilhelmina having taken into exile with her an official whose assent was necessary to the legality of any Dutch law, but this did not deter the Germans from administering the Netherlands as a dependent province of the Third Reich. Seyss-Inquart headed Reichskommissariat Niederlanden, aided by another Austrian Nazi, also picked personally by Hitler, H. A. Rauter (1891–1949), as head of the SS and security police. They squeezed everything out of the Netherlands that they could, both food and manufactures, for the benefit of Germany. From government offices in the centre of The Hague, they ran a stern colonial administration, laying down—sometimes in minute detail—what their conquered Dutch subjects were and were not to do.

At the last general election in 1937, 4% of the electorate had supported the Dutch Nazi Party, which grew from 30,000 to 50,000 members during the occupation; but its leader, Anton Mussert, was given no high place or special treatment by the Germans. He bombarded Hitler with memoranda about the Aryanism and the potentialities of the Dutch, and foresaw a Greater Netherlands which would reabsorb the Flemish-speaking provinces of Belgium at least; but he never received any serious attention from Berlin, where he was regarded as an unimportant puppet. Over 5,000 Dutchmen joined the Waffen-SS, and another 54,000 belonged of their own will to various other Nazi organizations; in a total population approaching 9,000,000, they remained a small minority. The civil service and the police continued to operate more or less as usual; the police did their best not to carry out their instructions from Rauter too promptly or too well.

(b) Government-in-exile and post-occupation government

In spite of Hitler's assurances, the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 (see FALL GELB) and three days later the queen boarded a British destroyer. She hoped to continue the battle from Zeeland, in the south-west of the country, but the situation deteriorated so rapidly that she was taken to England instead. The Dutch cabinet, having transferred all its powers to General H. G. Winkelman, C-in-C of the Dutch forces, followed the queen who settled in London. She dismissed her strongly pacific prime minister, D. J. de Geer (who went back home), replacing him in late August 1940 with the minister of justice, P. J. Gerbrandy, who proved combative enough. But the Dutch forces in exile were never strong. Of those who had managed to escape, the airmen became part of 320 Squadron RAF, the army formed the Irene Brigade under Lt-Colonel de Ruyter van Steveninck, which fought in the Normandy campaign and in north-west Europe, and the warships fought with the Royal Navy.

The queen encouraged her people by frequent broadcasts on Radio Orange and she quickly became accepted, by the occupied Dutch and the Allies alike, as the symbol of Dutch freedom and independence.

In May 1944 the government made an agreement with the British for the formation of a Dutch military government when the country was liberated; and in September, in preparation for the liberation, the government formed the Netherlands Forces of the Interior (Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten, or BS, a phrase borrowed from the French). Under the command of the queen's son-in-law, Prince Bernhard, this integrated the three main resistance groups in the Netherlands which, in the liberated areas of Zeeland, North Brabant, and Limburg, worked under the Allied armies as an auxiliary force. It was these areas that the Dutch military government, with BS aid, administered and when five Dutch ministers arrived in December they were largely ignored. This forced Gerbrandy to form a more representative government which included representatives from the liberated provinces.

4. Armed forces

(a) Dutch defences and the German invasion

The defensive outlook of Dutch politicians contributed to the swift defeat of their country when the Germans invaded on 10 May 1940. In the past the Dutch had relied on flooding to defend themselves and in 1937 the Dutch prime minister declared that he could stop any invasion by simply pushing a button. This defensive outlook, so similar to the French reliance on their Maginot Line, made inundations an integral part of the Dutch defences which comprised three indifferently fortified lines: the IJssel, the Grebbe north of the Meuse and the Peel-Raam south of it, and finally, a water line which was a last-ditch defence of ‘Fortress Holland’ (see Map 70). But the Dutch took no account of the German blitzkrieg, nor of airborne warfare.

The Eighteenth German Army quickly overran the IJssel Line and though the two German airborne divisions which were dropped at strategic points in ‘Fortress Holland’ were hard pressed and received some severe reverses, they could not be eliminated. Those holding the crucial bridge across the Waal at Moerdijk, which gave direct access into ‘Fortress Holland’ behind the Grebbe Line, held on until the 9th Armoured Division arrived on the third day and advanced on Rotterdam. To the south the Seventh French Army, too weak to intervene, withdrew and left the Dutch isolated. That same evening orders were issued ‘to break resistance in Rotterdam by all possible means’ and the next day, 14 May, the city, whose bridges had been stoutly defended by Dutch marines, was heavily bombed and that evening the Dutch capitulated.

(b) Army

Commanded by General H. G. Winkelman, the Dutch Army comprised four army corps of two divisions each and four brigades. These plus a number of smaller units totalled some 400,000 men. This was a sizeable force, but it had not a single tank, and only 26 armoured cars and 656 outdated guns. A strong pacifist movement in the Netherlands (its symbol was a broken rifle) had helped inhibit the army's modernization; lack of operational experience, and parsimony in equipping it properly, left it incapable of effectively resisting the Wehrmacht. Its losses during the fighting were 2,100 dead and 2,700 wounded.

(c) Navy

The small but modern navy was employed primarily to defend the Netherlands East Indies. It comprised 5 cruisers, 8 destroyers, 24 submarines, 16 minesweepers, and a number of torpedo boats and auxiliary craft. It also had about 50 operational but obsolete aircraft. In May 1940 only one cruiser, one destroyer, and a number of smaller vessels were stationed in the Netherlands. The destroyer was sunk by German aircraft and some of the ships were subsequently scuttled. However, most escaped to the UK and the cruiser subsequently worked with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. Nearly all those in the Netherlands East Indies were lost to air attack, or in the battles of the Java Sea and Sunda straits, but one or two survived to serve with the British Eastern Fleet. The navy had developed an early version of the Schnorchel, plans of which fell into German hands, but luckily for the Allies the Germans were slow to develop it.

(d) Air Force

The Luchtvaart Afdeling (Military Aviation Division) of the Dutch Army was created on 1 July 1913, but separate air arms were later formed by the navy and the army in the Netherlands East Indies. To oppose the 1,100 aircraft employed by the Germans on 10 May 1940 the Dutch had just 175, of which only 132 were serviceable and only 72 were modern. They lost 62 of them on the first day and few survived beyond capitulation on 14 May.

5. Intelligence

One of the reasons the Germans gave for invading the Netherlands was that Dutch intelligence was co-operating in an anti-Hitler conspiracy. This claim was not without foundation, for the Dutch chief of intelligence, Maj-General J. W. van Oorschot, turned a blind eye when his cryptanalysts presented him with the wireless traffic—which they had easily deciphered—being exchanged by an agent of MI6 in the Netherlands with a source in Nazi Germany (see Venlo). This turned out unhappily; the source was not, as MI6 supposed, one friendly to the Allies.

A German source that did turn out to be entirely reliable, but one which was also largely ignored, was Colonel Oster, deputy chief of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization. An early member of the resistance against Hitler (see Schwarze Kapelle), Oster was a friend of the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Major G. J. Sas, and kept him informed about German invasion plans. On the evening of 9 May he told Sas that the Netherlands were to be invaded the next morning, but though Sas passed this information on to The Hague many of those guarding the country's strategic points were still taken by surprise.

Once the Dutch government-in-exile had been formed in London it set up a special intelligence service under the queen's secretary, F. van't Sant, which worked with MI6. It was not successful; Sant resigned in the summer of 1941 and a new intelligence organization was formed under Colonel M. de Bruyne, but this also had its problems (see Englandspiel).

Until the Japanese invaded the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) the Dutch had a small but efficient code-breaking organization (Kamer 14) in Java. According to one source (see E. Layton et al., And I was There, New York, 1985, p. 206) it made inroads into the Japanese naval code (see ULTRA, 2) and into a consular cipher, but did not manage to decrypt Japanese diplomatic messages encoded on the PURPLE machine cipher (see MAGIC). Layton also quotes the Dutch C-in-C in the NEI, General Hein ter Poorten, as reporting that Kamer 14 had alerted him to the concentration near the Kurile Islands of the Japanese task force that raided Pearl Harbor, but as all the Dutch records were destroyed there is no means of confirming this.

After the NEI had been overrun by the Japanese both the Netherlands Forces Intelligence Service based in Australia (see Allied Intelligence Bureau) and the Ceylon-based Korps Insulinde, which was part of SOE's Force 136, attempted intelligence-gathering operations into the NEI, but with negligible success.

6. Merchant marine

Most of the merchant marine, overseas at the moment of invasion, rallied to the government-in-exile, for which it provided an important source of income. Dutch schuyts, coastal sailing barges, were prominent among the little ships at Dunkirk. Dutch shipping—640 strong, apart from more than 200 small vessels—was of material help to the Allies; nearly half of these ships were lost to German or Japanese torpedoes or mines, at a cost of some 3,000 Dutch seamen's lives. The shipyards near the mouths of the Rhine and Maas were put to work by the Germans to build ships for the German Navy, a task they carried out as badly as they could.

7. Resistance

Several resistance movements developed, including three large ones; some of them co-operated with their local policemen, who were personal friends. The Orde Dienst (OD), favoured by the government-in-exile, was intended to make sure that the queen's return would be untroubled by left-wing disturbances. All the OD's detailed instructions were sent through SOE channels in 1942–3, so it could claim few successes: all of them were controlled by the Abwehr's/SD ENGLANDSPIEL. The Raad van Verzet (Resistance Council) and the knokploegen (combat groups) helped the onderduikers, and managed a little useful sabotage; but they were short of arms and explosives. Their efforts were much hindered, as SOE's had been, by the prevalence of double agents. Moreover, everybody who was anybody in the Netherlands knew everybody else; it was exceptionally hard to keep anything really secret.

From 1942, there were some useful intelligence circuits at work passing data back to England (see spies), and the many good Christians, far more numerous than the double agents, made it possible to set up some escape lines. Both the Protestant and the Catholic churches, outspoken as usual in denunciation of Nazi methods, supported a further great strike, in April– May 1943, which was the response to a German attempt to re-arrest thousands of Dutchmen whom they had taken prisoners-of-war, and then sent home; the strike was brutally put down, at the cost of some 150 lives, but at least the prisoners were not re-arrested. The country's large printing industry made possible an unusually widespread clandestine newspaper service; one journal, Je Maintiendrai (the royal family's motto), run by a Dutch reserve artillery officer, Dirk de Loos, circulated in 80,000 copies of each issue (see subversive warfare). De Loos was betrayed in 1942 but survived five concentration camps, including Dachau.

Several thousand young men, due for forced labour in the Reich, joined the onderduikers. Terrain forbade the formation of maquis, as in France—there was all too little rough country; they either hid in a town, with the connivance of a clerk at the town hall, or pretended to be farm labourers (who were exempt from the labour call-up) in the countryside.

When the Allies entered the Netherlands the three main resistance groups, now amalgamated into the BS, were able to seize a few useful strong-points. They also provided a lot of useful battle intelligence, as First Canadian Army fought its way towards Bremen across the eastern Netherlands in the spring of 1945. At the end of the war the Germans still held the two provinces of North and South Holland.

M. R. D. Foot

Bibliography

Foot, M. R. D. , SOE in the Low Countries (London, 2001).
Maass, W. , The Netherlands at War (London, 1970).
de Jong, L. , Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in der Tweede Wereldoorlog, 14 vols. in 27 (The Hague, 1969–91).