BIRTH | Dorothy Thompson, 1893

Dorothy Thompson,
Time Cover, June 1939

July 9, 2020—This day in 1893 was born journalist Dorothy Celene Thompson,   in Lancaster, New York. Time magazine poll ranked her as one of the two most important woman in the United States, along with Eleanor Roosevelt. She married novelist Sinclair Lewis.

A foreign correspondent for the New York Evening Post in the 1920s, she later became its bureau chief in Berlin. She so angered Adolf Hitler with her reporting on the Nazis, that he personally expelled her. 

Her syndicated column, On the Record, appeared three times a week in as many as 170 papers, and she also had a popular radio show that was listened to by overseas troops during World War II. She died in 1961.

In early 1944 she wrote a column on, and devoted a radio show to, the idea that soldiers fighting for the Allies needed a vision of the postwar world to motivate them. 

My uncle Willem van Stockum, then a volunteer bomber pilot at the 10 Squadron RAF base in Melbourne, Yorkshire, responded to his sister, Hilda van Stockum. He said that visions of the future do not motivate soldiers. 

What motivates soldiers, Willem said, is outrage at tyranny. 

His letter to my mother on this subject was published as an article, "A Soldier's Creed," in The Horn Book in its Christmas 1944 issue under the authorship of "A Bomber Pilot." It has been widely referenced and quoted. 

Willem van Stockum was shot down over France in June 1944 on his sixth mission, during the week of D-Day, attacking Nazi supply lines before and after the Normandy invasion. He is buried with his crew and that of another plane shot down on the same mission, in France. A book on his life was written by Robert P. Wack, Time Bomber (Boissevain Books, 2014).

Willem van Stockum, RAF. 

I didn’t join the war to improve the Universe; in fact, I am sick and tired of the eternal sermons on the better world we are going to build when this war is over. I hate the disloyalty to the past twenty years. Apparently people think that life in those twenty years, which cover most of my conscious existence, was so terrible that no-one can be expected to fight for it. We must attempt to dazzle people with some brilliant schemes leading, probably, to some horrible Utopia, before we can ask them to fight.
I detest that point of view. I hate the idea of people throwing their lives away for slum-clearance projects or forty-hour weeks or security and exchange commissions. It is a grotesque and horrible thought. There are so many better ways of achieving this than diving into enemy guns. Lives are precious things and are of a different order and entail a different scale of values than social systems, political theories, or art.
“Why are we not given a cause?” some people ask. I do not understand this question. It seems so plain to me. There are millions and millions of people who are shot, persecuted and tortured daily in Europe. The assault on so many of our fellow human beings makes some of us tingle with anger and gives us an urge to do something about it. That, and that alone, makes some of us feel strongly about the war. All the rest is vapid rationalization. All this talk about philosophy, the degeneration of art and literature, the poisoning of Nazi youth, which the Nazi system entails, and which we all rightly condemn, is still not the reason why we fight and why we are willing to risk our lives.
Here, let us say, is a soldier. He asks himself, “Why should I die?” You would tell him: “To preserve our civilization.” When the soldier replies: “To Hell with your civilization; I never thought it so hot,” you take him up wrongly when you sit down and say to yourself: “Well, after all, maybe it wasn’t so hot,” and then brightly tap him on the shoulder and say: “Well, I’ve thought of a better idea. I know this civilization wasn’t so hot, but you go and die anyway and we’ll fix up a really good one after the war.” I say you take him up wrong because his remark: “To Hell with your civilization” doesn’t really mean that he is not seriously concerned about our civilization. He is simply revolted by the idea of dying for ANY civilization. Civilization simply isn’t the kind of thing you ever want to die for. It is something to enjoy and something to help build up because it’s fun, and that is that, and that is all.
When a man jumps into the fire to save his wife he doesn’t justify himself by saying that his wife was so civilized that it was worth the risk! There is only one reason why a man will throw himself into mortal combat and that is because there is nothing else to do and doing nothing is more intolerable than the fear of death. I could stand idly by and see every painting by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo thrown into a bonfire and feel no more than a deep regret, but throw one small, insignificant Polish urchin on the same bonfire and, by God, I’d pull him out or else. I fight quite simply for that and I cannot see what other reasons there are. At least, I can see there are reasons, but they are not the reasons that motivate me.
During the first two years of the war when I was an instructor at an American University in close contact with American youth and in close contact with the vital isolationist question in the States, I often felt that there was much insincerity, conscious or unconscious, on our, the Interventionist, side of the argument. We had strong views on the danger of isolationism for the United States. We thought, rightly, that for the sake of self-interest and self-preservation the United States should take every step to ensure the defeat of the Nazi criminals. But however sound our arguments, our own motives and intensity of feeling did not spring from those arguments but from an intense passion for common righteousness and decency.
Suppose it could have been proved to us at that time that the participation of the United States in the stamping out of organized murder, rape and torture in Europe could only take place at great cost to the United States, while not doing so would in no way impair her security. Would we not still have prayed that our country might do something? And would we not have been proud to see her do something?
There is an appalling timidity and false shame among intellectuals. The common man in the last war went to fight quite simply as a crusader. I am not talking about politics now, I am not either asserting or denying that England declared war from purely generous and noble considerations, but I am asserting that the common man went and fought with the rape of Belgium foremost in his mind and saw himself as an avenger of wrong.
After the war the common man went quietly back to his home. The intellectuals, however, upon coming back, ashamed of their one lapse of finding themselves in agreement with every Tom, Dick and Harry, must turn around and deride the things they were ready to give their lives for. As they were the only vocal group, the opinion became firmly established that the last war was a grave mistake and that anyone who got killed in it was a sucker.
And now, in this war, these intellectuals are hoist with their own petard. They lack the nerve and honesty to represent the American doughboy to himself for what he is. They do not give him the one picture in his mind which would stimulate his imagination and which would make him see beyond the fatigues, the mud, the boredom and the fear. The picture is there for anyone to paint who has a gift for words. It is a simple picture and a true picture and no one who has ever sat as a small child and listened with awe to a fairy story can fail to understand. The intellectuals, however, have made fun of the picture and so they won t use It.
But some day an American doughboy in an American tank will come lurching into some small Polish, Czech or French village and it may fall to his lot to shoot the torturers and open the gates of the village jail. And then he will understand.
There is a lot of talk among our intellectuals about our youth. Our youth is supposed to want a change, a new order, a revolution or what not. But it is my conviction that that is emphatically NOT what our youth wants. Have you ever been in a picture house on a Saturday afternoon, when it is filled with children and some old Western movie is ending in a race of time between the hero and the villain? Have you seen the rapt attention, the glowing faces, the clenched fists? What our young men really want is to be able to give that same concentrated attention and emotional participation, this time to reality, and this time as heroes and not as spectators, that they were able to give to unsubstantial shadows, before long words and cliches had killed their imaginations. Killed them so dead that they can no longer see even reality itself imaginatively.
It is up to the intellectuals to rekindle the thing they have tried to destroy. It is as simple as St. George and the Dragon. Why not have the courage to point out that St. George fought the dragon because he wanted to liberate a captive and not because he wanted to lead a better life afterwards? Some day, sometime, my picture of an American doughboy in a Polish village will become true. Wouldn’t it be better for him then to have the cross of St. George on his banner than a long rigmarole about a better world?
As long as our intellectuals and leaders do not have the courage to risk being thought sentimental and out-of-date and are not willing to stress that nations as well as individuals are entitled to their acts of heroism and chivalry, they will never be able to give our youth what it needs.
It is true that every fairy story ends with the words: “and they lived happily ever after.” How irritating a child would be, though, if it interrupted its mother at every sentence to ask: “But, Mummy, will they live happily ever afterwards?” It simply isn’t the point of the fairy story and it isn’t the point of this war.
Presumably we won’t live happily ever after this war. But just as a fairy story helps to increase a child’s awareness and wonder at the world, so this war may make us more aware of one another. Perhaps we shall learn, and perhaps some things will be better organized. I hope so. I believe so. But only if we engage in this war with our hearts as well as our minds.
For goodness’ sake let us stop this empty political theorizing according to which a man would have to have a University degree in social science before he could see what he was fighting for. It is all so simple, really, that a child can understand it.

WW2 | Sept. 1 – Hitler Invades Poland

September 1, 2017 – This day in 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. He had been aggressive before without provoking a response from the rest of Europe.

Hitler began his plan with a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934.

This pact was contravened five and a half years later – Hitler had just been buying time.  The pact was unpopular with his supporters, who resented the Versailles Treaty's giving former German provinces to Poland. Hitler, however, saw the nonaggression pact as a way to prevent a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before the Wehrmacht had rearmed.

In the second half of the 1930s, France and Britain pursued a policy of appeasement toward Germany. Public opinion (especially in Britain) was sympathetic to revising some territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty, and neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight the Nazis.  So Britain and France acquiesced to:

• German rearmament (1935-1937). 
• Remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
• Annexation of Austria (the Anschluss, March 1938). 
• Invasion of the Sudetenland and breakup of the Czechoslovak state (March 1939) in violation of Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia in what is called the Munich agreement.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw. France and Germany responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler's shocking answer to that was   a nonaggression pact with Premier Josef Stalin in August 1939, partitioning Poland between the two powers, giving Germany the western third and enabling Hitler to attack Poland without fear of its defense by the Soviet Union.

One week after the surprise pact with Stalin, at 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued an order for the Wehrmacht to invade Poland, claiming that the Poles were preparing to invade Germany. In fact, the Wehrmacht was massing on the German side of Poland's western border and the Poles were simply moving their army to defend this border.

Britain and France declared war within two days, but it was too late. The German army launched its Blitzkrieg, its "lightning war."  From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, more than 2,000 German tanks,covered by  more than 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border. Within six days they took Krakow and within ten they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen. World War II was on.

DUTCH HISTORY | Johan and Jimmy Huizinga

Johan Huizinga was a founder of the field of cultural history. He
wrote critically about Fascism in the 1930s, was arrested in 1942
for speaking out against the Nazis, and died in prison in 1945.

July 24, 2016—Wally van Hall, who has been called the "Prime Minister of the Dutch Resistance," as a young man in 1929 went to New York to work with his brother Gijsbert (Gijs) van Hall. 

They met up with their Dutch friend Jimmy Huizinga and they had a great time, according to Aad van Hall (son of Wally van Hall).

I emailed Charles "Leidschendam" Boissevain (the middle name is to distinguish this Charles Boissevain from so many others) to ask whether Jimmy Huizinga was the son of the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and the answer came back overnight from him and Marleen van Hall Habraken (daughter of Gijs van Hall, who became Mayor of Amsterdam after the war):

Yes! Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) had two sons Leonhard (1906-1980), author of a humorous book and some articles, and Jacob "Jimmy" Herman (1908-1983), who was a good friend of Wally and Tilly van Hall and often stayed with them when they were living in Staten Island, New York. (Another son, Dirk, shows up on searches.) Marleen has pictures of Jimmy with Gijs, Wally and Emmie (Gijs' wife) in good spirits in their garden. Marleen reports as follows [translation by Charles]:

Jimmy wrote for the NRC (the NRC and Algemeen Handelsblad merged in 1970 into the present NRCHandelsblad). When Emmie went back to Holland he arranged for her to write about American literature, for quite a long time. They were also friends with Jimmy's older brother Leonard Huizinga, his wife and daughter (born in 1930). We have a picture of a summer house that our families rented in Noordwijk, a well-known village on the North Sea, 20 miles north of The Hague. I remember Leonard saying that children should be seen, not heard!

I am grateful to  Charles "Leidschendam" Boissevain, Marleen van Hall Habraken and Aad van Hall for the above information.

Postscript, August 2, 2020: I just heard from T. J. Rider McDowell, who said: "Jimmy Huizinga was my surrogate grandfather. Great guy." 

In his Erasmus Lectures at Harvard, Loe de Jong quotes Jimmy's father Johan Huizinga as saying: "History, like good sherry, should be dry." The following on Johan is from various Internet sources.

Johan Huizinga

Johan was the son of Gröningen Physiology Professor Dirk Huizinga and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after Johan was born. He was a student of Indo-Germanic languages, graduating in 1895. He then studied comparative linguistics, learning Sanskrit in the process. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of the jester in Indian drama in 1897.

In 1902 he started writing about medieval and Renaissance history, with his first writing a biography of Erasmus. He  became Professor of General and Dutch History at Gröningen in 1905. In 1915, he was appointed Professor of General History at Leiden University, a post he held until 1942, when the Nazis removed him. He opposed Fascism in the 1930s and in 1942 spoke critically of the Nazi occupiers. From then until his death in 1945 he was locked up by the Nazi regime. His body lies in the graveyard of the Reformed Church at 6 Haarlemmerstraatweg in Oegstgeest.

Huizinga, The Play Element of Culture.

Huizinga founded a whole field of study, cultural research. His knowledge of languages led him to examine the role of playing, of games, in the formation of culture. He believed that games preceded culture, that animals instinctively know how to play and that playing leads to culture. Huizinga attempts to classify the words used for play

Greek

παιδιά — pertaining to children's games

ἄθυρμα — associated with the idea of the trifling, the nugatory

ἀγών — for matches and contests

Sanskrit

krīdati — denoting the play of animals, children, adults

divyati — gambling, dicing, joking, jesting, ...

vilāsa — shining, sudden appearance, playing and pursuing an occupation

līlayati — light, frivolous insignificant sides of playing

Chinese

wan — is the most important word covering children's games and much much more  cheng — denoting anything to do with contests; corresponds exactly to the Greek ago. sai — organized contest for a prize

Japanese
      asobu — is a single, very definite word, for the play function

Semitic languages

la’ab (a root, cognate with la’at) — play, laughing, mocking

la’iba (Arabic) — playing in general, making mock of, teasing^[13]

la’ab (Aramaic) — laughing and mocking

sahaq (Hebrew) — laughing and playing

Latin

ludus — from ludere, covers the whole field of play

Huizinga's study of culture stood him in good stead in the 1930s when he started to research and write critically about the culture of Fascism. He studied it as a game. He said:

You can deny almost everything: the beauty, the truth, the spirit of God. You can deny seriousness. But you can never deny the game.

IRELAND | June 24–Éamon de Valera Resigns

This day in 1973, Éamon de Valera resigned as President of Ireland. His personal survival to that age can be attributed to his birth in New York City! His birthplace seemed to be of little importance until his life was spared by the British after the 1916 Easter Rising, because of his U.S. citizenship.

He lived out his years in Blackrock and I could see the sentry box in front of his walled enclave every day when I bicycled in 1951-52 from our house–"Springfield", Sydney Avenue (as I remember the address)–to Blackrock College. I was in the junior school at Blackrock, Willow Park, being nine years old.

They started me out in a lower grade but realized that they main thing holding me back was not knowing the Irish language. Someone, possibly my mother, persuaded the Holy Ghost Fathers (C.S.Sp.) that learning Irish was not a priority for a typical U.S. citizen visitor not planning to spend the rest of his life in Ireland.

From my first days learning Irish I remember a few words like an cupán, meaning cup. When my instruction in Irish was ended, I was advanced one grade.

But I digress. When he resigned, de Valera was the world’s oldest statesman, 90 years old.

He was born in New York City in 1882 to a Spanish father and Irish mother. His father died when young Éamon was two years old. His mother couldn't look after him alone and so he was packed off to live with his mother’s family in County Limerick, Ireland. He attended the Royal University of Ireland, class of 1904 and obtained his degree in mathematics.

He became an important figure in the Irish-language revival movement and the independence movement. In 1913, he joined the armed Irish Volunteers, which advocated Ireland’s independence from Britain. In 1916 he participated, as mentioned, in the Easter Rising in Dublin. He was the last rebel leader to surrender and his life was spared because of his American birth. He was released from prison in 1917 under a general amnesty.

He then became president of the nationalist Sinn Fein Party. In May 1918, he was deported to England and imprisoned again, but in December 1918 Sinn Fein won an Irish national election, making him the unofficial leader of Ireland.

In February 1919, he escaped from jail and traveled to the United States, where he raised money for for the Irish Republican (independence) movement. When he returned to Ireland in 1920, Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were waging a guerrilla campaign against the British army. forces. In 1921, a truce was declared. The following year a group of Sinn Fein leaders including Arthur Griffith split with de Valera and signed a treaty with Britain that partitioned off the more Protestant counties in the north and let the rest of Ireland, Éire, be independent.

A civil war followed, with de Valera supporting the IRA against the Irish Free State (the new government of the autonomous south). He was imprisoned by William Cosgrave’s Irish Free State ministry. In 1924, he was released and two years later left Sinn Fein, forming Fianna Fail, which eight years later won control of the Dail Eireann, the Irish assembly.

So the same year that FDR was elected President, de Valera was elected Taoiseach, or Irish prime minister. For the next 16 years, de Valera pursued a policy of political separation from Great Britain, including the introduction of a new constitution in 1937 that declared Ireland the fully sovereign state of Éire. During World War II, he maintained a policy of neutrality but repressed anti-British intrigues within the IRA.

In 1948, de Valera narrowly lost reelection because the public was weary of his party’s long monopoly of power. Out of office, he toured the world advocating the unification and independence of Ireland. His successor as Taoiseach, John Costello, officially made Ireland an independent republic in 1949 but lost the prime minister’s office to de Valera in 1951. The seesaw continued–relative Irish economic prosperity in the 1940s declined in the 1950s, and Costello began a second ministry in 1954, replaced again by de Valera in 1957. In 1959, de Valera resigned as prime minister and was elected Irish president–a largely ceremonial post. On June 24, 1973, de Valera retired, and died two years later.

Comment

At the beginning of World War II my father was plucked from FDR's senior civil service by William ("Wild Bill") Donovan of the O.S.S. to Dublin to check on whether de Valera was assisting the British on intelligence issues despite Éire's official neutrality. My father's conclusion was that the Irish didn't like the Brits but they liked the Nazis even less and were cooperating fully with British intelligence.

One event that sanitized biographies omit is that de Valera went to the German Embassy in Dublin to sign the condolence book when Hitler died in his bunker. By this time the Nazis were defeated, with–from the perspective of the Allies–minimal involvement by Éire (although many from Éire signed up to serve in the British Army). The poke in the eye for Churchill and Britain obviously was designed to play well with de Valera's Irish Nationalist base, and did not reflect the Éire government's actions in the war years. However, even as a strictly political move it was extremely foolish. By this time the many atrocities propagated by Hitler were largely uncovered and his signing of the book was used to justify hostility to de Valera in Britain, the USA and the many other countries that contributed to defeating Hitler. This blot on de Valera's name will never be forgotten.

TIME LINE | The Nazis in 1922, 1933

First mention of the Nazis.
 Link tweeted by Jon Ostrower.

Time Line

Nov. 22, 1922 | The New York Times writes that Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda is just a temporary gimmick to get attention.

Mar. 4, 1933 | FDR is inaugurated for the first time in USA.

Mar. 5, 1933 | Adolf Hitler votes in his last contested election.

WW2 | 5. Dutch Resistance Groups (Updated Mar 16, 2017)

Charles Boissevain at the graves of our 
cousins Gi, Janka and Louis Boissevain. 
Note Dutch flag, belltower. Photo: JT Marlin.

Feb. 17, 2015—On Sunday, Feb. 15, I visited the Eerebegraafplaats—the Honorary Cemetery high on the dunes in Bloemendaal near Zandvoort on the North Sea—with Charles Boissevain.

We went to the Eerebegraafplaats 

 Plot 33, where three of our cousins—Gi, Janka and Louis Boissevain—are buried.

Charles and I have two great-grandparents in common - Charles and Emily Boissevain. We also share a keen interest in the Dutch Resistance to the Nazi Occupation.

The Honorary Cemetery

The Eerebegraafplaats Cemetery honors those who died fighting the Nazis in the Dutch Resistance. During the summer after the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945 from the Nazis, the bodies of those who had been shot on the dunes were exhumed.

The general sign at the cemetery.
 Photo by JTMarlin.

The mood of Holland was exuberant because the unprecedented evils committed in the country under Hitler were ended.

But families continued to get bad news about relatives who had been missing and were now known to be dead. During the war years it was known that the Nazi authorities executed without trial many Dutch patriots in the dunes west of Haarlem called Overveen, Bloemendaal. Many men and one woman were executed. The exact number will never be known–who they all were and what happened to their bodies.

Eerebegraafplaats, Feb. 15, 2015. Graves
of Louis, Gi and Janka Boissevain. Behind
 me, the grave of Walraven van Hall
 in Plot 35. Photo by Charles Boissevain.

In the summer of 1945, in the dunes and elsewhere, the remains of more than 100 Resistance fighters were found. Others were found in Amsterdam, 422 in all.

Some of the executed fighters were reburied by their families in graves of the families'  choosing. But the majority–372 victims–were given their own graves in the dunes.

The gravesite is managed by "The Eerebegraafplaats Bloemendaal" foundation which was established in May 1946. On the website is information about all the people buried at the site. On the site itself is a dedicatory text and a listing of the graves.

Hannie Schaft

One woman is buried here, Hannie Schaft. She was the first of those executed to be buried in the Eerebegraafplaats when it was opened.

She and her Resistance co-workers blew up Wehrmacht trains and hid Jewish students. She was betrayed and shot in Overveen, Bloemendaal by two soldiers. The first one only wounded her and she told him: "I'm a better shot than you are." The second soldier was then more accurate.

She was the sole woman out of the 422 Resistance fighters whose bodies were found in the dunes at Bloemendaal after the war. She was awarded the Resistance Cross and her picture has been on an East German stamp.

Background on the Dutch Resistance

Resistance newspapers flourished,
though strictly banned by the Nazis.

The Dutch Resistance was most active and successful in transporting and hiding people who were hunted by the Nazis, and in disseminating news.

The central problem of the Resistance was how to

• Maintain an organization, while
• Keeping secrets from the Nazis.

The best way to control information - as I discovered was the practice when I worked many years ago with a Top Secret clearance - was by limiting distribution of information to those who absolutely positively had to know.

I once asked someone in the NYPD about what a "perfect crime" would look like, and he answered quickly: "A perfect crime does not require an assistant." No one else to turn you in. The only possible exception he would allow to know about your crime would be your mother. For everyone's protection, Resistance groups tried not to meet in very large numbers and when they met everyone had a nickname.

Individuals working in the Resistance were told only what they needed to know. In a bureaucracy the words were, when I handled such papers, "Limited Distribution" or LIM DIS. Ian Fleming used the term as a title for one of his James Bond stories, "Your Eyes Only".

The Resistance helped move and hide Jews and other individuals targeted by the Nazis, such as pilots from the Allied Bomber Command who bailed out over the Netherlands. It also distributed forbidden underground newspapers, forged and distributed documents, obtained money to support their efforts, and in some groups fought back against the Nazis through sabotage and assassination.

The Occupation Government

After the Queen and top government officials escaped to Britain and capitulated on May 15, Hitler installed as his personal governor in Holland, the Reichskommissar, an Austrian–Arthur Seyss-Inquart.

An early supporter of the Austrian-German Anschluss, Seyss-Inquart actively supported the Gestapo's hunting down Resistance men and women. The following edited excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the nature of the Gestapo:

The Gestapo–Geheime Staatspolizei (“Secret State Police”)–were the original political police of Nazi Germany. The Gestapo ruthlessly eliminated opposition to the Nazis within Germany and its occupied territories and was responsible for the roundup of Jews throughout Europe for deportation to extermination camps. When the Nazis came to power in 1933: 

• Hermann Göring, then Prussian minister of the interior, detached the political and espionage units from the regular Prussian police, filled their ranks with thousands of Nazis, and, on April 26, 1933, reorganized them under his personal command as the Gestapo. 

• Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, together with his aide Reinhard Heydrich, similarly reorganized the police of Bavaria and the remaining German states. 

• In 1934, Himmler was given command over Göring's Gestapo. In 1936 he was  made German chief of police. ...

• In 1936 the Gestapo—led by Himmler subordinate Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller—was joined with the Kriminalpolizei ("Criminal Police”) under the umbrella of a new organization, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo; “Security Police”). 

• Under a 1939 SS reorganization, the Sipo was joined with the Sicherheitsdienst (“Security Service”), an SS intelligence department, to form the Reichs sicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Central Office”) under Heydrich. Although the Sipo was phased out, people still used the name.

The Gestapo and its allied police operated without civil restraints. They had the authority of “preventative arrest,” and its actions were not subject to judicial appeal. Thousands of leftists, intellectuals, Jews, trade unionists, political clergy, and homosexuals disappeared into concentration camps after being arrested by the Gestapo. 

The political section could order prisoners to be murdered, tortured, or released. Together with the SS, an race-based elite control group, the Gestapo managed the treatment of what the Nazis considered “inferior races,” such as Jews and Roma (Gypsies). 

During World War II the Gestapo suppressed partisan activities in the occupied territories and carried out reprisals against civilians. Bureau IV B4 of the Gestapo, under Adolf Eichmann, organized the deportation of millions of Jews from other occupied countries to the extermination camps in Poland.

It was said at his trial that Seyss-Inquart approved the execution of at least 800 Dutch nationals, including 117 people in a reprisal for the killing of SS Lt. Gen. and Hanns Rauter, police leader.

The Dutch Resistance was organized around individuals who took huge risks to serve as the hub of the groups they led. The more public they were and the more violent they were, the earlier they were infiltrated and wiped out by the Occupation authorities.

Earliest Resistance - Communist Partisans - CPN and RSAP

Early organized resistance to Hitler in Holland came from two Communist groups fiercely opposed to Hitler. They appear to have followed the lead of authorities in Moscow, and so long as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in place, they did not mobilize. A recent U.S. official history says the Communist groups waited to move into action when Hitler sent three million German troops into Russia on January 22, 1941.

• The CPN (Communist Party of the Netherlands). On May 15, 1940, the day after the Dutch capitulated following the bombing blitz on Rotterdam, the CPN met to organize its resistance to the Nazi occupiers. Bernardus Yzerdraat printed flyers that protested the occupation and called for resistance. He started building an organization called De Geuzen, "The Beggars", named after a Dutch group that rebelled against Spanish occupation in the 16th century. But the group was quickly suppressed by the SS, which ferreted out and executed some 2,000 communists by firing squads, in torture rooms or in concentration camps.

• The RSAP (Revolutionary Socialist Worker's Party) was led by Henk Sneevliet, a Communist resistance fighter who came out of the trade-union movement and Dutch politics. He was known all his life as "Maring". He had the foresight to disband the RSAP on May 14, 1940 after the Nazi invasion of Holland, knowing that they would suppress his organization. Sneevliet became an onderduiker, first hiding and then emerging as an active Resistance fighter. He was allied with his union colleagues, the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front. He and his wife were arrested two years later in their hiding place and he was shot with seven other RSAP workers on April 13, 1942 at Leusderheide. He was awarded the Resistance Cross (information from the award site, translated from the Dutch).

The Communist groups' initiatives were very effective but were aggressively countered by the German SS and did not survive past 1942, when another group, the RVV, discussed below, became active.

The Main Resistance Organizations - LO, LKP, OD and RVV

As of mid-1944, four major Resistance organizations did the work of matching refugees and onderduikers with transportation and homes in which to hide, and providing backup in the form of intelligence and forged documents. Individual families  hiding onderduikers often did not know how they were being helped. Communication was necessarily tightly controlled, and networks operated independently of these four main organizations:

• The LO,  for Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers, the National Organization for Help to People in Hiding. It was the most successful underground organization in Europe, created in 1942 by (1) Mrs. Helena Rietberg Kuipers, referred to as Tante Riek and (2) Frits Slomp, known as Frits de Zwerver. The LO looked after about 275,000 people as of July 1944 — i.e., about 2.5 percent of all Dutch residents. The group was outlawed on pain of immediate execution or deportation to the death camps. Of the 13,000 participants in the LO, 1,104 were executed on discovery or died later in the camps.
• The LKP (Knuckle Gang) for Landelijke Knokploeg, literally "country thugs", but commonly translated as the National Assault Group, also called the KP or "the Knuckle Gang". Its 750 members (as of the summer of 1944) engaged in sabotage and assassinations of the Nazi occupiers or Dutch collaborators. The LKP provided ration cards to the LO through raids on police stations and other government offices — the raids both obtained materials for forgery and destroyed  records of Jews and other Nazi targets. In 1943, Hilbert (Arie) van Dijk, Jacques (Louis) van der Horst and Leendert (Bertus) Valstar put together local Assault Groups within the LKP that picked up on the aggressive practices of the shorter-lived CS6. The LKP grew in the summer of 1944 and there were 2,777 documented members in September 1944; of them, 514 died and only one of the top LKP members survived, Liepke (Bob) Scheepstra.
• The OD (Orde Dienst, Order of Service) prepared for the return of the exiled Dutch government and the GDN (Dutch Secret Service), OD's intelligence group. This group is frequently referenced in Herman Friedhoff's memoirs, Requiem for the Resistance (Bloomsbury, 1988).
• The RVV (Raad van Verzet, or Council of Resistance) was a partisan group pursuing sabotage, assassinations, and hiding of people wanted by the Nazis. Mrs. Rietberg Helena Kuipers was a member as well as a founder of the LO. She  was betrayed and died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Although many members of the RVV were Communists, its most famous member was not. She joined the RVV because it was the most active group she could find. Her name was Johanna (Hannie) Schaft, about whom a movie was made, The Girl with the Red Hair. 

Hiding and Transporting Jews and Others Wanted by the Nazis

Perhaps the most effective activity of the Resistance in Holland was hiding and transporting Jews, bailed-out pilots and other people sought by the SS, especially:

• German (and Austrian) Jews who had fled to the Netherlands before 1940 and knew right away what evil to expect from Hitler's occupation. They immediately went into hiding. Anne Frank's father was one of these - he left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, only to be trapped in Holland. Bert Jan Flim says that of the 25,000 Jews who went into hiding, 18,000 survived the war. 
• Dutch Jews who survived the early roundups, which were effective because Dutch taxes were allocated by religion. Of the 107,000 Jews who were deported by the Nazis, mostly to concentration camps, only 5,000 survived the war. More than half of the deportations occurred during the 10 months July 1942-April 1943. In May 1943, 33,000 Jews remained in Amsterdam, which was the primary concentration. Of them, 8,000 were protected by having a non-Jewish spouse - by and large, the Nazis did not deport Jews married to Christians.
• British soldiers who could not get back to France to the retreat from Dunkirk, and hid with farmers in Holland. 
• French and other escaped prisoners of war who in the winter of 1940/1941 passed through the Netherlands. One single family in Oldenzaal helped 200 men. In total about 4,000 ex-POWs - mainly French, some Belgian, Polish, Russian and Czech - were aided on their way south in the province of Limburg.

Assassination of Key Collaborator–CS6 (Chapter 6)

The bravest (some even say "reckless") single organization, which attracted top-level attention from the Nazi occupiers, may have been CS6, which stands for Corellistreet No. 6 in Amsterdam. It was wiped out before 1944, to be continued by the LKP or KP.

According to official Dutch war historian Dr. Louis ("Loe") de Jong (1914-2005), CS6 was the deadliest of the Resistance groups in killing individual targets, successfully killing 20 traitors or Nazis they identified. It was started in 1940 by Gideon ("Gi") and Jan Karel ("Janka") Boissevain, two sons of Jan ("Canada") Boissevain, both of whom are in the List of the Fallen in the Resistance (2010). CS6 grew quickly to 40 members and involved Dutch communist surgeon Dr. Gerrit Kastein. They collected military information, sabotaged German machines, and targeted top Dutch collaborators and traitors.

They successfully killed (1) Dutch General Seyffardt, whom the Germans put at the head of the Dutch SS-legion; (2) Assistant Minister Reydon; and (3) several police chiefs. CS6 played a crucial role in the rescue of Jews, but failed to carry out a plan to kill the best-known Dutch traitor, Nazi Party leader Anton Mussert.

Their activities prompted the 1943 "Silbertanne" covert murder reprisals by the SS, after CS6 was betrayed by a collaborating Dutch spy, Anton van der Waals. Some of their activities are described by Loe de Jong in Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (see Vol. 6, pages 158, 159, 546, and Vol. 7, pages 924 and 933). In 1943, many members of the group were arrested after betrayal. Jan "Canada" Boissevain (1894-1945) died in Buchenwald (NP 55) and his sons Jan Karel (Janka) Boissevain (1920-1943, NP 56) and Gideon Willem (Gi) Boissevain (1921-1943, NP 56) were shot in the dunes of Overveen with 12 others, including their cousin Louis Daniel Boissevain   (1922-1943, NP 128), who was an active member of CS6. Many other members of CS6 died. A full list is provided in the chapter on CS6.

Financing the Resistance–The NSF (Chapter 9)

The NSF, for Nationale Steun Fonds (National Support Fund), was a crucial group that financed all the others. It received some money from Queen Wilhelmina's government in exile to fund operations of the LO and KP, and then through some brilliant schemes it generated other money. The financial group was run by Walraven ("Wally") van Hall. It paid money throughout the war to all families in need, including relatives of sailors and people in hiding. The NSF supported a variety of other resistance groups and underground papers like Trouw, Het Parool and Vrij Nederland, which were distributed by the other groups. Wally set up some large-scale scams never discovered by the Nazis, involving the Netherlands national bank and the tax service. Because of Wally, the Dutch Resistance as a whole was never short of money. He is one of the few people with a place both in the Memorial Cemetery at Bloemendaal and on the Yad Vashem's List of the Righteous.

Sources for this post include:

Bentley, Stewart, CIA historian.
de Jong, Loe, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, 14-volume history of World War II in Holland. A complete copy is on the shelf on the ground floor of the Amsterdam Stadsarchief (Archives) on Vijzelstraat between the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht.
The Eerebegraafplaats Bloemendaal Stichting web site.

Related posts

The above post is a draft chapter of a book I am writing: The Boissevain Family and the Dutch Resistance, 1940-45. 

WW2 | The Book Thief–#1 Book - Courage in a German Village

In WW2, People Fell Like Dominoes.

This afternoon, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps by Soviet troops, Alice and I participated in a Book Discussion Group about The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

The book, written in 2005, has a rating of about 4.4 out of 5 (ratings are updated every 5 minutes) on Goodreads.com and ranks as the #1 book for Young Adults on World War II.  The Diary of Ann Frank ranks #2). My copy of The Book Thief was from its 34th printing.

Like other books among the top ten on this list, The Book Thief has a female heroine, is based in a small community (a fictional village outside of Munich), and brings World War II down to a manageable scale. Like many YA books, it is a general bestseller, not just for the YA market.

In my review of the discussion, I start with the general themes and then drill down to the individual characters in the book.

Courage. All of us liked the stories showing the courage shown by the heroine, a 13-year-old German girl, Liesel Meminger, and her closest friends. The discussion group spent some time asking whether today's generation would show such courage or be willing to make sacrifices of the kind that people made in World War II. Some said no. But one of us pointed out that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks she saw widespread signs of selflessness - driving up the East Coast the week of September 11, she found flags flying at half mast in every little town, out of respect for the dead at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. "Strangers were hugging each other in the street." "You don't know what people are made of until they are faced with the crisis." "Many people in World War II were reluctant heroes. Can you say no when the only person between someone else and certain death is you?"

How Could a Man Like Hitler Come to Power in an Educated Democracy? The group talked about how an evil, crazy man like Hitler could ever be elected in a democracy and command such an educated and traditionally tolerant country as Germany. I pointed out the special economic conditions in the years that Hitler came to power. Germany was devastated after World War I, and the Versailles Treaty imposed onerous reparations. Even so, the Nazis only got 2 percent of the vote in 1928. The following year the Crash of 1929 called into question of the reliability of democratic capitalism and made alternatives - Communism or Nazism - look like possible solutions. The Nazi Party got 18 percent of the vote in 1930 and twice that in 1932. When Paul von Hindenburg was reelected President in 1932, he invited Hitler (whom he despised) to help him form a government, and he made Hitler Chancellor as of January 1933. Within a few months von Hindenburg agreed to the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler and his Cabinet to pass laws. One day before von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler went a step further (in violation of the Enabling Act) and dissolved the Office of the President, making himself the Führer. Democracy in Germany was then kaput.

How Could So Many Germans Become Nazis?  Someone brought up the blue-eyed vs. brown-eyed experiment that Jane Elliott tried in her third-grade class starting the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The exercise showed how powerful and destructive it was to divide people up according to criteria that they could not control, and make some people inferior. It turns out to be  easy for those on the favored side to accept their privileged position. Once the rules are in place, it is hard for the unfavored group to fight their inferior status.

The Importance of Meaning to Life Beyond Work. A member of the group brought up the work of Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian Jewish doctor who had been involved in suicide-prevention work in Vienna before WW2 and the Holocaust. He spent much of the war in concentration camps and sought to find a common denominator to explain what kept some people in the camps alive longer than others. My mother used to tell me, based on stories from her relatives during and after the war, that those more likely to survive were people with a religion. Frankl generalized that to people who had meaning in their lives. In a beautiful piece of writing, he describes how he and another prisoner marching miles in the freezing cold held on to thoughts about their wives.

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love.

After the war, Frankl coined the term "Sunday Neurosis" to describe people who suffer from the illness of having only one purpose in life, their job, arbeit.

The Heroine, Liesel. The discussion group focused on Liesel Meminger's determination to read, the importance to her of words, and the fact that she never would kiss the boy she loved. She is reluctant to put her love in words or express her feelings, except her passion to understand words.  She shows great love and loyalty for her brother who dies, her foster father, the Jewish man (Max) they hide from the Nazis, and her best friend, Rudy. She is fearless when confronted with bullying, and stands up to a bigger boy in a famous fist fight. Our group liked the fact that the heroine was a girl of 13-14, and was German. As one person said, "it shows that all Germans were not bad people".  Ironically, Liesel is obsessed with books but won't accept a book as a gift. She starts as a book thief when her brother dies and she steals The Grave Digger’s Handbook from the cemetery as a remembrance of her younger brother, who died - it was her only souvenir of his burial, of him, the only thing she could pick up as she was dragged away. Ironically, she stole something she couldn’t use, because she couldn’t read. Also, she usually wants to do the right thing, but the only way she wants to acquire new books is to steal them.

The Village. The group liked the fact that the story was told from the perspective of a small village, Molching, with its neighborhoods (Himmel Street was not the best part of town) and characters - the Nazi baker, the Hitler Youth enthusiasts, the Mayor and his wife. Interestingly, although the book is informed by strong religious allegories, there is no rabbi or priest.  At one point Jews march in a parade reminiscent of a Passion Play. Someone tries to help and a Nazi soldier responds by beating both the Jewish prisoner and the villager who shows compassion, in a scene that for me echoes Veronica's intervention in the Way of the Cross, or that of Simon of Cyrene, except that Simon was actually recruited by a  Roman soldier either as an act of mercy or to speed things up.

Death, The Narrator. The group liked the narration by Death, who comes across as a busy man at first and starts in by complaining about the exhaustion of his job in World War II, with so many souls to carry away. The narrator seems bored by most of the souls, and only a few get his attention; Liesel is one of the ones he finds most memorable. He sums up individual lives, even comments on the entire human race. Death states, “I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both” (p. 491). Death is constantly admiring colors in the sky.

The Hubermanns.  Liesel's foster parents (misidentified by one commentator as adoptive parents, but they were paid by the state to take Liesel in) are in one way opposites. Rosa has a loud mouth and uses strong words, but the subtext can be kindly. When Rosa comes to Liesel's school she shouts to hide her true message. That scene is deeply moving. Hans Hubermann is more passive. But both are loving - Rosa, through her actions, and Hans though his decency, patience, empathy and generosity. Ironically, Hans’s life is saved first by his handwriting (paralleling Liesel’s inability to read), by a broken leg, and by someone pre-empting his seat. Hans is a house painter, but the only colors in use in the war are black (for the blackout blinds) and white (for Max to paint over pages of Mein Kampf). When Hans first finds The Grave Digger's Handbook he immediately understands why it means so much to Liesel, which shows his compassion for her own loss.

Max Vandenburg. Max is the son of a man that Hans Hubermann served with in the German military in World War I, Erik Vandenburg. Hans had never before met the son, but told Max's father that he would be available if ever needed, and Max was given that information by his father. Max was desperate because under the Nazi regime he was being hunted as a Jew. He was dependent on the Hubermanns for his life, his food, his shelter. He has a loving nature and a poetic spirit, and he is full of gratitude for being protected. But he feels he is a burden and is apologetic about it. Mein Kampf saves Max’s life and enables him to write.

Rudy Steiner.  Rudy, Liesel's love interest, is reckless, competitive, passionate and a good friend. The final scene where Liesel kisses him in death the author says was the hardest for him to write.

Mrs. Hermann. The Mayor's wife is desperate over the loss of her son, and shows compassion for Liesel.

The Book Thief costs $13 in hardcover and $8 in paperback, but you don't need to steal it because many used copies are available for under $2.

November 9 - Kristallnacht, the Public Start of Hitler's Holocaust

The morning after Kristallnacht... Hitler's murderous
Holocaust was now without fear and in full view.

Today is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Crystal-night, "the night of broken glass"). In 1938 the Nazis coordinated an attack throughout Germany on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues - as Garrison Keillor has reminded us in The Writer's Almanac.

My brother Randal Marlin has just issued a second edition of his book on Propaganda, and I was interested to see how the Kristallnacht attacks as outlined by Keillor follow the Propaganda playbook.

1. The attacks were inspired by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris. When Hitler heard the news, he decided to use the event to stage a mass uprising in response. (Playbook: Milk events for propaganda purposes.)

2. He and Joseph Goebbels contacted storm troopers throughout Germany and told them to attack Jewish buildings, making the attacks look like spontaneous demonstrations. (Playbook: Stir up public resentment, or fake it.)

3. The police were told not to interfere with the demonstrators, but instead to arrest the Jewish victims! (Playbook: Accuse the victims.)

4. Similarly, firefighters were told only to put out fires in any adjacent non-Jewish properties. (Playbook: Do not protect the victims.)

Everyone cooperated. In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Many of the attackers were neighbors of the victims.

To pile injury on injury:

1. The Nazis confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to the Jews who lost their property.

2. They imposed a huge collective fine on the Jewish community for the crime of having incited the violence by the murder of the diplomat.

3. They barred Jews from schools and most public places, and forced them to adhere to new curfews.

4. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht was the opening shot of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis killed people secretly. Afterwards, the Nazis persecuted and killed Jews openly, because the propaganda ensured that public opinion would be against anyone who tried to stop them. I contacted my brother for his views on Kristallnacht. He said:

What a terrifying time it must have been to be Jew at that time, recognizing that you had no protection from lawless violence. What needs attention is the original statement of Nazi party principles. They made it quite clear that Jews were not citizens of Germany and were without civic standing regarding voting and other civic rights that we today take for granted. That was back in the early 1920s. The moral for us today is to wake up and see what is happening with respect to erosion of the principle of rule of law, and not to allow it to decay any further.

To document what my brother says about the Nazi party origins, I found a timeline used in schools for teaching about the Holocaust. It shows that the Nazi principles were developed in 1923-25.

• In 1923, the Nazis attempted to take over Munich and failed. In a 24-day trial, Hitler gained the sympathy of the judges and some of the public, and his fellow Nazis were given a light sentence. At this point, the Nazis were a small group on trial, and no one feared them. In prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, which laid out the Nazi principles of German pride, and enmity to Jews and Bolsheviks in Germany and worldwide.
• In 1925, Hitler's book was published after he emerged from prison and started reconstituting the Nazi party under his sole leadership.
• In 1928, Hitler's party got 2.6 percent of the vote. 
• In 1929, the worldwide crash occurred, followed by the Great Depression. This threw the German government into confusion and provided an opportunity for Hitler to exploit public distress. 
• In 1930 Hitler's support leaped to 18 percent of the vote.
• In 1932, Hitler got 37 percent. 
• In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg -- reelected the previous year, but aging and at his wit's end -- appointed Hitler as Chancellor. The Nazis moved in, establishing a police state, step by step. Albert Einstein was in USA, decided not to return to Germany after his German residences were ransacked. 
• In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria without bloodshed. 
• In October 1938, having threatened Neville Chamberlain's Britain with war, the Western powers looked away as Germany marched into the Sudetenland and carved up Czechoslovakia.
• In November, convinced by now that Western governments were paper tigers, Hitler initiated the Holocaust with Kristallnacht.