A downward view at the bookshop Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen on the Dominicanerkerkstraat, located in an 800-year-old former church
Dutch Remember the War Dead, Observe Liberation from the Nazis: ‘Evil Triumphed Here, at Least for a While’
By Jonathan Spira on 4 May 2024
Several minutes ago, at 6 p.m. Central European time, the people of the Netherlands observed the Dodenherdenking, the Remembrance of the Dead, with a two-minute period of silence.
“We remember all those – civilians and military – who were killed or murdered in the Kingdom of the Netherlands or anywhere else in the world; both during World War II and the colonial war in Indonesia, and in war situations and peacekeeping operations thereafter,” reads an official government memorandum issued in 2022 concerning the Dodenherdenking.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” is a quote so often misattributed to Edmund Burke that even U.S. President John F. Kennedy cited it in a speech.
While the quote is an oversimplification of what is required for evil to triumph, evil triumphed here, at least for a while, at the height of the Second World War after Germany began its occupation of the country on May 10, 1940, as part of Fall Gelb, also known as the Manstein Plan, the Wehrmacht’s plan for the Battle of France in 1940. The Dutch had managed under Pieter Cort van der Linden to maintain the country’s neutrality throughout the Great War and was issued a guarantee of neutrality by Hitler’s Germany in 1939.
The John Frostbrug, named after then Lt.-Colonel John Fros, the commander of the British forces during Operation Market Garden.a failed attempt in September 1944 to break through German lines in Arnhem
Nonetheless, Germany occupied the country starting in 1940, albeit with a so-called “velvet glove” or a “light touch,” but as the war wore on the velvet glove was taken off by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian politician who had served as Reichskanzler of that country starting just two days before the Anschluß and who rose in the position of Reichskommisar of the Netherlands.
But the Dutch people did not welcome their invaders with open arms. Active resistance, at first by a small minority of the population, grew to be carried out by close to a majority.
The Dutch reacted with the February strike, a nationwide protest against the deportations, unique in the history of Nazi-occupied Europe. Although the strike did not accomplish much – its leaders were executed – it was an initial setback for Seyss-Inquart, and others followed.
The first such commemoration were held locally in August of 1945 by the Commission for National Remembrance, an agency that traces its origins back to the Resistance. The first year after the end of hostilities the government wanted to combine remembrance and a celebration of the country’s liberation on May 5, but the commission resisted.
Instead, May 4 is Dodenherdenking and May 5 is Bevrijdingsdag, Liberation Day.
Bevrijdingsdag marks the end of the country’s occupation by National Socialist Germany during the Second World War, its liberation.
A schoepenrad, or water wheel, used for irritation purposes, in Arnhem
The Netherlands were liberated by Canadian forces, the British I Corps, the 1st Polish Armored Division, and American, Belgian, Dutch, and Czechoslovak troops, as well as the British Second Army and American and Polish airborne forces. On May 5, 1945, at the Hotel de Wereld in Wageningen, Canadian Corps commander Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes and Oberbefehlshaber Niederlande commander-in-chief Generaloberst Johannes Baskowitz reached an agreement on the capitulation of all German forces in the country. The capitulation document was signed the following day in the auditorium of the Wageningen University.
The government’s official ceremonies for Bevrijdingsdag have changed and evolved greatly over the years and for the past 60 years have taken place at the Dam, the popular name for Dam Square, which lies in the center of Amsterdam near the Koninklijk Paleis van Amsterdam, or Paleis op de Dam, and the Nationaal Monument op de Dam, the latter commemorating the casualties of the Second World War and subsequent conflicts.
This year the government was severely limiting attendance to the ceremony on the Dam in order to keep the event safe and ensure there were no anti-Israel or Gaza-related protests to take aware from the solemnity of the day. Typically, over 100,000 gather at 6 p.m. local time but this year, the number was limited to 10,000 and all had to register in advance and be subject to search.
Cannons in front of the historic medieval city wall in Maastricht
While the occupation had serious consequences for the Dutch people, those in immediate peril were the Jews within its borders. In 1942, the National Socialist regime converted the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a Dutch theater that in 1941 was deemed by the regime to be a Jewish theater, into a deportation center where Jewish families were rounded up and processed before being sent to concentration camps, from which few returned.
One notable exception was a group of 600 children. The Nazis found it difficult to control the children in the makeshift theater, so they housed them in a day-care center across the road that was shared with a teachers’ training college whose director was Johan Willem van Hulst, a highly devout man and a fierce opponent of the National Socialists, who would later receive the Yad Vashem distinction, Righteous Among the Nations, from the State of Israel.
Van Hulst antedated student registrations to keep them from conscription and worked with others in the resistance to stymie the Nazis at every possible opportunity.
Meanwhile, Henriëtte Pimentel, who was the director of the day-care center, worked with van Hulst and Walter Süskind, the manager of the Schouwburg, and Sieny Kattenburg of the daycare center’s secretariat, to move the children using lists of safe hours provided by the NV Group led by Joop Woortman, the Utrecht Children’s Committee, and the Amsterdam Students’ Group.
Hundreds of children were moved from the makeshift theater to the daycare center, and then spirited into the college, down a hidden alleyway, and to safe houses in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
