How Too Few Chairs In Study Hall Frustrate WWII Trauma Processing
by Toon Janssen,
DWT Amsterdam correspondent
If anyone thinks that during the Second World War everyone in the Netherlands was against the German occupier, then that person is very much wrong. It is generally believed that only between 30,000 and 45,000 people were part of coordinated resistance, divided over multiple operating cells. According to sources, that is only half a percent of an average 9 million population over 5 years of war. Among them were many communists, artists and Jews. Many of them did not live to tell, because they were executed by Nazis. The number of individually operating participants in resistance, including people in hiding and their helpers was bigger however, an estimated 350,000. People also showed their dissatisfaction by striking, by using false distribution coupons or doing courier work, to mention some minor jobs. The vast majority of the population however, demonstrated a sense of powerlessness and resignation, embedded in a mentality of loyalty and adaptation to the oppressor. The Nazis characterized Dutchmen as Germanic peers and prepared them for national socialist ideology and inclusion into a Greater-German Empire. According to reports, the resigned attitude contrasted sharply with the post-war pretension of many who claimed there were heroes in wartime. However again, relatively few people, over the entire spectrum, actively resisted.
Much is known about some fighters and their actions, covered in historiography, publications and film adaptations. It was mainly men however, who sabotaged infrastructure, cut telephone lines, blew up buildings, prisons and railways, and made areas unusable by flooding them. Many did not survive, were forgotten or honored posthumously. Gerrit van der Veen (1902-1944, sculptor) is perhaps one of the greatest Amsterdam heroes. He and his group committed a spectacular attack on the population register, that way blocking detection of Jews. But it was not exclusively men who were involved in resistance. In The Girl with the Red Hair by author Theun de Vries (1956), as well as in many other books, documentaries and films, Jannetje Johanna Schaft (1920-1945) has been widely admired. Let me try to put her on a pedestal once more (as Howie did half a dozen years ago). You may assume I have a reason for doing this.
Jannetje Johanna, nickname Jopie, was born the second daughter of Aafke Vrijer and Pieter Schaft. Her mother came from a Mennonite socialist preacher’s family. Her father, teacher at a governmental training college, felt strongly about the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. SDAP in those days was strongly committed to social legislation, universal suffrage, state pension and the like. Indeed, there were many conversations going on in the Schaft house about socialism and the rise of broad workers’ movements, as well as about the power of striking and women’s rights rallies. Jopie also enjoyed reading leading Russian writers like Sjolochow, Gladkow and Fadejew. Their books opened her eyes for the ‘nature of the Russian soul’. She also read pamphlets written by Marx and Lenin, about collective state farms, five-year plans, proletariat elevation and reification of society. But neither Marxism nor Communism was her priority. It was sympathy for the inhabitants of Leningrad and Stalingrad, who defended their cities against the fascist Nazi monster, that had inspired her first and foremost. While she experienced it as unbearable fascism also threatened to crush the Netherlands, dismantling Nazism became her most urgent mission.
In 1938 Jopie finished HBS-B, the beta department of secondary education, and then studied international law at Amsterdam University. During her studies she shared an apartment with two Jewish fellow students, Philine Polak and Sonja Frenk, who became her closest friends. It will not come as a surprise to you that she felt personally and strongly affected by antisemitism and persecution of Jews, of whom there were almost 80,000 living in Amsterdam in the 1940s. After Schaft, like many other students, refused to sign a German imposed ‘declaration of loyalty,’ to refrain from any action directed against German Empire, Jopie then quit her law studies and went back to live with her parents. In her eyes there was ‘other work’ that urgently needed to be done. She took Philine and Sonja with her and lodged them in hiding.
Jopie decided to participate in resistance, often on personal behalf or within the framework of the small cell near her home, and provided hiding places, stole food rations and supplied identity cards as a start. Eventually by the end of April 1943, she joined the Council of Resistance (RVV), an umbrella organization with a strong social ideology, to bundle the existing tangle of underground groups. Her pseudonym became Hannie, alias het meisje met het rode haar (the girl with the red hair). After instructions on weapons and a shooting lesson, she was ready for her first serious assignment. She was ordered to shoot a commando of the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD, security service) with a FN 9mm gun, a ‘wayward little beast’ manufactured by Belgian Fabrique National. The moment she pulled the trigger, at the agreed time and full of adrenaline, instead of a shot, there was a click… It turned out there were no bullets in the gun.
But then the SD commander came forward and introduced himself as Frans van der Wiel, the highest secret RVV commander. He declared Hannie had passed the ultimate test of competence and reliability. Even though she was furious about the ‘incident’, from then on the real work lay ahead and numerous executions followed. Together with Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, both also RVV fighters, she committed various attacks on Germans, collaborators and traitors.
On June 21, 1944 for example, she committed an attack on a ‘bad’ Dutch police commissioner who collaborated. Her resistance partner Jan Bonekamp, who she shared a romantic relationship with and was hiding, was fatally injured. On March 15, 1945, to mention another killing she was involved in, Hannie and Truus carried out an attack on Ko Langendijk. This hairdresser from fishing town IJmuiden, strategically located on the 1700 mile Atlantic Wall, had started working for the SD. They didn’t succeed in killing him but did injurehim. He survived the war and then, in 1948, testified for the benefit of his girlfriend Willy van der Meijden, who still was accused of war betrayal and had identified Hannie as Langendijk’s attacker on March 15.
On March 21, 1945 Schaft was arrested at a roadblock with Illegal magazines and a weapon in her bicycle bags. On the photo of her false ID she had her hair dyed black and wore window glass glasses. She was taken to the police station and questioned. Ko Langendijk, who had escaped execution just a few days before, then eventually recognized her as his attacker: “Sie ist die Hannie, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, das Madchen mit den roten Haaren!”
Despite an agreement between Nazis and Domestic Armed Forces, agreed upon as the end of the war drew closer, not to kill any women, Hannie was shot only three weeks before liberation. Thereafter her body was dumped in a mass grave in the dunes. Once the war finally ended she was reburied in the Honorary Cemetery of Bloemendaal town. Members of the royal family were present on that occasion.
Because Hannie Schaft was used as an icon of resistance by Dutch communists directly after the war, her name lost its luster for many other Dutch people, especially as the Cold War divided Europe and the Russian Bear showed its teeth more clearly. Gradually, to put it into words, time turned against her. In 1951 the government even went so far as to deploy police and army to make the annual commemoration of her reburial impossible. Supporters of Hannie however, disagreed and argued she fought against fascism, Nazism and hatred of Jews first and foremost. They also argued she was worried ‘the old clique’, that was in power before the war in the Netherlands, would simply return. However, after the Cold War waned and with its wake extreme communist hate as well, Schaft was rehabilitated with a bronze statue titled Vrouw van Verzet (woman of resistance) by Queen Juliana.
The tide had clearly turned, and as more and more information about her surfaced she received hero status for many. The icon qualification however, was somewhat turned down by Freddie Oversteegen, Hannie’s resistance partner mentioned above, in a post-war interview: “I am not a hero, my sister was not a hero, and Jopie neither. We did what we had to do because Nazis killed good people.” When asked how many people she actually shot, she answered: “You shouldn’t ask soldiers for something like that.”
More than 70 years after the war, there are still people struggling with the horrors at that time. This applies not only to survivors but also to their children and grandchildren, to whom the trauma was transferred. For many it was hard to realize Dutch resistance was quite disappointing in size, fragmented and poorly coordinated, to put it mildly. I hope to have informed you, about this here above. Of course there was resistance, and certainly life-threatening, with heroes that acquired cult status years after, but there were also bad guys.
There were more than 100,000 registered National Socialist Party members; more than 25,000 Dutchmen participated on a voluntary base in battles on the Eastern Front and in the Baltics; assistance was provided to the enemy on a large scale, linked to undermining Dutch government in exile (London); many contributed to prosecution of Jews; some betrayed people in hiding or resistance, for money; the black market flourished and food was traded for sky-high prizes, to the supplier’s benefit; some raided Jewish homes and stole household goods which were in great demand at the time. In short, in addition to Dutchmen who resisted, in addition to ‘neutral’ people who just passively let everything happen and adapted German authority, there were too many nationals who were plainly on the wrong side. I would like to provide you with further information about these ’wrong people,’ foute Nederlanders, as the Dutch say.
Since 1995 an important law is enshrined in the Dutch Constitution, which regulates the management and access of government archives, the Archiefwet. There it says the government is obliged to make and keep its archives sustainable and accessible. In the context of this DWT post Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (CABR) is important, since after German retreat research was done into detained and alleged collaboration, culminating in numerous criminal prosecutions. Although not everyone was brought to trial, convicted or even rightly accused, still as many as 425,000 people were investigated. They had their data documented and saved in CABR. Thirty-two million pages, covered in documents over more than 500,000 files, were processed. Documents full of convictions, incriminating witness statements, diaries, medical records, information about faith and political views, and the like.
According to Archiefwet, after 75 years retention obligation had passed, CABR was bound to open its records to the public recently. In anticipation of this, from 2022 onwards, CABR began converting data to digital formats. Of the thirty-two million pages, eight million have now been scanned. It is expected the archive will be completely digitized within two years.
The idea behind digitization, in addition to efficiency reasons, was the urge to make data easily accessible on the internet for all nationals, and contribute that way to public war trauma processing, just from behind one’s own laptop or computer. The idea was also that providing data to researchers, relatives and victims, with context and nuance provided by the files, might break down black white thinking in good or evil only.
An enormous wealth of data was to be released about perpetrators and suspects; about raiders, looters and Jew hunters, both large and small ones; about followers or opportunists; and about victims or selfless care providers as well. Anybody was now supposed to be able to use CABR the easy way. For example, with just a few mouse clicks grandpa’s war past, or data about NSB members and traitors, or about anyone who had appeared before judge, would show up. Jewish relatives hoped to finally find out for themselves how their family members had fallen into the hands of Nazis. Offspring of traitors, who were suspected or not, would from now be able to trace their family history. However, the internet access that was supposed to happen as of late January 2 did not happen, being postponed indefinitely by ministerial decision under another law in the Dutch Constitution, the Privacy Law.
The original plan was adjusted after serious warnings by Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, supervising personal data, who worried about law violation and its juridical consequences. They claimed online access to be “too sensitive matter, since the archive contains criminal personal data about people who are still alive, creating a risk and dilemma for which there is as yet no solution.” In the Dutch media it was suggested that difficulties with descendants of foute Nederlanders were expected to show up in particular. It was proven, journalists claimed, that in some cases the accusations or suspicions turned out to be unjustified or false. In some other cases Jews, who testified in collaboration cases, were accidentally registered as suspects. Your DWT correspondent heard about a war-time Jewish labor striker, gassed in Auschwitz, who ended up in a file. Meyer Hamel, national news reported, who together with his wife and daughter was murdered in Auschwitz, also was recorded in the register as ‘investigated for collaboration.’ There were more cases in which no conviction took place because charges turned out to be faked.
Politicians could no longer stand aside; action was inevitable. Current and responsible Minister Eppo Bruins decided to postpone complete disclosure and issued ‘temporary arrangements.’ He came up with an interim solution that entailed CABR to be public to a limited extent only, provisionally till January 1, 2026. “What should happen next still needs to be worked on. Despite ‘suggestive associations’ it will not be locked for ever,” according to Bruins. Only relatives and researchers were now allowed to consult the files, with permission on ‘valid grounds.’ Once that was settled they were then obliged to make an appointment for access to a specific study hall of The Hague’s CABR ‘bastion.’ There, taking notes with a pencil was allowed, photography or photo copying not.
The interim solution also entailed a so-called Namenregister, on website Oorlog voor de Rechter, an online record of exclusively names of deceased Dutch people who collaborated or presumably did so. Anyone can now fill in the name of a suspect there, make a search and click. An overview of persons will then appear on which can be searched further. Inventory numbers that show up thereafter can be reserved for study hall. Final permission for record access is granted by a council that controls ‘ethics.’
Let us now focus once more on resistance fighter Jannetje Johanna Schaft. When we enter her name in the search engine of Namenregister then ‘no persons found’ shows up. This doesn’t come as surprise of course, since she passed away, had never been suspected and had no reports. It becomes different however, when we search for names of suspects she had to deal with in wartime and passed away. Let’s put it to a test: what shows up when we search for Maarten Kuiper or Matthias Schmitz?
The names of German SD officer Mathias Schmitz and Dutch NSB and SS member Maarten Kuiper, both involved in Hannie Schaft’s fusillade in the dunes April 17, 1945, are indeed present in the register. The match brought up the inventory number, and that led to investigators finding evidence in CABR of interrogations that had been conducted. Loads of data were listed but some notes are striking here. According to Schmitz, who had priority to shoot first, his gun refused and “therefore I did not fatally shoot her.” Kuiper agreed, in his files, the other’s shot misfired, since “I heard the girl say ‘ouch’ and I observed she tried to look around. To end her life in the quickest possible way I then fired some shots from my MG rifle. She died immediately.” After war Kuiper was sentenced to death (1948).
Besides these two another SD officer, Willy Kluting, was present in the dunes April 17.
“I remember we thought it was strange a woman had to be killed. To the best of my knowledge this had never happened before,” he stated in 1948. Just after the war, Kuiper told him, he had found Hannie’s execution the toughest possible assignment ever. It will not come as a surprise Kluting’s name also showed up in Namenregister.
It quickly became clear that insufficient account has been taken into the enormous interest that was to be expected for the archive. On the first day alone Namenregister opened, there were as many as 389,000 visitors who succeeded finding out the presence of records there. CABR however, being far less accessible, is fully booked well into 2025. With accommodation for 108 study places in CABR study hall only, this doesn’t come as surprise. Although the number of seats has already been expanded to 140, of which only 61 are available for people permitted to view records, a sufficient provision is lacking. Processing the war trauma and healing ‘open wounds,’ the main goals of CABR digitization, is extremely frustrated that way.
Note from Howie:I watch Number 24 last night, about a similar story, but in occupied Norway. Here’s the trailer; it’s worth seeing the whole film