These survivors from Germany and the occupied territories had been shipped by railcars and worked and brutalized to near-extinction in German industrial extermination camps. We saw photos and videos of piles of collected items from those gas chambers – for example, millions of bones of the exterminated as high as a house. We saw piles of suitcases, and boots, and human hair to be used for pillow fills; as well as large dug-outs with emaciated dead bodies, ready to be set on fire. We heard all of the atrocious facts of that particular war. It was a scary mystery to us children how this could have happened? We were shown these unimaginable images with the moral intention that we never allow this kind of catastrophe even happen again when we became adults and rule the world in the place of our parents. We were educated – no – indoctrinated to become tolerant and to appreciate differences in others and learn to recognize, and disapprove of, the slightest signs of discrimination. We children embodied the hope of our parents for a better future for the nation and the world. No wonder we were the “flower-power” and “love” generation and despised war as adults: “make love; not war!”
Recently my eldest cousin who is eighty years old gave me the result of his research into my family’s history. It included a piece written by my dad, Jan, about the arrests of Dutch collaborators as well as of the enemy on the heels of the war, on liberation day. Seventy years later, it was the first written account of his that I would ever read. Jan’s matter-of-fact report started set me wondering and imagining the scenario around, and condition under, which he wrote. As a policeman, he must have had a hell of a time cajoling German army officials, while trying to protect the town’s residents from depraved Nazi policies. The occupiers frequently arrested non-compliant citizens and sometimes shot them for the slightest of infringements against War-time German regulations. Sometimes they were even held for no offence at all but as hostages. It was not uncommon for a person to be shot in the street execution-style just as a deterrent. This was an example of the terror-rule by the Nazis. It is possible that the occupying force showed Jan some measure of difference because he was married to a German woman. In any case, he remained the town’s police chief until liberation from occupation by the allied forces.
While Jan’s appearance of being sympathetic to the occupiers was a ruse to help him protect the town’s citizens up to a reasonable extent, Johanna was a staunch supporter of Hitler and openly adored him. She thought that Hitler gave pride back to the defeated and orphaned German nation after the First World War. To her, Hitler was someone who finally dared say the things many Germans were already thinking in a depressed and devastated country after a First World War, which had ended only 20 years earlier. It is all those foreigners’ fault, those Jews – never mind that ‘those Jews’ had been born German and had been Germans for generations. Johanna was friendly to the German soldiers; she was a true collaborator opposed to Jan. Johanna gave her treasures to the ‘war-effort’; this included antique copper wares, my mom told me in an unguarded moment. Jan was pissed, but what could he do? His wife was Johanna’s daughter. He didn’t want to alienate his mother-in-law or his wife. But such open support for the Nazis seemed to be more widespread. It appeared that majority of Europeans had been covertly anti-Semitic. This was why there had not been any serious and systematic effort to stop Hitler in his fury to kill Jews until it was too late. Ich habe es nicht gewusst – I didn’t know – was a popular phrase, unfortunately after the fact.
In my research, I learned that Jan was arrested three days after the liberation and brought before the purging committee to justify his actions. Some community members had accused him of collaborating with the enemy. Plenty of witnesses stepped forward to testify, some for and some against Jan. The testimony of members of the local underground resistance group finally set him free. A writer for an underground paper, De Vonk, testified on his behalf. He had made a sketch of Jan at work in the field while assisting with illegal drops of British weapons for the resistance. The local and the regional commanders of that illegal group testified in my dad’s defence. That testimony exonerated him during the hearings that followed liberation. He was quickly released but had to be transferred to another town since locals remained too hostile. Two months after the war, that resistance group published a bundle of their stories that I hunted down and now have a copy of.
Each and every report of suspected collaboration or criminal actions filed against a civil servant was referred to an Exceptional Court. It determine the extent of wrong and appropriate punishment. There was no law for the offence of collaboration with an enemy. This was virgin territory for the courts. The new government reinstated a previously abolished, centuries-old death penalty to cater to the unusual post-war situation. The post-war adjudicators, who had survived the war years without blemish either in prison or underground, started with investigating the worst offenders first. Jan’s highest superior within the police force, Tenkink, had been the deputy minister of Justice. He got the death penalty and was executed within the year. His successor, Schrieke, was also sentenced to death. But the frenzy for revenge had passed by the time his appointment with the hangman came. Queen Wilhelmina stepped in and directed clemency. His sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1948.
From extensive investigations and in trying top war criminals, it became clear to the government that the police top brass had been criminally involved with the Nazis to an advanced level of collaboration. The police leadership had instructed police rank and file to comply with that same level of collaboration as well. The Exceptional Court, in its judgements, never took the top-level police collaboration order into consideration as far as individual civil servants were concerned. The argument was that such civil servants should have known, by virtue of their profession, what correct conduct required. Policemen were sentenced for overstepping the bounds of decency, and for breaking the law, even while instructed by their superiors to do so. About half of the police force had been investigated.
I dove into the history of my dad and researched his seventy-year-old files, which were hidden away in some national archive. I found out about his own self-conduct in the dangerous and uncertain situation of war occupation. On instructions from the local resistance group’s commander and acting with calculated duplicity, Jan pretended as police chief to like the German occupiers in town as well as the commander of the German prison camp, with whom he formed collegial relationships. He played his role of informant for the resistance very well, while appearing to be a collaborator and fooling everybody in town, including his subsequent detractors.
Jan collected and passed on information about German troop movements from the local Wehrmacht commander and from the boss of the man-hunting commandos of the prison camp, Erika, which was under the German Nazi police (Ordnungspolizei). In his role as Dutch police chief, he was able to lead some arrested Dutch people to freedom, intervene on their behalf. He also assisted with the illegal weapon drops by the British for benefit of the area’s resistance groups. Jan’s brother-in-law was a Dutch Nazi, while another brother-in-law was the regional commander of the resistance. Jan’s life must have been a balancing act, with a potential traitor in his extended family and a wife he was not sure he could trust because her mother was a collaborator as well. This must have put his immediate family at great risk. The police commander in his region was pro-Nazi. The regional officer of Justice was also a potential traitor. Anybody within the justice system in those days could easily be a spy for the other side. Civil servants had been replaced with Dutch Nazi members. By the end of the war, one third of them were Dutch Nazis. It really couldn’t have been called paranoia when there really were people out to get you.
War had a great impact on my parents. It might have contributed to my dad becoming such an intolerable straight shooter, after regaining the freedom of liberation. He had spoken and acted according to his true beliefs after the war, shedding the duplicity and appearance of sucking up to the Nazis. I have never given my parents enough credit for surviving without blemish and staying on the right side during those years. I just had no idea. As a nation, the Dutch were collectively traumatized by the brutal events of war and the daily struggles of living through it, or even by the events after liberation. Many were unable to talk about it afterwards, as most had dirty hands, in some way.
3 Comments
One mistake that I would like to correct here: Jan Tenkink, the deputy minister of Justice during the WWII did not stay on in his function and resigned from his post March 1941after the occupation by the Germans. He was not executed.
Thank you for this wonderful document. Also for writing so well, so clearly.
Wat een indrukwekkend verhaal Joeke ! Dat moet een belevenis zijn geweest om je vaders aantekeningen te lezen. Mooi dat het voor iedereen te lezen op deze manier, en inderdaad stof tot nadenken.