The Dutch Resistance Museum

If you're ever in Amsterdam, I recommend the Dutch Resistance Museum. My familiarity with Holland during World War II was limited to the Anne Frank story (and the general concept of gentiles hiding Jews in their houses). But, as with all things in history, there's a lot more to it.

First of all, I didn't know how the Nazis came to occupy the Netherlands, which had remained neutral during World War I. In a surprise attack in early May 1940, Hitler invaded with three times as many troops as the entire Dutch army, then bombed the hell out of Rotterdam (the largest port on the North Sea), killing 800 civilians and leaving 85,000 people homeless. The Dutch government surrendered, rather than have the rest of the country and civilian population treated the same way. The queen, Wilhemina, and the rest of the government went into exile.

At first, the Germans thought the Dutch would join up with their fellow Aryans:

The Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging [NSB, National Socialist Movement, the Dutch Nazi Party] was set up in the Netherlands at the end of 1931, modeled after Hitler’s NSDAP. The party remained small. After May 1940 the NSB finally had a hope of taking control. Thousands applied for membership. But the Germans did not jump at the chance of close cooperation. They did not have a high opinion of the NSB, and they knew that most Dutch people strongly detested the party.

The members of the NSB pushed their way in the limelight by holding ostentatious parades. Gradually it became clear that they were virtually the only loyal supporters of the occupying forces. So in December 1942 the Germans permitted NSB leader Anton Mussert to call himself Leader of the Dutch People, although he had no real power. (All quoted material is from the museum's explanatory panels.)

"A New Netherlands - in a New Europe."

The anti-Jewish propaganda began with anti-Bolshevist messages like this one, a common association made by Nazis to this day:


Translation: "Bolshevism Is Death!" (complete with slaughtered Christians). And the move against Dutch Jews also began gradually:

The first anti-Jewish regulations seemed rather harmless. In October 1940, all civil servants were required to fill in an “ancestry form,” indicating their religion and that of their parents and grandparents. Everyone knows that the purpose is to register Jewish civil servants, yet the response is massive compliance. One month later the Jewish civil servants were dismissed. In Leiden and Delft, students went on strike to protest against the dismissal of their Jewish university teachers.

In January 1941 all Jews had to report for registration. Almost everyone obeyed. After all, what can possibly happen if you refuse? And why shouldn’t you be open about your origins? However, this registration makes it easier for the Germans to carry out other measures against the Jews later on.

In 1941, Allied airplanes started dropping pamphlets that challenged German propaganda. The letter V became the symbol for Victory. By summer that year, the Germans tried to coopt the V in their own campaign: V = Victory, because Germany is victorious on all fronts:


Victory, for the Nazis, was symbolized by crushing an anti-Semitically caricatured Jewish man with the V:


In turn, the Dutch vandalized the posters. The V became W for [Queen] Wilhelmina, or V for Verliest (loses) or Verzuipt (drowns):


Or, as you can see in the card in the center of this photo, they wrote O Z O around the V, which stood for Oranje Zal Overwinnen, translated as "Orange Shall Triumph." (Orange refers to the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange.)

By 1941, it was becoming clear to the Germans that the most of the Dutch were not joining up, and they began labeling the Jewish population with stars on their clothes.

Public facilities were closed to Jews. Separate Jewish schools were opened. In summer 1942, the deportations begin. Jews were required to report for 'employment in Germany'.

Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, this is the result of Nazism:


One part of the exhibit I especially appreciated was the section on the resistance press. Many examples are given, including these stereotype plates (at the bottom of the photo), which were used to transport seditious material for printing in various parts of the country because they were much lighter than moving the metal plates themselves (shown at the top of the photo):


Artists of the resistance also created images like this one:


As the Allies began winning the war after Stalingrad (more than a year before the D-Day invasion in early June 1944), the Dutch waited and continued to resist. In March 1943, a group of resistance partisans bombed the Amsterdam Registry Office, where records of the Jewish citizens were kept. The museum currently has a visual retelling of that story called Risk of Explosion, describing the people who carried it out and putting it in context with today... asking questions like, When is violence allowable as a means of struggle or resistance?

The results of the attack are also listed with nuance:

• 12 people were executed
• 10 were sent to prison or concentration camp
• 15% of the ID cards were permanently destroyed
• Two shadow archives were unaffected, having been set up in the Hague since 1941
• The Registry Office was out of operation for five months after the attack
• The issuance of the second ration certificate was delayed one year, which made it difficult for people in hiding to obtain food
• The largest number of Jews had already been taken away when the attack happened
• The attack inspired others to resist

A video at the end asks: Back then it was the Germans, but who are “they” now?


Another thing I learned was that the winter of 1944-45, as the Nazis were clearly losing the war and the Allies had already liberated Brussels and Paris, Holland remained under Nazi occupation and it was a time of extreme hunger (the Hunger Winter). They ate tulip bulbs... and 20,000 people died of starvation. The war dragged on and on with no food and no hope in sight, it seemed.

The exhibit ends with posters like this one:


After the war, 120,000 Dutch collaborators were imprisoned and 34 executed, including the NSB leader Mussert.

The last item is a national festival skirt made by resistance member A. Boissevain-van Lennep. She introduced the skirt as a member of the committee that created guidelines for celebrating the liberation:


The skirt, made out of pieces of old clothing that recalled events in the life of the family, was to become the symbol of reconstruction and national solidarity.


At commemorations held in 1946, 1947, and 1948, several thousand women wore festival skirts.


The last thing I learned at the museum was that it was founded by the elders of the resistance in the 1980s as they once again saw the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment among Dutch people. While they still had time to speak, they wanted people to remember what intolerance and hatred can lead to.