New research results about the horrors of the Second World War surface with some regularity. Researcher Elias van der Plicht, co-author of the book Hunting the Resistance, shares his discoveries about alcohol abuse by Dutch people in German service with Kennislink.
Nijmegen, summer 1942. After a number of Jews on Kelfkensweg are arrested, their house is looted by the Sicherheitsdienst. SS agent Anton Wiebe is also present. He plans to stuff his suitcase full. During the raid, he finds a bottle of gin that he can't keep away from. In no time he is completely drunk. When he wakes up the next day with a hangover, he finds that he has only taken an empty cigar box as loot.
Unique archive
This story can be found in Wiebe's criminal file. It is located in the National Archives, among the no fewer than 500,000 other files of Dutch people who were suspected of collaboration or war crimes after the war. The criminal files together form a unique archive:the Central Archives for Special Jurisdiction (CABR). The CABR is a particularly rich archive containing, among other things, thousands of official reports about the arrests of Jewish people in hiding and resistance fighters. Until now, the data on their capture of most of the detainees could not be found:the CABR is an archive of perpetrators and can therefore only be consulted in one way:via the name of the perpetrator.
Relatives of the victims often do not know who arrested their father, grandfather or uncle, so that their investigation quickly came to a dead end. I worked with a handful of historians on a project to make part of the CABR accessible in the name of victims as well. In the criminal files we found the names of 9,000 Jews arrested and 12,000 people arrested for activities that the occupier did not like. This ranged from wearing an orange pin to committing an armed attack. Thanks to this research, the National Archives can now better serve interested relatives.
The opportunity to gather more information about the fate of the victims is not the only result of the investigation. In our work we have come across so much new data about the persecution of the Jews and the struggle against the resistance that we decided to collect, organize and record them. In the autumn of 2011, the book Jewish Hunt . was published and in March 2013 came The hunt for the resistance off.
The hunt for the resistance
The book describes the cruelty and sadism, stimulated by excessive drinking, by the uniformed Dutch counterpart of the German occupier. Resistance people were brutally tortured and executed without trial, houses were looted and burned and frustrations were vented uncontrollably on helpless victims.
This information comes from more than 200 criminal files of convicted war criminals, who together arrested 12,000 people for small and large acts of resistance. Details of their capture were often unknown, as they were in the criminal files of the war criminals who had locked the detainees. And the names of these war criminals were often unknown to the victims or their next of kin.
The hundreds of stories written by the researchers Elias van der Plicht, Marie-Cecile van Hintum, Margot van Kooten, Anne-Marie Mreijen and Liesbeth Sparks have been classified under the editorship of Ad van Liempt as the Hunt for the Resistance .
Alcohol Abuse
One of the most striking things that came up during the investigation is the role that alcohol played during the occupation. We come across the story about the heavy drinking SS agent Anton Wiebe in the Jewish Hunt. It doesn't stand alone. The hunters for Jews and the resistance drank to life. In the ideology of the National Socialists, drunkenness was an abomination. But as so often, ideology and practice did not always match. Discipline slackened, especially at the end of the war.
In The hunt for the resistance abuses committed under the influence of drink have been collected:dozens of stories about drunken SD'ers, police officers, and land guards. The drink caused excesses. Our research leads to the conclusion that alcohol was an important factor during the Second World War. An underestimated factor, moreover, because as far as could be ascertained, almost nothing has been published about the role of spirits in the Second World War.
How did all those cops, SD men and land guards get their drink? Not by buying it – alcohol had become too scarce and therefore too expensive for that. In the first year of the war, a drink was still available for fifteen cents. But in the last years of the war, sometimes more than ten guilders had to be paid for a drink. Drinks were therefore not bought but stolen.
In Zwolle, a liquor dealer lost his stock in this way. Two days after he had ingested about 1,400 liters of jenever, a group of land guards stood at the door. One of them asked if any alcohol had been brought in recently. The liquor merchant led the land guards to the warehouse, whereupon their leader exclaimed, “Ah, there's enough gin here! Here is something for us and also for the comrades in Deventer.” They got a cargo bike and took more than eighty liters of jenever, five bottles of lawyer and seven liters of old ready-made.
Appease conscience
An excess of alcohol leads to abuses, which is no different in times of peace than in war. But because during the Second World War it was precisely the people who had the monopoly on violence that could easily get a drink and so often looked too deeply into the glass, major abuses arose.
In Leeuwarden for example. The SD officer Grundmann mistreated there together with a colleague Douwe Harkema, who had opened his house to people in hiding. The two SD men seemed in no hurry:while they gave Harkema one hard blow after another, they drank gin in the meantime. When Harkema was taken to his cell after the interrogation, the prison director saw that he had been completely beaten.
After the war, during the criminal trial against Grundmann, the prison director told about the day Harkema was brutally interrogated. He said:"It appeared to me that, despite the fact that it was still early in the morning, Grundmann was under the influence of alcoholic beverages." It is just one example from a series of stories.
In actions in which detainees were severely mistreated, the spirits may also have been a means of appeasing the resting conscience. That led to paradoxical situations, because that drink only created greater abuses and torture.
One of the most striking notes we found in the files was from the wife of Gerrit Holla, a land guard from Roermond who had made more than sixty arrests. Holla said he drank more than a liter of gin a day and could therefore not keep his hands to himself. He was arrested after the war. In prison he received mail from his wife. In the note, she confronted him again about his drinking. She wrote:“Yes dear, if only you had listened to me. That dirty drink is to blame for everything.”
About the author
Elias van der Plicht studied history, political science and Italian language and culture at Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam. He is a freelance historian and journalist and associated with historical research agency Studio Storia. Elias van der Plicht is co-author of Jew Hunt (2011) and The hunt for the resistance (2013). In these books he wrote about the head money paid for the arrest of Jews, about the Nazi methods used in rounding up resistance groups and about the role of alcohol in those arrests.