Even in 2012, the Second World War remains an inexhaustible source of fascinating historical stories and new insights. The period 1939 – 1945 is therefore a popular subject among writers and history book enthusiasts. The following recent war books are definitely worth reading, according to the Kennislink editors of History &Archeology.
Anthony Beevor – World War II
By Maarten Muns
“If we are Americans,” wrote American journalist Anne Applebaum, “we think that the 'War' is an event that began with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. When we are British, we think of the Blitz of 1940 and the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. When we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are Germans, we only know part of the whole story.”
In World War II the famous British military historian Anthony Beevor makes an attempt to tell that whole story. Beevor has written wonderful books about turning points in World War II, such as the Battle of Stalingrad, D-Day and the Battle of Berlin. Beevor was therefore often referred to as an "expert on war". "I always felt a bit of a cheat when someone said that again. Although I knew a lot about certain aspects, I knew too little about the war as a whole. That had to change,' said Beevor in an interview with NRC Handelsblad.
According to Beevor, the war did not start with the German campaign against Poland, but several months earlier with a battle between the Soviet Union and Japan in the far east of Mongolia. The Battle of Halhin-Gol was won by the Russians. Japan then turned its attention to the conquest of China and the western colonies in Asia. Because the Japanese threat had passed, Soviet dictator Stalin was able to turn to the West. During the war, everything was connected with everything, Beevor would like to say.
Beevor describes the Second World War primarily as a military conflict. What happened on the battlefields, how did the generals determine their strategy. Not only in Europe, but also in China, on the Atlantic Ocean or in the Burmese Jungle. Beevor describes the strategies and tactics quite exhaustively, but fortunately he also leaves room for telling anecdotes from the lives of the afflicted civilian population, who tried to make the best of it behind the barbed wire. Also, Beevor does not hesitate to describe in detail the daily routine in extermination camps such as Treblinka or Sobibor.
This variety makes Beevor's work a complete and clear, but at times gruesome story. The brutality of the conflict drips from many pages. Beevor has come to the right place for anyone who wants a complete picture of the greatest catastrophe mankind ever caused.
Bart van der Boom – 'We know nothing about their fate' Ordinary Dutch and the Holocaust
By Marjolein Overmeer
This book reads like a protest. A protest against the current tendency in historiography in which the ordinary Dutchman as an indifferent bystander was not much better than the murderous SS man.
The historians who wrote about the persecution of the Jews in the 1950s and 1960s agreed that ordinary Dutch people did not know what awaited their fellow Jewish citizens in the East. As the years went on, this view became less and less believed. This resulted in the guilty and anti-Semitic bystander as the other extreme in 2006. Bart van de Boom's research aims to show that the earliest writers on the Holocaust were right. He used 164 diaries of Jews and non-Jews, both literate and illiterate, as a source for this.
The Dutch, Jew or not, thought as long as the war lasted that the Jews would go to work in Poland. This would be tough, but the chances of survival were considered to be higher than those in hiding. Then being arrested meant the end, the Germans threatened. This train of thought explains the small number of people in hiding, the rejection of hiding places and the large number of Jews who reported for transport. Cooperating was safer and more sensible in the long run than protest, for Jews and non-Jews. And that war would not last that long, everyone thought when the deportations started in the summer of 1942.
The Germans needed workers so the idea that all Jews would be killed immediately upon arrival didn't even occur to people. And when news of the murder of Jews reached the illegal press, the Dutch didn't know what to think. Many diary readers complained about the lack of reliable news. Mass murder factories were unprecedented in history and the few whistleblowers who spoke of them were not believed. Not even by the Allies, who received the most 'rumours'.
In addition, Jews and non-Jews thought that the discriminatory measures would apply to all Dutch people. The Jews only came first because the Germans hated them, which the Dutch thought was terrible and barbaric. First Jews had to hand in their radio and bicycle and then the Dutchman. First the Jews had to go to work in Poland and then the Dutch men because of the institution of the Labour. Nobody assumed that the goals of the last two types of 'deportations' were completely different. The secrecy of the Holocaust, maintained by the Germans to counter resistance, worked.
The book comes to life through the many diary fragments. The content of this supports Van der Boom's argument. The ordinary Dutchman did not know that his Jewish compatriot, whom he certainly sympathized with, was facing inevitable death in the gas chamber. Van der Boom delves into wartime instead of looking back and judging it later. The book just does not explain why other European countries regretted a lot less Jewish victims after the war.
Bas Kromhout – The Foreman. Henk Feldmeijer and the Dutch SS
By Maarten Muns
During the occupation period in the Netherlands you had different kinds of collaborators who helped to hand over our country to the Germans. The most important contradiction was that between the supporters of NSB leader Anton Mussert, who wanted to make the Netherlands independent from Germany on a National Socialist basis, and Meinout Rost-van Tonningen, who preferred to see the Netherlands merge into a Greater Germanic Empire. Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler also wanted the latter.
Bas Kromhout wrote a biography, on which he recently even obtained his doctorate, of a much less well-known collaborator. Henk Feldmeijer had roughly the same ideas as Rost-van Tonningen, but was higher in the Nazi pecking order. He had been chosen by Himmler to set up a Dutch division of the SS to Nazify the Netherlands. Kromhout portrays Feldmeijer as a radical and righteous Nazi, who in terms of fanaticism was in no way inferior to his colleagues from the Third Reich.
Feldmeijer, for example, left in 1941 as a 'righteous SS man' for the Eastern Front, to fight against the Bolshevik archenemy. There he witnesses the downfall of the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. 'The lesson from the front' made an indelible impression on Feldmeijer. From that moment on, the era of National Socialism was an all-or-nothing battle. This conviction led him to coordinate massacres of resistance members after his return to the Netherlands.
In addition to being a historian, Kromhout is also primarily a journalist. He doesn't like the assumption that an academic dissertation has to be boring by definition. This can be seen in the spectacular way in which he describes the life of his protagonist and the accompanying zeitgeist. The Foreman gives a lively look into the life and radicalization of one of the Netherlands' most important collaborators.
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