Seventy years later, we still cannot let the painful events surrounding the occupation and the persecution of the Jews rest. This is apparent now that Bart van der Boom, who is criticized for his research 'We know nothing about their fate', into the Holocaust in the Netherlands. The point of contention:did the Dutch cooperate passively or did they really know nothing about what awaited their Jewish compatriots?
During the occupation, what did the Dutch know about the 'final solution of the Jewish question', the common name in the Nazi bureaucracy for the deportation and gassing of European Jews in extermination camps in Germany and Poland? The answer to that question – among many other factors – may be important in explaining why the highest number of Jews from Western Europe were deported in relative terms. About 75 percent, while in Belgium and France they did not go further than 40 percent.
Bart van der Boom, assistant professor of national history at Leiden University, came to the conclusion after analyzing 164 war diaries of both Jews and non-Jews that 'people' were not aware that deported Jews were murdered immediately after arrival in the camps. They were deported to perform forced labour.
That work would be very hard, but the chances of survival were thought to be greater than if the Jews went into hiding and were discovered. If they had known all the finer points of the Holocaust, the Dutch would have done more to help the Jews, says Van der Boom in his book.
'Extremely misleading'
An opinion article by Ies Vuijsje, independent researcher and author of the 2006 book 'Against better knowledge', appeared in NRC Handelsblad. In the submitted piece, Vuijsje gives sharp, but also emotionally charged criticism of Van der Boom's research. "Van der Boom's conclusion that people did not know about the Holocaust, because they did not know that the deported Jewish Dutch were murdered directly in the gas chamber, is extremely misleading."
According to Vuijsje, the messages sent to the Netherlands via Radio Oranje and the British BBC spoke of 'destruction' and 'extermination in cold blood' of European Jews. How could anyone misunderstand that? Vuijsje writes:'During the war, most Dutch people denied the reality of Hitler's Final Solution, of the Holocaust. This denial of reality was mainly caused by feelings of powerlessness, lack of resilience and the need for peace of mind.'
“The murder campaign was in full swing, London broadcasters and the illegal papers reported. Knowledge of the murder method and the time of the murder was not essential.' (...) 'The fact that many Dutch people knew about the Shoah during the war but 'looked away' has led to unease among some of the descendants. Van der Boom wants to remove that inconvenience with pseudo-scientific reasoning.' (read the entire article by Vuijsje here)
Unbelievable
But according to Van der Boom, who had a response posted in the NRC on 11 May, the terms 'extermination' and 'destruction' in 2013 are equivalent to camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor. But during the war, that link was much less clear. The aim of the Germans was extermination, the means was not gassing, but deportation to an inhospitable place. "That was imagined during extermination:the Jews would have a hard time and many would die in the long run - but how hard, how many and in what period was completely unclear," says Van der Boom.
“None of the 164 diarists I studied says in clear terms that the Jews were not employed, but that the majority were killed on arrival. That was simply unimaginable,' writes Van der Boom. His response was next to a letter from an eyewitness:'During the war years, our antennas did not receive any message from which we could deduce the fate of the deportees. (…) We did not know about the systematic extermination of the Jews. Moreover, if we had been told, we would not have believed it.”
With today's knowledge, Van der Boom's argument may sound implausible. But despite the Nazis' intention of "removing" the Jews from Europe (and Hitler spoke of "the destruction of the Jewish race" in speeches), for years they had no concrete method in mind. The idea of systematic gassing has gradually emerged when all other plans, including deportation to places such as the island of Madagascar or the Russian steppes, proved unfeasible. For years, German propaganda spoke of 'emigration' ('Auswanderung' ). It was not until early 1942 that it became clear that 'removal' would actually mean physical extermination.
Was that important?
Van der Boom has received much more criticism for his research (the criticisms are all on his own website). In addition, the question often arises whether it would make a difference if the fate of the Jews was known. 'The key point is that the Dutch, like the Germans, could know and also knew that the Jews would be treated very badly and that, despite this knowledge, they did relatively little to save their Jewish compatriots,' writes Willem Melching, historian of the University of Amsterdam. Jaap Cohen, who works as a researcher at the NIOD, also doubts the importance of ignorance.
Were the majority of the Dutch passive spectators (whom the Jews might have preferred to get rid of rather than rich) or did they really know nothing and soberly considered that going into hiding was more dangerous in the long run than deportation? Who knows, may say…