Armageddon - Max Hastings [301]
For all the fame of Anne Frank’s long concealment from the Nazis, the wider reality was that almost all Holland’s Jews were identified, deported and killed. Of 117,000 shipped east, 5,500 returned. Just 20,000 Dutch Jews survived the war. “At first when they took Jews, people said: ‘It’s impossible, they can’t do that,’ ” observed a young Dutchman. “But after a time such things become normal.” Hans Cramer, the twenty-two-year-old son of a German Jewish father living in the Hague, said: “For most of the population life went on in an incredibly normal way. Okay, there was no coffee or tea, and a few people were in great danger, but lots of others still seemed to be playing tennis. Some of us were surprised by the willingness of the Dutch authorities to work with the Germans.” More Dutchmen carried arms for Hitler—some 25,000, of whom 10,000 were killed—than wore the khaki of the Free Netherlands forces.
Both rival armies found Holland a bewildering place, full of contradictions. On the one hand, some Dutch people behaved with extraordinary courage in assisting Allied forces and fugitives. On the other, some inhabitants—especially those living near the German border—seemed more sympathetic to the Wehrmacht than to their Allied liberators. Fritz Hauff, an officer with 712th Fusilier Battalion, recorded in his diary on 21 October a conversation with a Dutch civilian: “His attitude is typical. He does not care who wins the war, as long as it is over soon.” This view was echoed by George Turner-Cain, writing of his own experiences as colonel of a British battalion billeted among Dutch civilians in the winter of 1944: “There is considerable indifference to our presence, and some are downright unfriendly.” War Office reports from the liberated area of Holland stated that “security doubts on the reliability of elements of the Dutch population” caused some houses and villages to be compulsorily evacuated; and “The discovery that liberation was going to increase the hardships and difficulties of living was a big disappointment to labour, and has tended to produce discontent.”
Until the winter of 1944, when liberation seemed so close, most Dutch people unwillingly accepted their lot. The Netherlands was perhaps the most instinctively ordered middle-class society in Europe. “There were some nice German officers and soldiers,” said Cas Tromp, twelve-year-old son of an Amsterdam court official. Once when his brother was hit on the head by a stone, a German hospital patched him up and a German soldier drove the boy home. Tromp’s father was careful to avoid trouble with the occupiers: “He was a law-abiding man. He had three children to feed.” Bert Egbertus’s father, an Amsterdam house decorator, was able to slip back home from forced labour in Germany. “It was not so bad for Dutch people—nothing like as bad as for Poles and Russians. Though there was a war, for a long time it was not so terrible for us.” The 8 p.m. curfew was an inconvenience, nothing worse. While those who resisted the occupiers suffered badly, for much of the war Germans treated those who obeyed them with civility. Bertha Schonfeld, a twenty-seven-year-old living in the Hague, was deeply irked when she tripped in the street and two German soldiers helped her up. She had an argument on a train with a uniformed Dutch Nazi who offered her his seat, which she refused.
Yet it would be wrong to confuse Dutch acquiescence with enthusiasm for the occupiers. Fritz van den Broek, a Dordrecht doctor, would not allow his children to go to the cinema, because he did not wish them to be exposed to German propaganda. The only film his twelve-year-old son had thus ever seen was Snow White, a few weeks before the 1940 occupation began. In the course of the war, some 7,000 young Dutchmen sought to join the Allied forces by the long perilous routes across the North Sea or the Pyrenees. Just 1,700 succeeded.