The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [13]
In Holland, as in his previous assignments, Seyss-Inquart quickly won his superiors’ admiration. “I have the impression that the treatment of population in the occupied areas is being handled best in the Netherlands,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on September 8, 1943. “Seyss-Inquart is a master in the art of alternating gingerbread with whippings.”
FOR THE DUTCH, occupied Holland was a trap, and as the years passed, the trap squeezed tighter. In part, the problem was geographic happenstance, in part Nazi malevolence. “The Netherlands were more isolated than any other country in western Europe,” lamented the Dutch historian Louis de Jong, who witnessed the events he wrote about. “If you tried to escape from France, there was but one frontier you had to cross. From Belgium two. From the Netherlands three.”
Occupied France had a neutral neighbor, Spain, next door. Occupied Norway had Sweden, and over the course of the war, eighty thousand Norwegians managed to escape to Sweden. But Holland is squeezed between the sea to the north, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south. By the spring of 1940, escape through Germany was out of the question, and Belgium (and, beyond it, France) lay in enemy hands.
Escape by sea was no more promising than escape by land. Holland’s ports and coastal waters were heavily patrolled. Throughout the entire war, only two hundred Dutchmen escaped to Britain by boat.
So fleeing was extraordinarily difficult. And in tiny Holland, so flat that a rise of three hundred feet merits a name, and so crowded that a single tulip bed might almost constitute a garden, going into hiding was nearly as hazardous. For two groups in particular—the Jews and the Dutch resistance—the lack of hiding places proved devastating.
“Probably no other country in Europe is so unsuited for action against an occupying military power as the Netherlands,” noted Walter Maass. Trains and excellent roads connected every part of the country. The Germans could speed their troops anywhere they wanted. No region was remote or inaccessible. Dutch resistance fighters had no mountains or forests to retreat to, no caves or valleys to serve as hideaways that strangers could not penetrate. In France, Norway, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, in contrast anti-Nazi bands could launch hit-and-run raids, and vanish.
Nor could the embattled Dutch resistance hope for much help from the outside world. Once again, geography created much of the problem. Because the route from Britain’s airfields to Germany’s industrial heartland passed directly over Holland, the Nazis dotted the Dutch countryside with antiaircraft weapons and kept large numbers of fighter planes at the ready at Dutch airbases. So much for any chance of dropping supplies to the resistance fighters or parachuting in secret agents.
HISTORY, TOO, WORKED to undercut any hope of successful resistance to the Nazis. “Every tradition of conspiracy and insurrection was lacking,” wrote Maass. Holland had never been occupied, and the well-off Dutch had little of the bitterness or desperation of their counterparts in, say, Greek or Balkan backwaters. In particular, the famously thorough Dutch bureaucracy stayed in place under Holland’s new masters and continued to do its job. No one had thought that it might be better to destroy Holland’s official records—which included personal and professional information on every Dutch citizen—than to let them fall into enemy hands. The Nazis pounced with glee on this unexpected gift.
In a radio broadcast from London in 1943, the Dutch government-in-exile issued an agonized condemnation of its own civil servants for refusing to look at the big picture. “They had spent their whole lives accustomed to obey, they were always—and rightly—so proud of the impeccable execution of their tasks and conscientious fulfillment of their duties that they brought the same conscientiousness and the same fulfillment of duty to the scrupulous organization of the plunder of our country, to the advantage of the enemy.”
What made matters worse was the personality of the man