Sample Solution

icy of Nazification can be seen with the subsequent use of the NSB. After the ban of the Nederlandse Unie, Anton Mussert’s NSB was declared the only party still legal under German occupation (Hirschfeld, 1981, p. 481). The NSB, the Dutch equivalent of the Nazi party, had grown in prominence since the invasion and despite having a marginal pre-war presence swelled to include as many as 75,000 wartime members (Foray, 2010, p.775). As the only remaining party, this meant that it was generally either German officials or NSB members in high positions of office throughout the Netherlands (Warmbrunn, 1963, p.37). The German occupation had hoped not to utilise the party to such an extent as it was severely disliked by the majority of the Dutch public, being regarded as politically and morally corrupt (Hirschfeld, 1988, p.39). The Dutch public would not support any policy from such a disliked party, especially when some of the attempts to establish Nazi organisations came from the NSB rather than the German authorities (Warmbrunn, 1963, p.263). Furthermore, the growth of anti-German sentiment after 1941 is representative of the failure of the German Nazification policy. The anti-Nazi attitude manifested itself in 3 main strikes: the aforementioned February 1941 Amsterdam strike against the treatment of Jews; the Spring 1943 strike in retaliation to the reinternment of the Dutch armed forces; and 17th September 1944 strike ordered by the exiled government on Dutch railwaymen as the Allies attempted to invade (De Jong, 1990, p.34). In terms of the 1943 strike, Christiansen, the supreme commander of the German Wehmacht, ordered the members of the Dutch army that had previously been released in 1940 to report for reinternment. There was a large amount of resistance to this policy with few soldiers responding to the order and a general strike from workers and business owners taking place throughout the country, united against Nazification (Ibid., pp.34-35). This strike in particular showed that even after 3 years of German occupation, the Dutch people had retained their own identity and had not fallen victim to the Nazification propaganda (Warmbrunn, 1963, p.117). The initial motivation behind the order, to stop the veterans joining the resistance, and their reaction to it, shows clearly that the German occupation’s policy of Nazification failed.

In contrast, the German occupation policy of deporting and then executing Jews from the Netherlands was extremely successful. Of the 140,000 people whom the Germans considered ‘Full Jews’ in 1941, only 38,000 survived the occupation (Croes, 2006, p.474). This was a drastically higher death rate than in other occupied states such as France, where 80,000 of the 320,000 Jews were killed (Griffioen & Zeller, 2006, p.437). There are a number of reasons why this was the case. The Nazis set up a Jewish Council of intellectuals headed by Abraham Asscher which served as the instrument by which the majority of Jews were identified and turned over (De Jong, 1990, pp.10-11). The German civilian administration was a major reason why the policy was so successful, the administration was ideologically and organisationally incredibly purposeful, with a very strong Nazi and SS presence, adding to the extreme anti-Semitic convictions (Blom, 1989, p.338). Seyss-Inquart was able to legally implement the policies of Jewish deportation after a judgment on 12th January 1942 from the Dutch supreme court “declared that Dutch courts had no power to decide whether these decrees were in accordance with the Hague convention IV of 1907” (Jansma, 1947, p.53). The German authorities also managed to use the Jewish Council extremely effectively by never stating that all Jews would be deported in order to reduce resistance and keep the Jews disunited (De Jong, 1990, p.10). Another reason why the policy was so successful was that the geography of the Netherlands favoured the Germans. The Jews were worse off geographically than Jews from Belgium and France as it w