NSB Children in Germany

In September 1944, many NSB families left on special evacuation trains organized by the Germans. The experience of being an expellee and a refu­gee is central to the accounts of the NSB children who went on this trip.

Memories of trains under fire are common and often depicted in similar ways.²⁶ Little Andre was saved by a German soldier, who accompanied his train and threw him over a wire fence. The soldier shot his machine gun at the planes. While his mother tried to protect Andre by covering him as best she could with her own body, the toddler assured her that when he grew up he too would learn to shoot planes.²⁷ Some trains managed to keep going, as was remembered by Duke Blaauwendraad-Doorduijn, then an urban middle-class girl of about twelve who had fled with her mother. Her story of a train attack is particularly poignant and harrowing. In the may­hem of the shooting, she saw horrible creatures with mad eyes and striped clothes running in the open field near where she was hiding. Later, she concluded that they must have been psychiatric patients from a nearby hospital.²⁸ But at the time, she felt as if she was in hell surrounded by shooting, screaming, and unknown mad creatures.

In the stories of these children, the attacks on their evacuation trains are framed as symbolic of their own vulnerability and coincide with a self­image of being refugees and innocent victims. That the trains also often carried German soldiers is subsumed within this framework. The trains under Allied fire are instead remembered as symbols of violence against defenseless women and children and have become separated from the larger historical context.

Duke and her mother were brought to camp Westerbork before going further to Germany. In an ironic twist to her “evacuation” story, it was from Westerbork that the deportation of the Jewish population of the Netherlands had taken place. Almost all Dutch Jews were brought to Westerbork and from there transported to extermination camps, mostly at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Duke, however, did not realize where they were. They met some acquaintances while waiting in a hall near the camp and arranged a private cottage on the campgrounds. That evening they sang songs and played games in order to suppress their feelings of insecurity and disorientation. When Duke went to get food in the morning, she first realized how big the camp actually was. Behind the barbed wire she saw people wearing the Star of David. The last transport of Jews from Westerbork was on 13 September 1944, a few days after the NSB families had left. When her memoirs were published in 1989, Blaauwendraad-Doorduijn did not mention what kind of discussions their presence at Westerbork had evoked among their group. She wrote how she later reflected on having been at a place so tightly connected to the Holocaust:

After the war when I heard what kind of camp it was I found it terrible that we had been there, there of all places. Only much later did it truly occur to me how horrible this must have been for the Jewish inhabitants [sic]. That they were in the anteroom of hell, did not have any future. How unbearable the fears of those parents for their children must have been.²⁹

Like many others who wrote their memoirs in order to come to terms with their pasts as children of Nazi collaborators, Duke contrasted and compared her experiences with those of other people in danger.

The awareness of their new identities as refugees was further enhanced when NSB families arrived at their destination in Germany. Duke remem­bers how an arrogant Dutch NSB official awaited them and directed them through the village where people stopped to stare at them.³² The locals were already getting used to the fact that large groups of foreigners were brought to their town. In the last stages of the war, millions of people from abroad stayed as refugees, POWs (prisoners of war), or as compulsory, forced, or slave laborers in Germany.

While not necessarily welcomed with open arms, the Dutch National Socialists in Germany enjoyed a position that was different than the one they had occupied in the Netherlands. In Germany, they were no longer confronted with a large majority that regarded them as traitors. Their newly constructed identities as refugees could thus be further reinforced. This is particularly important for the children of collaborators: in describing their stay in Germany, they do not mention any fear of, for instance, being “dis­covered” or punished but focus on ordinary hardships for (child) refugees during war, such as bad housing, lack of food, and the fear of bombings. Thus, their accounts may resemble those of German “children of the war.” But sometimes they also stress the differences between themselves and the Germans, who as a result of worsening conditions in the evacuation camps became more and more the enemy for some.³⁵ Consequently, the self-image of being a victim of the Germans could also take root.

In Germany, it soon became clear that the officials of the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt³⁶ regarded Dutch Nazi supporters as welcome extra support for the German war effort. Apart from daily work on farms and in factories for the adults, many of the older children were (often consensually) sent elsewhere for “war service.” An unknown number of children were separated from their families. Iet, then a girl in her early teens, was disappointed when her sister was sent to a camp in the Sudetenland and she was not.

The children of collaborators directly experienced war when the German cities near their camps were bombed or when they became combatants and actual participants in the German war machine. When the latter is described in a memoir, it is usually depicted as an unwilling consequence of German policy and as something horrible to happen to a child. Parents' responsibil­ity for this participation in the war effort or the consequences of the chil­dren's own choices are seldom discussed in the memoirs. The framework of the stories is that of the innocent child who is swallowed up by the war. A telling example is the story of Rinnes Rijke. One day in the autumn of 1944, Rinnes was taken to a Hitler youth house (HJ-HeimJ in Hanover. Rinnes was eleven years old and, in fact, too young for the HJ. Although he felt quite proud that he had a uniform, he was also the smallest boy in the home, the only one from the Netherlands, and totally unaccustomed to the militarized way of life in an HJ-Heim.

Rinnes's memoirs were published in 1982. His book was one of the first published accounts of a collaborator's child and, as such, received consider­able attention. Rinnes framed his memories around the title Niet de schuld, wel de straf (Not Guilty, but Still Punished). In his book, he focused on the revenge that was exacted on him by the Dutch public for being the son of a collaborator. Rinnes did not analyze what had happened to him since the framework of “punished without guilt” made that superfluous. He was not looking for ways to understand his past or the relationship with his family and society but was rather seeking to convince his readers of the unjust treatment he received after the war in the Netherlands.⁴⁰ Interestingly, he did not present his period of “exile” in Germany in 1944 and 1945 in terms of injustice and punishment. Conditions at the HJ house were harsh, but he accepted it as a part of what war was about.

The return to the Netherlands, especially for children who had lost contact with their parents, could be a troubled trip. After the German sur­render, millions of displaced persons had to be repatriated. Among them were about 300,000 people from the Netherlands, including 270,000 Dutch workers (mainly men) who had been forced to work in Germany, about 13,000 Dutch men and women who were released from concentra­tion camps, and 10,500 Dutch POWs.⁴¹ According to official sources, there were about 4,500 Dutch willingly residing in Germany at the end of the war, including volunteers in the German military forces and collaborators, many of whom were Dolle Dinsdag refugees.⁴² It is unclear whether these statistics included their children. It is possible that in the chaos of the May 1945 period, children traveling alone or in small groups did not stand out. Lia was with other NSB children in Theresienstadt at the end of the war and remembered that liberated Jewish women took care of them. In men­tioning this, she also referred to the maltreatment she received on her return to the Netherlands. Tom, then aged 12, and Nico, 10, had similar experi­ences on returning from a Kinderlandverschickung (a holiday camp in the countryside, KLV) in Czechoslovakia.⁴³ Ida also traveled back through the frontlines. She was questioned by Dutch border guards, and it was at that stage, as she explained it, that her humiliation began. Henk, who was then 12, also remembered this.⁴⁴ As soon as the children encountered other Netherlanders, the enormous cleavage between the collaborators and their children and the rest of Dutch society became apparent. The children feared that Bijltjesdag was imminent. “We will hang you all from the highest trees,” warned a man Rinnes met on a train to Belgium.⁴⁵

Rinnes himself did not encounter any bad treatment on his return to the Netherlands, and even though many Dutch officials did not seem very friendly, there was always someone willing to take care of him. Rinnes lied about his past, keeping silent on his NSB and HJ connections and claimed that he had been sent to a children’s holiday camp in Germany. The border administration dismissed him and sent him home. The real disappointment occurred when he found out that his father had married a woman who instantly began taking out all her frustrations on him. Rinnes urged his readers to share his opinion that that it was “Dutch society” that had let him down, assigning him the stigma of being a war criminal and failing to rescue him from his evil stepmother. Rinnes's maltreatment at the hands of his stepmother symbolizes for him what society did to him: where he had longed for a safe home, instead he found ongoing hardship. It is noteworthy that Rinnes avoids examining the relationship with his father, his mother, and his stepmother and instead focuses on the punishment inflicted on children of collaborators by society at large. He appealed to the readers to stand up and exclaim that such a society should be ashamed of itself and that surely they did not want to belong to a community that punishes innocent children.

An example of an autobiography that revolves totally around the topic of unjust punishment by society was written by “P Berserk.”⁴⁶ “Berserk” was one of the few Dutch boys from a working-class background who attended a German cadet school. His father and elder brothers all fought on the eastern front. “Berserk” was bullied at school and was, therefore, sent to a German school, which did not make things any easier since he had to wear his uniform publicly, making him an easy target for Dutch children in the streets. In autumn 1944, he and his schoolmates were sent to build trenches on the western front. They had to work on evacuated land in the Belgian-German border region. They received meager rations and the German boys blamed everything that went wrong on the Dutch boys. When the fighting reached their positions, “Berserk” was already suffering from hunger and a lice infestation. In the midst of the raging of the war, while being shot at by American fighters and listening to the German anti­aircraft guns responding, it dawned on him that the whole Übermenschen story was one big lie. His belief in National Socialism further crumbled when a group of Red Cross nurses came to powder the naked bodies of all men present against scabies. Like “white Negroes,” “Berserk” wrote, we were dancing and screaming in the night.⁴⁷ After that they were sent to the German heartland. “Berserk” ended up near the border with Poland at the end of 1944 and decided to look for his father, who was supposed to be in Posen at that time. He soon ended up going west again with the refugee masses fleeing from the Russian troops. Then all hell really broke loose. His impressions of this period consisted mostly of lying in the mud in the burn­ing cities of Dresden, Berlin, and Hamburg with his hands pressed against his ears against the thunder of bombardments.⁴⁸ He managed to get to Schleswig Holstein, where he worked for various farmers until Dutch offi­cials discovered him at the end of the summer and returned him to the Netherlands to be put on trial for serving in enemy forces.

In contrast to Rinnes's reception in the Netherlands, in cases like “Berserk's” it was obvious that youngsters returning to the country had participated in the Nazi war effort. The stress on innocence in these mem­oirs is in direct opposition to the way these adolescents were often seen at the time: as Hitler's soldiers. “Berserk” may have been a child soldier, but he was still seen as being active in the German war effort and was consequently regarded as a danger to the Dutch and Allied cause and as a person deserving punishment for his pro-Nazi acts. When “Berserk” returned to the Netherlands, for example, he was beaten and humiliated by border guards.⁴⁹

On their arrival in the Netherlands, the expectation many children had of Bijltjesdag became reality. Anticipated and experienced events mingled with rumors and stories that filled the border and internment camps. Central to all the stories of repatriation is the uncertainty about their own position and future. At the time, women were rumored to have been raped, men beaten and shot at, children taken away, maltreated, and put in deten­tion centers until they reached the age of maturity. Many camp guards were indeed lax about keeping to formal prison rules. They were volunteers who lacked a professional background and often felt that they were guarding the conquered enemy giving them the right to abuse the internees. Camp com­manders did not always discipline their guards for the abuse of the detainees and sometimes they even encouraged it.⁵⁰ “Berserk” described how he was forced by the guards to jump around like a frog, a humiliation often mentioned by interned collaborators,⁵¹ but that he refused:

I'd rather die than do that, it runs through my head. They lock me in a dark room. I am hungry. I have wet my trousers. My face bleeds. I am in utter darkness and weep like a child. Those are the images of my adolescence! Your liberation was my mental death!⁵²

This last exclamation illustrates how “Berserk,” like Rinnes, framed his story as an accusation and wanted to invoke in Dutch readers compassion and feelings of shame that their society allowed these things to happen to innocent children. “Berserk” most probably did not choose his pseudonym by accident. His memoirs, published shortly after Rinnes', were fragmented and interwoven with outcries about him getting angry and violent while writing down his memories. He raged against the society that had made this human wreck out of him.

Duke is much more inquisitive than both Rinnes and “Berserk.” She and her mother returned home via Bremen, where Dutch repatriation officials interrogated them. When Duke refused to give up the names of other NSB families in her street, one of the men grabbed her, and she suggests in her text that he sexually assaulted her. She avoided specifying what happened and appeared to shy away from putting this memory explicitly on paper.⁵³ To her this experience may have been an example of her ultimate humilia­tion not just as a child of collaborators but also as a girl. She avoided telling her mother about what had happened, fearful that her mother's reaction would further endanger their position. Later she witnessed the humiliation of other collaborators. When they arrived back in the Netherlands, Duke wrote that they had to watch how men had to run circles in a schoolyard while being shot at.⁵⁴ At the border they were, like all repatriates, disin­fected. Duke described this as something she found very humiliating. Having DDT sprayed on her and the other repatriates' naked bodies sym­bolized their vulnerability and invoked associations with vermin that needed to be destroyed.⁵⁵ The act of disinfection signified to her that she would, from now on, be treated as a second-class citizen by her own people and became, therefore, a part of the memorial framework of social punishment.

For “Berserk” and Rinnes it was not so much the failure of their families to prevent their participation in the German war effort or even that some parents actually sent their children off to participate in the war that was central to their narratives. Rather, it was that these experiences at the front were seen in the Netherlands as proof of their own, personal, guilt and as evidence that they were traitors to the national cause. Society labeled them “war criminals,” while they identified themselves largely as victims. The source of this victimization was thus, in their minds, transferred from the war itself to the social reaction to it afterwards. For many collaborators' children who returned from Germany, the public's condemnation of these young people's actions became a defining experience. The shock of being regarded as perpetrators of war crimes dominated their memories, exacer­bating the image they had of themselves as damaged children who were innocent victims of the war.