The German invasion of the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 made the anonymous author of Onder de vleugels van de partij: kind van de Führer (Under the Wings of the Party: Child of the Führer) feel excited.1
The invading Germans were National Socialists just like himself and his parents. Now, finally, the bullying and street fights between the few supporters and many adversaries of National Socialism would be over.
The new era had arrived! But living in Rotterdam, the 12-year-old soon saw his city erupt in flames during Luftwaffe bombing four days later. The adventure that was supposed to come with war was accompanied by fear and anxiety and fundamentally changed his life. In the course of the war, he would be sent to a National Socialists-childrens home in eastern Germany, conscripted into the Wehrmacht, and eventually enter the service of the SS. This Dutch boy ended the war actually fighting on the German side in the battle of Arnhem and in the Ardennes.In contrast to this story, most children of Dutch National Socialists remained noncombatants and did not experience the harsh realities of war and occupation until 5 September 1944, when the Allies liberated the southern provinces of the Netherlands and collaborators fled en masse out of the recently liberated areas. Dolle Dinsdag (Mad Tuesday), as 5 September came to be known, plays an important role in the autobiographies and memoirs that these children later wrote.2 Throughout the course of September and October, collaborators who had not succeeded in getting north of the main rivers were mostly arrested. The rest of the Netherlands remained in German hands and experienced the harshest period of the Nazi occupation. For many collaborators, the period from September 1944 up to the summer of 1945 was a time of growing insecurity and degradation. This period was particularly harrowing for the women and children involved, who, in spite of often having been minimally politically active, were now faced with the far-reaching consequences of the political choices and deeds of their husbands and fathers.
“Suffering” was from the beginning regarded as an integral element in the Dutch experience of the Second World War, epitomized by the idea that this small neutral country had been brutally invaded by its large, aggressive neighbor and had been subjected to its regime of terror for five long years. Suffering and innocence are combined themes in Dutch postwar national identity,3 having become synonymous with rejecting evil and, therefore, with being on “the good side.”4 By the 1960s, the idea of national suffering was superceded by the suffering of various groups within society: the Dutch Jews were the subjects of initial attention but were soon followed by other groups affected by the war, such as bombardment victims, resistance fighters, and the “second generation,” including the children of collaborators. The definition of suffering at the hands of the German enemy or National Socialism broadened to include suffering endured as a result of decades of societal ignorance and neglect or, rather, the suffering inflicted by postwar society on “war victims.” Children in testimony books thus became, in their own minds and through their publications, representatives of the helpless innocent nation that could not withstand the horrors of war.5
The memoirs or “testimony books” of children of collaborators began to appear in the early 1980s and drew attention to the effects of the war and occupation on them at the time and later in their adult lives.6 The children, both those who actively contributed to the German war effort and those who did not, present their stories in these memoirs within the narrative framework of the “innocent child.” In doing so, they mobilize the notion of unjust suffering that is central to the Dutch collective memory of the war, from which they are otherwise largely excluded because of their status as the children of the “enemy within.” Placing themselves under the same umbrella as other “war victims” had obvious therapeutic effects on the people concerned.
However, the significant peculiarities of their actual individual experiences and memories must be noted in examining their testimonies.Unlike other “war children,” the offspring of collaborators shared a diffuse fear of a Bijltjesdag (a Day of Reckoning): an Allied victory was expected to unleash the revenge of the Dutch population on the collaborators. Collaborators’ children often hoped for a German victory or at least a “draw.” These hopes, fears, and expectations of a postwar future clearly set these children apart from the rest of the Dutch population. In their memoirs, children of collaborators blur the distinctions between the concepts of “victim,” “perpetrator,” and “bystander” and thereby invite a questioning of the divisions between “right” and “wrong” (goed and fout) that were forcibly imposed by the Dutch on all who lived in the country during the war. During the 1980s, however, the accounts of these children began to attract increasing public interest following a critical shift in attitudes away from the early postwar myths of national heroism and resistance in the Netherlands.7 This interest was sharpened in conjunction with a move in scholarly and public interest from heroism to victimhood. The image of the innocent child who had endured hardships replaced questions regarding the responsibility of perpetrators of war crimes and issues of guilt and responsibility that had previously dominated Dutch views of those who had in one way or another collaborated with the Nazis.
Telling the war stories of collaborators’ descendents who return to the position and perspectives of childhood in their memoirs has important consequences. In Western culture, especially since the twentieth century, childhood is regarded as a distinct phase in life. Childhood is also regarded in a utopian light: it ought to be carefree and a time of happiness. When a child “loses” his or her innocent childhood, it is generally perceived as unfair or even tragic.8 These cultural notions about how childhood should be experienced influence how readers interpret stories about children.
When the main protagonist of a war story is a child, the narrator has the possibility of addressing questions that would be much more difficult if told from an adult’s perspective. For instance, the notion of helplessness associated with children allows the helplessness of adults to be addressed—a much more uncomfortable and problematic reality but one of crucial importance when thinking about the impact of war on combatants and noncombatants alike.It is also important to interrogate the cultural association of helplessness with innocence. The supposed helplessness of the child invites us to regard him or her as an innocent who cannot, therefore, be interrogated on political or moral issues. “Innocence” makes every evil that befalls the child seem automatically “unjust” or “unfair.”9 When collaborators’ children present their war stories first and foremost as children, the first impulse of the reader to focus on the deeds and ideas of the parents or the moral choices of youngsters engaged directly with the war effort is diverted. The adoption of a “childlike persona” makes it possible for the author to avoid the larger political and historical context of their stories and remove the burden of being scrutinized as a Nazi supporter.
Many of the memoirs written by the offspring of Dutch collaborators focus on exclusion and societal revenge, both feared and real, and on all who were stained by National Socialism. The framework of the “innocent child” thus begins by underscoring an injustice perpetrated by society: these children are depicted as the innocent victims not of their parents' choices but of society's blind revenge. In some memoirs, parental choices are questioned; in others, they are not. This does not mean, however, that for all children of collaborators this framework of punishment by society functions in the same way. As this chapter demonstrates, retribution and the way it is remembered depend on the specific experiences of these children in the last stages of the war. The kinds of “social punishment” they identify depend upon whether they remained at home, were evacuated to rural provinces, or ended up in Germany. The memoirs of children of collaborators enhance our understanding of the ways in which childhood memories are framed. They can reveal the means of dealing with the legacies of collaboration and how these memories have become cohesively integrated in the Dutch collective memory of the Second World War.