DUTCHMEN IN THE FREE WORLD

Prof. Dr. Loe de Jong,
Heavily armed, U-bote and Merchant raiders

In the heart of the City of London, until German bombs destroyed it, stood the Dutch Reformed Church Austin Friars. On May 10, 1941, when it was a year since Hitler had invaded our country, hundreds of Dutchmen who worked in London gathered here (I was one of them) with Queen Wilhelmina in their midst. The Prime Minister, Prof. Gerbrandy, ended his short speech with a call for remembrance. Queen Wilhelmina with Prince Bernhard at her side during the memorial service in the destroyed church, Austin Friars

Page 395 tm 420
📚 Dutch Version
📚 English Version

PROF. MR. P.S. GERBRANDY

Let us remember in one minute of reverent silence all those dead, wherever they were, who in the past year sacrificed themselves in this camp for the preservation of the country and the maintenance of Christian freedom.

And they remembered, each in their own way, those who had the privilege of working in freedom. On 13 May 1940, Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard arrived in London with Princesses Beatrix and Irene. In the evening of that day, Queen Wilhelmina arrived and was followed by the ministers. One thing was certain for the Queen: the Netherlands had to continue the war with whatever strength it had left.

In her view, the Netherlands was closely linked to the House of Orange, to the dynasty. So the future of the dynasty had to be guaranteed. She decided to send her daughter and her two granddaughters to Canada. There was a flight connection from London to Lisbon and from Lisbon you could fly to America, but that seemed risky to her (she had never flown). Early June, the old Dutch cruiser 'Sumatra', escorted by the new, not yet completed 'Jacob van Heemskerck', crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He took the three princesses with him.

The safe arrival of her daughter and granddaughters in Canada was one less worry for the Queen. She had enough worries, and one of the most serious was that the Prime Minister, De Geer, lacked any fighting spirit. In early June, De Geer presented Churchill with the idea that England would conclude a compromise peace with Hitler. Churchill grumbled and did not respond. De Geer's defeatism grew stronger when Hitler's Blitzkrieg led first to the dispersion of the French army and then to the capitulation of France.

It was a crushing blow for the Prime Minister, but also for most members of his cabinet. They considered it likely that the Wehrmacht would land in England, and they decided at the end of June that the seat of government would be moved to Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The Queen would also have to go there, but she did not think about that. To the cabinet, she used an argument that was not up for discussion: she said that her health did not allow her to live in a tropical climate.

For her and for all those in London who understood De Geer's views, it became more and more clear week by week that the Prime Minister had to be replaced. Early in August, De Geer informed the Queen that he intended to take a two-week holiday in Switzerland, especially at such a critical stage of the war.

Her answer was that she had lost all confidence in him, and his in consequence that he was resigning. The matter had progressed to such an extent when, on her sixtieth birthday, 31 August, a meeting was held in London's Queen's Hall (the building would be destroyed by German bombs a few weeks later), at which she was represented by Prince Bernhard.

PRINCE BERNHARD

It is very easy to have loyalty and devotion in days of prosperity. But the feelings that you here and all free Dutch people in the entire world and also in the hearts of all Dutch people who live in oppression at home, these feelings that live there, are worth much, much more, they are much deeper. It is loyalty in adversity, which you show our queen today and that is the most beautiful gift you could have given her on her birthday, on this birthday. I who love our queen as you all do, I thank you for this from the bottom of my heart.

Gerbrandy, whose fighting spirits the queen had come to appreciate, became the new prime minister. An attempt was made to get De Geer out to the Indies, but that failed. He flew no further than Lisbon, contacted the German ambassador there and returned to occupied Holland with German help at the beginning of 1941 where he, he said, wanted to live 'as a forgotten citizen'. But that so-called 'forgotten 'De Geers brochure', (early 1942) citizen' published a brochure in early 1942 with the support of the 'wrong' department of Public Information and Arts in which he again urged peace through compromise. De Geer was punished for his attitude after the war by special legal proceedings: a year's imprisonment, conditional.

Gerbrandy was made of different stuff. In the autumn of 1940, London was bombed night after night by the Luftwaffe. Thousands were killed. Many did their best to find a place to sleep outside London, but not Gerbrandy. He did not think of leaving the hotel in the West End, where he had taken up residence. Churchill stayed. So he stayed, too. That was a man who spoke from his heart! Like that at the first meeting of Allied governments.

CHURCHILL

What tragedies, what horrors, what crimes, has Hitler and all that Hitler stands for, brought upon Europe and the world! The concentration camps are overcrowded. Every dawn the firing parties are at their work but nothing is more certain than that every trace of Hitler's footstep, every stain of his infected and corroding fingers will be sponged and purged, and if necessary be blasted from the surface of the earth!

It was Gerbrandy who achieved that the government in its own radio program to speak to the people in occupied territory and in the Indies as: Radio Oranje. That name was thought up by the socialist journalist Meijer Sluijser, who had escaped to England in the May days of 1940. As an official of the Government Information Service I got my job at Radio Oranje. In the first years I did not think our programs were very good for all kinds of reasons, of which the lack of information from occupied Netherlands was one of the most important. The radio cabaret 'De Watergeus' had some popularity in 1941. There the members, including Jetty Paerl, also performed in England sometimes.

JETTY PAERL

But after rain always comes sunshine And after that dark time of arbitrariness of shame and terror there will be a day of joy and reunion. We are proud and full of courage, because the people of the Netherlands are holding up well, the small Holland is defending itself bravely like a giant 't Is Oranje, 't Blijf Oranje is the motto for you, for me and for 'De Watergeus'.

Our broadcasts generally only improved when Radio Oranje, with me, was merged with the Dutch broadcasting company for seafarers, 'De Brandaris'. It was run by the journalist Henk van den Broek, born in Rotterdam (he called himself 'De Rotterdammer') and by the writer A. den Doolaard. Of course, the BBC news broadcasts were also of great importance to the people in occupied territory. In addition, the Government Information Service, which employed about a hundred of the thousand people working for the departments, ensured that from the autumn of 1941 onwards, copies of the monthly magazine De Wervelwind were regularly dropped over occupied territory in miniature format.

When the occupying forces decided to confiscate all radios in the summer of 1943, the newspaper De Vliegende Hollander was added to De Wervelwind, which was initially distributed rather irregularly and in a not so large circulation by aircraft. But from the autumn of 1944 onwards, tens of thousands of copies were dropped almost daily over the cities in all provinces north of the major rivers and in such magazines one found evidence that what the Netherlands, even after the fall of the Indies, still had in the free world, was used for the war. And then I think first of the battle at sea.

Everything that the Allies needed for their offensives: troops, weapons, had to be brought in overseas. The same applied to part of the food in England and of the raw materials of the English arms industry. Fast ships, passenger ships for example, used for troop transport, crossed the oceans on their own, but the slower freighters were combined into convoys that eventually numbered a hundred and fifty ships.

These convoys were hunted by the feared German U-boats. Sometimes these U-boats could carry out their attacks above water. But the German naval units and camouflaged German freighters that were heavily armed, the so-called Merchant raiders, could also be a danger. Independently sailing ships or convoys were also attacked by the Luftwaffe when they came near Europe. Initially, many ships had hardly any defences. After a while, they all did. Of course, the Allied naval units hunted down the U-boats. Aeroplanes also took part in this hunt for the U-boats. These planes forced the U-boats to stay underwater. Later in the war, a flight deck was added to several oil tankers, including two Dutch ones. Such an aircraft carrier ensured that the U-boats stayed away during the day.

The battle at sea led to great anxiety among the Allied war leaders until the first months of 1943: the shortage of ships became acute. Afterwards, the battle was clearly won. In this battle, the Dutch passenger and cargo fleet suffered heavy losses. Of twenty passenger ships used as troop transport ships (the largest, the 'Nieuw-Amsterdam', transported more than a million passengers, including Allied soldiers and German and Italian prisoners of war), six were sunk. Of the more than eight hundred (820) cargo ships, including two hundred coastal ships, almost four hundred (380) were lost. This battle at sea cost the lives of sixteen hundred of the twelve thousand Dutch crew members. But there were many more (I estimate eight thousand) whose ships ran into a German mine or were hit by an enemy torpedo or were fired upon once or several times.

Those who sailed the oceans during those war years were in mortal danger day and night. This was especially true for the engine room crew, who were furthest away from the life-saving equipment on board. On one such life raft, originally five crew members of a Dutch ship managed to save themselves. Two Dutch sailors and an American soldier were still alive (they had collected rainwater and picked fish from the sea with their bare hands) when they were rescued after drifting for eighty-three days (and nights).

It is quite understandable that a number of sailors (they had to sail, the government had imposed the sailing obligation on them) were disillusioned. These people were then given a position on shore, where, for example, in London, a thousand people worked at the governing body, the Dutch Shipping and Trade Commission. Approximately one in forty sailors evaded or tried to evade the sailing obligation. These people could then be convicted by the Dutch court installed in London in 1941. One in forty is not many. The others could occasionally go and see cities like London, but when such a period of leave was over, they reported back on board and sailed out, towards the dangers.

Then there was the navy. What ships had escaped from the Netherlands during the May days were immediately put into service. New ships were purchased. Old ships were taken out of the stables and when the ship was finished or made ready for sailing, the queen came on board.

QUEEN WILHELMINA

I would like to take this opportunity to wish the commander, officers and other passengers of this new ship a happy voyage. I am convinced that everyone, in the awareness of the just cause for which we are fighting, will do their duty to the utmost. May God grant you the opportunity to help defeat the enemy, in the awareness that every contribution to the final victory from the Dutch side brings the time closer when we will all return to a free and independent fatherland. Know that my thoughts will be with you in your difficult moments!

PASSENGER

Long live the queen! Hip, hip, hurray!

QUEEN WILHELMINA

Long live the fatherland! Hurray!

The 'Jacob van Heemskerck' (the cruiser had camouflage paint) had a formidable anti-aircraft defence. The same applied to the destroyers, of which the 'Isaac Sweers' was sunk by a U-boat in French North Africa in November 1942.

The ship's doctor of this destroyer was a college friend of my brother's. I had known him for years. If the 'Sweers' was in England, he would come and see me. If a message like that comes about the 'Sweers', you rush to the navy headquarters. 'Have you got the list of casualties yet? Who has been saved?' 'Come back tomorrow.' And then you come back. 'Almost ninety crew members missing - yes, including the ship's doctor.' And what can you do then? You write a letter to his mother and sister via a contact address in Portugal and you continue your work Part of the interior of the submarine 'O 23' Some of our submarines have also been lost in this way.

Incidentally, our most modern boats were better than the English ones. Good work was also done by two gunboats and in the last years of the war by our motor torpedo boats that fought many battles with the coast guard units of the Kriegsmarine. And then, throughout the war, Dutch minesweepers were at work in the waters around England. Some of these minesweepers were also lost, and the war continued.

Those who fought in the air knew this too. The instructors and students of several flying schools of the Military Aviation and the Naval Air Service had escaped from our country. The flying schools also left the Indies, after which several hundred young people received their further training in the United States. Most of them were deployed from Australia, but some joined Dutch squadrons that already existed in England, incorporated into the Fleet Air Arm (these were the pilots who were stationed on aircraft carriers or on English aircraft carriers). Others were incorporated into Coastal Command. These were the squadrons of the Naval Air Service, which with its five hundred crew members first used Lockheed Hudsons and then Mitchell bombers.

There was also a Dutch fighter squadron in the RAF, and that squadron did a great job by shooting down or detonating more than a hundred of the V-1s (unmanned aircraft with an explosive charge) that Hitler launched in the direction of London from June 1944 onwards, above open terrain. Of those who took part in all these air operations (there were also Dutchmen in the ground services), about a third were killed.

Our army, deployed from England, had fewer casualties: the Princess Irene Brigade. The approximately seven hundred Dutch soldiers who turned out to be in England after the May Days of 1940 (most of them the remainder of troops that had moved south from Zeeland), soon left London to be dressed in English uniforms in a tent camp in Wales, in order to prevent confusion. In the autumn the brigade left for a barracks camp in Wolverhampton, not far from Birmingham, a total of around fifteen hundred soldiers ended up. These were both volunteers and conscripts because the government had announced conscription for Dutch people in all allied countries. They did not enjoy this very much.

Many Dutch people who were living in South Africa at the time (mainly people who had emigrated during the years of the deep crisis) did not feel like standing up. In Canada, which did not have conscription itself, the government had no legal remedies and in the United States there was not much interest either. Those who wanted to join up there preferred to do so with the Americans.

In the troop depot for the American hemisphere that was located in Canada, there were only forty recruits at the beginning of 1942. They were commanded by a large staff of officers. One of these officers wrote in a report: 'Fortunately I am still busy with my own affairs' (he was in the liquor trade) 'otherwise I would not know what to do.' The depot in Canada, where a total of eleven hundred soldiers were trained, was closed at the end of 1943.

All this made the brigade a rather strange hodgepodge. Out of frustration, some went to training for the Commando units. That seemed more meaningful to them than the work on the land that the brigade, given the lack of agricultural workers, had to do in the summer. But in the course of 1943-1944, the brigade, reinforced with more than a hundred marines, did become a good combat unit. From the beginning of August 1944, the brigade took part in the battle in Normandy. Before it entered the Netherlands, it was also deployed in Belgium. By the end of the war, more than forty soldiers from its ranks had been killed.

Then Suriname and the Antilles. Suriname was of cardinal importance to the Americans because it was there that the bauxite (aluminium ore) they needed for their military aircraft was mined. Of the hundreds of thousands of American military aircraft, two-thirds were built with aluminium, smelted from Surinamese bauxite. The petroleum refineries on Curaçao and Aruba were of even greater importance to the English. The Royal Air Force aircraft flew largely on petrol refined in the Netherlands Antilles.

There was no conscription in either area and the number of volunteers who came to sign up was not large: about three hundred in Suriname, about three hundred in the Antilles. Princess Juliana was warmly received during these war years in both Paramaribo and, some time later, in Willemstad on Curaçao. But if one considers the limited number of volunteers, one cannot say that the idea of ​​national unity had taken deep root in the West. Princess Juliana naturally came from Canada for these visits, where she devoted herself to the care of the two little princesses. In January 1943 a third princess joined her: Margriet. When she was baptized, men from the merchant navy acted as godfathers.

By this time, early 1943, not much had remained of the good relationship between Queen Wilhelmina and Prime Minister Gerbrandy. There was no difference of opinion between them regarding Dutch participation in the Allied war effort. They also agreed that, in order to alleviate the need that could be expected after the liberation, large stocks of raw materials for food, textiles and footwear as well as tobacco were to be stored mainly in the United States, Canada and Argentina.

They also both wanted that, in order to prevent that after the liberation, while the war against Germany was still continuing, authority would be exercised in our country by American or English soldiers, a Dutch military organisation would be set up under the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower: the Military Authority. This Military Authority would follow the instructions of the government and in turn give instructions to the municipal and provincial authorities. The organisation was set up in London by a high-ranking military officer, Colonel (later General) Kruls. Eisenhower's headquarters approved that it would initially consist of over seven hundred personnel, including almost two hundred officers, that is to say civilians who were temporarily appointed as officers.

Where did the difference of opinion between the queen and Gerbrandy lie? Wilhelmina lived from the vision of a completely renewed Netherlands that had to be built up after the liberation. She was a dominant personality and she wanted more power. But when she was inaugurated in 1898 as an eighteen-year-old girl, she had taken the oath on the Constitution that stipulated that only the ministers supported by a majority in parliament were responsible for government policy, but from mid-1942 an Extraordinary Council that had been installed at that time was verbal.

In London, however, there was no parliament, only an Advisory Council (which also included Engelandvaarders) that had only limited powers. This meant that if the queen refused to sign a draft bill that she did not like, no ministers had the power to make her sign it anyway. There was no parliament. What the Queen wanted was a change to the Constitution that would put her above the ministers and allow her to set the main lines of policy. This change had to be accomplished according to the rules set out in the Constitution itself.

So after the liberation she wanted a cabinet that would make a draft bill. That bill had to be accepted by parliament with at least a two-thirds majority. But which parliament was that? Both the queen and the London cabinet thought that the Lower House that had been elected in 1937 was no longer representative. So after the liberation an emergency parliament had to be set up first. The members had to be appointed and the queen trusted that in that emergency parliament the illegality that, she thought, agreed with her completely, would set the tone.

I must mention here that Queen Wilhelmina had acquired a great name in occupied Netherlands. She addressed the people on the radio more than thirty times: excellent speeches, combative, humane. That she had prevented the government from disappearing to the Indies in 1940 and that she had pushed De Geer aside, was of course known to some people who thought at the time that she should lead us after the war. Many Engelandvaarders thought so too. 

All these mostly young people were received by the queen and she had long conversations with several of them after such an initial reception. But Gerbrandy and the other ministers as well as the leaders of the pre-war parties in occupied territory, whose opinions Gerbrandy had obtained via Switzerland, rejected the constitutional amendment that the queen desired. According to them, the queen, if she determined policy, could become a centre of division.

Nothing came of that intention of Queen Wilhelmina. In her plans she had given an important place to Prince Bernhard. In those years in England he lived with the armed forces with heart and soul. He also learned to fly. He made a film of it himself and also provided recordings of flights that he made in 1944, without the queen knowing, with an American bomber with which he operated over occupied France. 

The Queen wanted him to be appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, which could be important because the entire apparatus of the Military Authority would then fall under his jurisdiction. But that appointment did not go through: the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Eisenhower, had no desire to have a Dutch Commander-in-Chief.

There was a second setback for the Queen. At the end of September 1944, she invited the illegality in occupied territory by telegram to one of the secret agents (a telegram that the cabinet was unaware of) to send a delegation of five men to her for consultation on her plans and also on the composition of the emergency parliament. She had refused to sign a proposal for this that had been submitted to her by all the ministers. This delegation would be able to cross over to the liberated south via the Biesbos, but the Queen's telegram only led to heated debates.

Many illegal groups felt that the illegality should not concern itself with post-war politics and the end result was that no delegation left at all. The only thing the queen achieved at that time was that, after the Gerbrandy cabinet had fallen apart, a new cabinet was formed in early 1945. This consisted mainly of people from the liberated south whom she had chosen herself. She wanted to get rid of Gerbrandy, but Van Kleffens, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, made it clear to her that he was irreplaceable because of his excellent reputation among the allies. 

In March 1945, the queen visited the liberated south, where she set foot on Dutch soil for the first time in almost five years in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. After the liberation of the entire country, she held a series of discussions which resulted in her instructing Schermerhorn and Drees to form the first post-war cabinet.

🧩 But she did not bring up the issue of the constitutional amendment again. She never did so, Drees once informed me. And there was (I would add: fortunately) an amendment to the political position of the bearer, or bearer, of the crown.

When the entire country was liberated in May 1945, this did not coincide with the end of the Second World War. In the Far East, it was still raging in full force. At that time, in the Dutch East Indies, where only a few points had been liberated, fierce fighting was going on on the oil island of Tarakan. Everywhere else in the archipelago, the Japanese were still in charge. From March 1942, when the commander of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army had capitulated on Java, it had been a point of constant concern for the government in London how the Dutch East Indies could be liberated and how Dutch authority could be restored there.

At the last moment, the lieutenant governor-general, Van Mook, had escaped from the Indies and among the few high-ranking people he had taken with him was the Indonesian Soekarno who at that time held the highest position an Indonesian could achieve: member of the Council of the Dutch Indies (you could say: the Indies Council of State). He was a Javanese administrative aristocrat. He and Van Mook were appointed ministers in London. Van Mook argued there that we had to offer the Indonesians something in political terms and this was partly because the Americans, who we expected to defeat the Japanese, were opposed to all colonialism and saw no point in an unchanged continuation of Dutch rule.

Queen Wilhelmina visited the United States in the summer of 1942. It was President Roosevelt who convinced her that the Netherlands had to accommodate the Indonesian nationalists. Soejono said in the cabinet meetings that compensation would not help if it did not also include the recognition, in principle, of Indonesia's right to self-determination. But that went too far for all ministers, including Van Mook, and the result was that in a speech that the Queen made in December 1942 ('the 7 December agreement'), nothing more was said than that the Indies (and Suriname and the Antilles) would take a place equal to the Netherlands as part of the Kingdom after the war.

Incidentally, that speech did not get through to the Indies at all. It was a great disadvantage for the government that the Indies were divided over two operational zones. Sumatra belonged to the English zone because the English were concerned with the reconquest of Singapore. But the entire rest of the Indies belonged to the zone where the American general MacArthur, who had escaped from the Philippines to Australia where he had his headquarters in Brisbane, led all operations.

Malacca and Singapore were fought from Ceylon. Admiral Helfrich's headquarters were in Ceylon. Most of the Dutch and Indian forces ended up in Australia, a continent as large as half of Europe. The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army eventually gathered three thousand men, including six hundred volunteers from the Antilles and Suriname. A technical battalion was also formed in a separate camp, not far from Brisbane. A squadron of bombers and a squadron of fighters participated in the war.

These air forces sometimes achieved success. The destroyer Tjerk Hiddes' made a valuable contribution by evacuating the forces of the KNIL and the Australians from Timor, where they had been fighting the guerrilla war against the Japanese for almost a year. The cruiser 'Tromp' took part in two bombardments of the port of Sabang near North Sumatra in 1944. MacArthur's operations also received important support from the freighters that had escaped from the Indies.

But all these Dutch forces together (which were also divided over two operational zones) were of course not very substantial and it was also a great disadvantage that the Dutch authorities received almost no messages from the occupied Indies. They could listen to the Japanese radio broadcasts, but from Ceylon it was not until the summer of 1945 that they succeeded in dropping a few secret agents over North Sumatra, and all attempts made from Australia to deploy secret agents in Java failed. Incidentally, whites were also used who of course immediately stood out and were arrested by the Indonesians.

Van Mook realised that the Netherlands was far too weak to reconquer the whole of the Indies. His concept was that the actual battle should be fought by the Americans and, on Sumatra, by the English. The militarised government that would initially be established, the Netherlands-Indies Civil Administration, the NICA, had to be supported by approximately thirty thousand lightly armed Dutch troops, the authority battalions, that would be trained in Australia. Furthermore, a marine brigade would be deployed in the Indies that would be trained in the United States.

In April 1944, the Americans landed on Dutch New Guinea, near Hollandia. Van Mook went there to inspect. He knew that he could count on MacArthur, but the decision as to which operations his armed forces would undertake was not taken by that commander-in-chief, but in Washington. No one there felt like getting involved in the difficulties that might be expected on Java.

MacArthur was given permission to recapture the island of Tarakan and after Tarakan also the oil production area of ​​Balikpapan. Early July 1945 a landing was carried out there with support from the cruiser 'Tromp' among others. Just like on Tarakan, units of the KNIL also took part in the fighting here. When the fighting was over, the Nica started distributing food and reconstruction was started. But MacArthur's proposal to subsequently land on Java with four divisions was rejected in Washington.

Further serious setbacks followed. Firstly, all Dutch ships and borders fell under the Allied warfare and the Schermerhorn cabinet was unable to release them for its own actions.

„Selten oder nie hat ein Kabinett in unserem Land unter schwierigeren Umständen gehandelt als derzeit“, begann Premierminister Wim Schermhorn, Vorsitzender des ersten Nachkriegskabinetts, heute
seine NOS-Rede für Radio Herrijzend Nederland.

Gemeinsam mit Willem Drees, dem verwaltungserfahrenen gemäßigten Sozialdemokraten, war Schermerhorn, selbst ein großer Befürworter einer Verwaltungserneuerung, Ende letzten Monats von Königin Wilhelmina damit beauftragt worden, ein provisorisches Kabinett der nationalen Einheit zu bilden. Jede bedeutende Bewegung sollte darin vertreten sein.

Zweitens zog die australische Regierung ihre Zusage zurück, den Autoritätsbataillonen die Ausbildung im Land zu gestatten. Drittens: Ohne vorheriges Wissen des Kabinetts entschieden die Vereinigten Staaten und Großbritannien am 15. August 1945, dem Tag der Kapitulation Japans, dass ganz Indien unter britische Herrschaft gehöre.

And so this last phase of the Second World War ended with a painful contrast between the small Netherlands, which had ended up in unforeseen difficulties, and the United States, which had the power to land in Japan itself if it so wished. The new weapon that America used was decisive. Japan capitulated and while the Indonesians on Java, but also elsewhere, made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the return of Dutch authority, a high-ranking Japanese delegation arrived in Tokyo Bay on board the American battleship 'Missouri' to be confronted with the power of the victor in the person of General MacArthur. He had been driven out of the Philippines at the beginning of 1942 and was now the spokesman for America and all its allies.

Japan was defeated but the Netherlands lost the Indies. If we now see how decolonisation has taken shape all over the world since 1945, it is certain that Indonesia would have become independent anyway. The transfer of sovereignty took place four years after our liberation in the Palace on the Dam in Amsterdam and I think we should see that acceleration in the emancipation of the Indies as one of the most important consequences that the Second World War has had for our country.

Wilhelmina's Return to the Netherlands took place on 13 March 1945, when she returned to London after five years of exile and entered Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. Wilhelmina, the Queen of the Netherlands, became a symbol of resistance against the Germans. Her speeches for Radio Oranje in particular made a great impression and influenced the Dutch resistance against the Germans.

Wilhelmina's performance, especially via Radio Oranje, earned her much praise during and shortly after the war. Winston Churchill is said to have called the Queen "the only man in the Dutch cabinet". But as the years went by, criticism also arose about the role of the Queen during the Second World War.

For example, Wilhelmina tried to set up a new state structure, in which the Cabinet and parliament would surrender influence in favor of the Queen. But above all, she is said to have directed her speeches on the radio too little to the Dutch people who suffered from the persecution by the Nazis. Both during and after the war, she paid little attention to the Holocaust, while research showed that Wilhelmina knew or could have known that there were camps in which people were imprisoned under miserable conditions.

↪ HOME Prof. Dr. Loe de Jong
DUTCHMEN IN THE FREE WORLD
↪ OCCUPATION AFTER 50 YEARS

 

↪ HOME SITE MENU
↪ EXCUSABLE EXCULPATIONS MENU

UNICEF - SAVE THE CHILDREN - HOMELESS FOUNDATION - ICRC RED CROSS
OXFAM INTERNATIONAL - GREENPEACE - WWF WILDLIFE - PAPAGENO
LIVESTRONG - DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS - WELCOME TRUST