THE DUTCH ANTON MUSSERT
Prince Bernhard was not happy with it
THE DUTCH ANTON MUSSERT
And now I come to you here in Lunteren with questions that you will have to answer yourself. And the first question is for you: 'Do you consider yourself at war with Germany, yes or no? (Cries: No!) Fine.
This was perhaps as great a shock as the invasion itself: there were Dutch people who were on the side of the enemy. Where did these pro-German Dutch people come from? What was the origin of its NSB, the National Socialist Movement, and what kind of man was its so-called leader, Anton Adriaan Mussert?
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If I give an answer to that, I would like to start by noting that the NSB was from the outset part of a right-wing movement directed against parliamentary democracy (there was also a left-wing movement: the communist movement) that emerged throughout Europe after the First World War. In Italy, the blackshirts of the Fascist Party undertook their march on Rome in 1922. Their leader, Mussolini, established a fascist dictatorship there. In 1923, Hitler attempted to seize power in Germany. He failed in Munich, but less than ten years later he succeeded in Berlin. He was rijkskanselier and the masses who cheer him on that the problems facing the country must henceforth be solved by one man, by the Führer. They also register in other countries, the candidate dictators.
In France, after some time, a professional soldier, Colonel de la Rocque, becomes the most striking candidate. In England, a member of parliament, Sir Oswald Mosley, gathers a following of many thousands. In the Flemish part of Belgium, the Flemish National Alliance comes to the fore and in the Walloon part, the Rex movement, which also wants a fascist-governed Belgium. It is led by Léon Degrelle, later an officer in the Waffen-ss. In our country, in Amsterdam, the third Landtag is held at the end of April 1934 of a group that has existed for several years, the NSB. The German Nazis greet with 'Heil Hitler. The NSB members also have their own greeting: 'Houzee!'.
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There was a big party in Amsterdam. Storm flags of the W.A. and S.S. were carried, party songs were sung and groups shouted 'Houzee!'. On this day, party leader Anton Mussert spoke at a public meeting of the NSB.
The leader of the NSB, Mussert, was almost forty years old in 1934. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he was twenty. He volunteered for the army (which was rare), but soon had to be discharged as a corporal on medical grounds. At the Technical University in Delft he obtained his engineering degree with honors.
In the mid-1920s, our parliament had to decide on the construction of a canal from Antwerp to Moerdijk, part of a treaty to be concluded with Belgium. The Lower House approved that treaty, the First rejected it. Mussert, chief engineer of the water board in the province of Utrecht, who believed that the canal was contrary to the interests of Rotterdam, played a leading role in the Committee of Action against the treaty.
In 1930, the Nazi party suddenly appeared to be the second strongest group in Germany, which was plagued by mass unemployment. This was stimulating and in December 1931 Mussert founded the NSB in Utrecht. He saw himself as the savior of the fatherland. In April 1934, this NSB had approximately twenty thousand members. They wanted to march straight through Amsterdam to the old RAI building where their third Landtag was being held. But the workers of Amsterdam resisted. They took on that fascist demonstration.
What drives all these people? Many by desperation. In 1929 the stock exchanges collapsed. Every year there were more bankruptcies. Mass unemployment was also spreading in our country. In Amsterdam, in the Jordaan, there was a riot. The state should assert itself more, the NS B'ers thought. The actions of the communists, all that division, yes, all other political parties, had to stop. Mussert promised discipline, order and solidarity, the abolition of parliament and a ban on all strikes.
A year later, in 1935, elections for the Provincial States were approaching. Mussert spoke at the NSB national congress in Amsterdam;
ANTON MUSSERT
My comrades, I trust in your courage, your perseverance, your discipline, your solidarity, your will to serve the movement. I trust in your idealism. Keep each other by the pulse, do not let go, then the day will come, our day, on which we can respect our fatherland and be proud of being part of the Dutch people. Then you will experience that your loyalty and your idealism will have purified your life. Houzee my comrades! (Houzee-cry).
The man who speaks there will (his audience knows) be fired two days later as a result of the civil servant ban. That gives him the halo of a martyr among his followers. He leaves his office in Utrecht and can now devote all his time to the election campaign. In those elections, in the spring of 1935, the NSB won one percent of the votes. Those votes came mainly from the middle class. But in wealthy neighborhoods, the percentage could even rise to twenty standers and poor farmers who had been hit hard by the crisis.
The dutch NSB itself saw that result as a big step in the right direction. It also saw the fact that Mussert was able to visit the Dutch East Indies after the elections. At that time, he had a strong following there who supported the NSB in the Netherlands with a lot of money and, to the annoyance of many in our country, was also received at the palace of Governor-General, Jonkheer De Jonge. De Jonge felt a lot of Mussert's ideas.
Two years later, in 1937, in the elections for the House of Representatives, the NSB expected to get at least fifteen percent of the votes, perhaps even twenty-five. However, Prince Bernhard was not happy with it. But instead of eight percent, it became four. How did that happen? Mussert had lost a lot of sympathy because he had sided with Mussolini in the autumn of 1935 when Italy attacked Abyssinia. Moreover, socialists and communists held on to their supporters. As far as the confessional parties were concerned, it was important that the Catholic bishops had prohibited any significant support for the NSB. In the Reformed Churches, all support for that movement was even prohibited.
Furthermore, someone who needed a so-called strong man in the Netherlands could be satisfied with the figure of the prime minister, the anti-revolutionary Colijn. There were other factors that played a role. In Italy and Germany, Mussolini and Hitler could have played on the fear of communism, but the CPN was not a significant force in our country. Then Italy and Germany would have emerged from the First World War with a deep grudge, Italy because it had gained little from the peace, Germany because it had lost the war. This grudge was absent in our country. Also, few people were attracted by the military activities of the NSB and this entire fascist ideology did not fit in with our national character.
The NSB noticed all this. The support among the voters had halved and the number of members now fell continuously. Of every three people who, for whatever reason, became an NSB member before the Second World War, two resigned. You could therefore already conclude in 1937 that in a democratic Netherlands the NSB no longer had a chance. Mussert saw this too, but he trusted that the fascist revolution that he thought would occur throughout Europe would offer him new opportunities. That is why he sought affiliation with Germany. He visited Hitler and in the report he wrote about it there is a passage that is particularly characteristic of his self-esteem: 'For the first time in my life I met someone whose majority I immediately recognize.' This was followed by these words:
Fortunate people, that have such a leader!
Mussert fully approved of Hitler's invasion of Austria and simple annexation of the country to Germany. He applauded the fact that the Sudeten Germans in the peripheral areas of Czechoslovakia were absorbed into Germany. He justified the Germans' entry into Prague and the subjugation of a non-German people, the Czechs. When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Mussert's spiritual alignment with the German Nazis was already so much a fact that Volk en Vaderland, the weekly magazine of the NSB, was able to indicate exactly who would be responsible for the war, following the German model.
Mussert expected nothing less than that Germany would attack and occupy our country during the war. Then he would seize his chance! In April 1939 he was in Berlin and made his views clear. He held a secret meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Auswärtige Amt. Mussert said there according to the report of the official who listened to him:
For Germany, there are two possibilities with regard to the Netherlands for the coming world war: one, Germany makes Holland small and unimportant, or, two, Germany makes Holland as strong as possible with a view to preserving and exploiting its overseas possessions. Eight and a half million Dutch people live in Holland, to which are added five million Flemish people from the current kingdom of Belgium. The overseas possessions of the Netherlands are four to five times as large as Germany with approximately seventy million people. This Dutch empire wants to be Germany's friend after the NSB has seized power... But if the Führer, on whose shoulders all the power and responsibility for the whole of Europe rests, wants to make the Netherlands a vassal state, the work of the NSB in the Netherlands would no longer have any meaning or purpose. He, Mussert, would then immediately stop the work of his movement.
In April 1940, shortly before the German invasion, Mussert went a step further. In a meeting with the secret service that visited him in Utrecht, he made it clear that an official of the German he did not know the date of the German attack, but when it was launched in the early hours of the tenth of May, he left Utrecht (where he did not sleep at home for 1 week) and went into hiding with a fellow party member on a farm in the Gooi.
He had already been hiding there during the day in a sunken road. Our government knew nothing about Mussert's contacts with the Germans. They did consider a large number of NSB members to be unreliable, they wanted to intern eight hundred, but under the influence of the panic in the May days that became about ten thousand. Of those ten thousand, seven were shot dead,
After the capitulation, Mussert thought that Hitler would call him, perhaps to give him power in the Netherlands and in any case for consultation, Nothing of the sort. Hitler sets up a German civil administration and appoints a Reichskommissar, Seyss-Inquart. Worse still, less than two weeks later, a high-ranking SS officer, Gottlob Berger, the organizer of the SS army, the Waffen-SS, comes to Mussert. He presents him with an order from Hitler that he had signed at his headquarters on May 25, 1940: 'I order the deployment of the SS-Verfügungstruppen-regiment 'Westland' Signed: Adolf Hitler. This meant that Hitler wanted to recruit volunteers for the Waffen-SS in our country, which was designated as Westland. Mussert wrote in his diary:
This felt like a slap in the face (...). It turned out to be deception that the Dutch people see themselves as German people. It is terrible. What will become of it?
While some of his advisors say that they should stop their action, that they have no chance if they cooperate with that occupier, he makes a decision that has resulted in great disaster for himself and for all his followers: he continues. He wants to try to make the NSB into a strong movement and then to bring Hitler, who has spoken of Westland, to other ideas. That entire meeting in Lunteren must show Hitler how strong and how pro-German the NSB already is. When Mussert then expects the invasion of England to be imminent at the beginning of September, he sends Hitler a secret telegram that ends as follows:
'On the eve of the great battle between Germany and England, I place the welfare of the Dutch people in your hands, Führer. In the realization that all your decisions and orders are ultimately also for the good of the Dutch people, we await your orders.'
As for these 'orders': Seyss-Inquart has demanded that the NSB must first acknowledge Hitler's leadership in black and white. Mussert does so and in doing so surrenders his own freedom of action. He is received by Hitler, is buried under words and can return to the Netherlands with the message that he must make the NSB as strong and as pro-German as possible. Seyss-Inquart will support the NSB. They may attempt, as they say, 'to conquer the streets'. The money for all uniforms mainly from the occupier and from 1 January 1941 onwards the NSB and all its formations were almost entirely financed by the occupier.
But there were other groups in the audience. First of all there was the Nederlandse Unie. It had eight hundred thousand members. The NSB had only fifty thousand. There was also the movement of the fascist Arnold Meijer who prided himself on being an even more principled anti-Semite than the Germans. Meijer had over ten thousand followers, mainly in Brabant and Limburg. He also had his own daily newspaper, the Nederlands Dagblad, and his own weekly, De Weg, which was hardly read by anyone. To continue this, he also received money from the occupier.
And finally, there is a group that is also subsidized by the occupier, that daubs the swastika everywhere and wants the Dutch (she speaks of Dutch Germans) to immediately merge into Germany. About fifteen thousand men have become members of this National Socialist Dutch Workers' Party, the NSNAP. Seyss-Inquart plays all these groups off against each other. He hopes that the NSB will be freed from its isolation by a much broader movement and when Hitler attacks the Soviet Union in June 1941, he believes that the moment has come for that.
During a demonstration on the grounds of the Amsterdam Ice Club (now the Museumplein), he calls on the whole of the Netherlands to participate in, as it is called, the crusade against Bolshevism. But the leader of the NSB, who has declared himself prepared to accept Hitler's orders, has an advantage. In his heart, Mussert has always been afraid of these Germans, rightly so, but he is now silent about that.
ANTON MUSSERT
My fellow citizens and comrades. You, Mr. Reich Commissioner, have spoken to us, Dutch National Socialists, and over our heads to that part of the Dutch people that understands the great struggle and the enormous events of this time. This people that has such a great history behind it, that has such great qualities within it, this people is too good, much too good to be lost in chaos and the choice is not difficult for the honest person. We old National Socialists made the choice years ago, deliberately and without hesitation out of love for people and fatherland. For us it has always been self-evident that Germany and its Führer have a European mission. We have chosen, for years: for Hitler, against Stalin, against Churchill!
The NSB declares itself prepared to call up volunteers for the fight on the Eastern Front. Arnold Meijer does the same, which costs him a five-year prison sentence after the liberation. The Triumvirate of the Dutch Union refuses, however, and Arnold Meijer finds little response within the National Front. The broader movement that Seyss-Inquart had hoped for does not get off the ground.
Now Mussert, who trusts that Germany will win, wants to eliminate his competitors: the Dutch Union and the National Front must be banned and the NSNAP must be disbanded. Seyss-Inquart does this, but Mussert has to pay a heavy price for it. In December 1941, Seyss-Inquart takes him to Berlin and there Mussert takes this oath in Hitler's hands: 'I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as a Germanic leader, loyalty until death. So help me God.' The protocol is signed by Mussert and Hitler.
Mussert legt den Eid in die Hände Adolf Hitlers ab, Berlin, 12. Dezember 1941, in Anwesenheit von Seyß-Inquart. Diese Eidesleistung (eine der deutlichsten Formen des Hochverrats) blieb in den Niederlanden streng geheim. Auch die NSB-Mitglieder erfuhren zunächst nichts davon. Danach konnte in unserem Land nur noch eine Partei offen auftreten: die NSB.
Anton Mussert
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— HOME Prof. Dr. Loe de Jong— OCCUPATION AFTER 50 YEARS
THE DUTCH ANTON MUSSERT
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