A Brill Calendar: December 19

The Tragic Consequences of the February Strike

Few facets of the Nazi-occupation of the Netherlands from May 1940 until May ’45 were more controversial.

The harsh fact is that the national community witnessed a much more thorough and effective deportation and murder of its Jewish compatriots than what other puppet Nazi regimes were able (or willing) to realize in neighbouring countries like Belgium and Denmark; or even occupied France. No development ever put the country to greater shame.

The grim truth vexed two generations of scholarly and journalistic inquiry and study. Only recently a remarkable doctoral thesis claimed that a bitter irony took its toll during those five years, the darkest in the history of the Kingdom: a ‘Law of Reversed Effort’ must have been at work. Compared to the countries mentioned, Jewish families, enterprises and activities were more substantial, much longer established and assimilated in the Netherlands; in the whole social range from small crafts to great learning. When, for instance, a superb legal mind like Professor Carel Asser died, December 19, 1898 in Leyden, he had been preceded – and became succeeded – in his profession by other members of his illustrious dynasty.

The irony was unwittingly enabled – so much is now clear – by the legendary ‘Februari Staking’ (the February Strike) early in 1941, just ten months after the invasion, when – starting in Amsterdam and initialized by the Dutch Communist Party, then illegal – many Dutch men and women rose against the German presence in protest against the iniquities inflicted on their Jewish country-men. Nonplussed, totally surprised, the SS first quenched the resistance bloodily; only to quickly invent a new strategy and different tactics, unprecedented elsewhere in Europe, to avoid such public drama and commotion in the future of the ‘Third Reich’ in its recent extension. The bureaucratic ploy proved to be appallingly effective and efficient; surprising even the inventors themselves.