Abstract
Reviewed by: Jennifer L. Foray, Purdue University, Indiana, USA
A decade’s worth of scholarship has now demonstrated that Hitler’s foreign conquests and foreign occupations constituted an imperial project: founded on the principles of racial purity, this new empire would span Europe from East to West, with each group of peoples allotted a particular role to play within this Nazi New Order. According to this schematic, the Slavic peoples of the Eastern-most territories were to be exterminated or enslaved, their fertile lands repopulated by intrepid Germanic settlers who would exploit this all-important Lebensraum. With this important contribution to the study of Nazi imperialism, Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel explores Dutch attempts to stake out a claim in this vast continental empire. Designated a ‘Germanic people’, the Dutch would be allowed to participate in this wartime venture, and, as von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel clearly demonstrates, Nazi resettlement and agricultural schemes complemented more long-standing efforts to alleviate rural unemployment in the Netherlands. Consequently, over the course of the war, a few thousand Dutch men and women would resettle in German-occupied Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic territories.
Hitler’s Brudervolk examines the recruitment, relocation and activities of these Dutch volunteers, devoting particular attention to the ‘Dutch East Company’ created by prominent Dutch Nazis to oversee – and monopolize – these resettlement efforts. Von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel locates these wartime projects within multiple histories: the Netherlands’ colonial ventures overseas; pan-Germanism and ‘Greater German’ thinking, as conceptualized in both Germany and the Netherlands; and Dutch agriculture, widely perceived to be in crisis during the first few decades of the twentieth century. However, the central core of the book – and the author’s extensive multi-country archival research – rests with those Dutch organizers and recruits who embarked upon this ‘great adventure’.
Using an array of materials including ego-documents and court records, von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel examines the ideologies and motivations informing this eastward journey as well as the volunteers’ interactions with Dutch supervisors, German administrators and officials, and local residents. These are rich sources, and, in places, the author could mine them for more systematic analyses, especially concerning the rank-and-file volunteers. It would be helpful to know, for instance, the percentage of volunteers citing strictly economic reasons for their involvement versus those who supported the NOC’s ‘Greater German’ worldview, regardless of any formal affiliation with the Dutch Nazi Party. Chapter 3, entitled ‘Embarking on a Great Adventure’, demonstrates that, for some of its advocates, the Eastern settlement programme represented a continuation of centuries-old Dutch colonialism overseas, particularly after March 1942, when the prized Dutch colony of the East Indies was invaded and occupied by the Japanese. But how did individual Dutch volunteers and officials understand this series of events, other than the most obvious response: that the Indies were now lost to the Netherlands, so the Dutch would do best to channel their colonial training and ambitions elsewhere? Did they believe that the Netherlands could regain and retain its overseas colonies and yet still remain part of the German-led Nazi New Order? The author briefly discusses these types of questions, but she might draw even bolder conclusions about these Dutch actors.
Ultimately, these Dutch resettlement schemes would collapse in dramatic form, and not simply because Germany lost the larger war. Whether employed in farming or industry, Dutch overseers and recruits lacked the autonomy they believed they would find in the Eastern territories and were instead forced to assume a subordinate role to their German ‘brothers’. Nor did they find the rich soil unpopulated and theirs for the taking. Quite the contrary, in fact, since, as von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel demonstrates, the Dutch arrivals both witnessed and participated in the exploitation and ill-treatment of local residents, including the murder of those Jews remaining in the area at this time. In the summer of 1942, the NOC, as created by Dutch Nazi and ‘Greater German’ radical M. M. Rost van Tonningen, assumed sole control of the various Dutch ventures operating in the German-occupied East, but only for a short period of time. By mid-1944, with the Red Army advancing through Eastern Europe, the eastern outpost of the Nazi New Order disintegrated, and those Dutch pioneers able and willing to leave their positions retreated westward. Some never returned to the Netherlands. Hundreds were killed by local partisans or the Red Army, while others simply disappeared, their fates still unknown. Those who returned to the Netherlands at the war’s end could expect to be tried as German collaborators. Yet, as explored in the book’s concluding chapters, the post-war tribunals and special courts charged with punishing collaborators occasionally downplayed the political nature of the NOC’s resettlement project: willingness to work in the east typically constituted an aggravating circumstance but not the primary charge against Dutch recruits and NOC officials alike.
This is a well-researched book that restores agency to those Dutch organizations, leaders, and recruits who believed themselves to be charting new imperial terrain. Maps of Dutch settlements, both proposed and actual, would have been useful additions, as would an appended list of leading individuals and their respective agencies/positions.