On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Captain C
It’s been a pretty crazy month, what with all the bad noise followed by what seems to be our side coming together with energy and optimism about our new Presidential candidate (about whom I am personally extremely excited). During this time, one of the things I thought about was the visit I made to the Versetsmuseum, the Resistance Museum, in Amsterdam last fall; you may remember I posted a few pics from there in this On The Road set. This week I put together a larger collection of photos from this museum, divided into three parts, perhaps as a reminder, ultimately, that despite all the bad noise, and understanding that people need as long as they need to process all that went down, this is what we’re fighting to prevent. It’s a lot easier to stop the MAGA-types before they get into power than to root them out once they attain it. I, for one, am optimistic that we can do it, and confident that we will.
We start with a propaganda poster of Anton Mussert, the founder of the Dutch Nazi Party in 1931. With the invasion and occupation of May 1940, he became a notorious collaborator, given by Hitler the title of Leader of the Dutch People. He was never given real power, though, that lay with Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and basically worked with the gestapo to suppress resistance. At one point, he raised an SS division of Dutch volunteers which was later sent to the Eastern Front where they got mauled. His last main achievement with what little power he had was not doing anything to stop the hunger winter, in which food was withheld from Dutch civilians by the Nazi occupiers and nearly 20,000 Dutch folks died of starvation.
After the war he was convicted of high treason and executed by firing squad. No more or less than he deserved.
The rest of the six photos of this set were taken in the exhibit on the huge system of files and documents which was used to enforce the occupation and support the suppression of resistance. Before the era of programmable computers, the Nazis and their stooges put a ton of effort, manpower, and material towards efficiently rooting out dissent and ‘undesirable’ people.
Looking up at the mirrored ceiling of the exhibit. If you look carefully, you can see me in the reflection.
A map of the location of all the Jewish residents in Amsterdam. This sort of thing made it easier to round them up when the time came. Now they’d use Google Maps and docs.
Files from the registry office. A black clip with a J was affixed to the files of Jews to make it easier to search for them quickly.
A letter from one of the few Dutch public officials to refuse to sign the ‘Aryan Declaration’, attesting whether he was Jewish or not. Of course, these were used to determine who to fire.
Just a typewriter used (or at least like the ones used) by the bureaucrats who facilitated the occupation and the arrest and deportation of as many of the Netherlands’ Jews, dissidents, and other ‘undesirables’.
Marmot
Cool. Was there more about the resistance itself? You hear more about the French Resistance than the Dutch one.
Princess
It’s a really great museum. Well worth a visit. Of course, the Nazis could not have done what they did without the willing and even eager cooperation of Dutch people.
H.E.Wolf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Our_Aircraft_Is_Missing
This is a 1942 British film from the director-writer team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger*, in which various members of the Dutch Resistance help a stranded aircraft crew return to England.
* Pressburger was a Hungarian-born immigrant to England, having fled from the Nazis in 1935.
Nazi characters in the film are ubiquitous, though never seen on screen.
Marmot
@H.E.Wolf: Thanks!
H.E.Wolf
True of shameful governmental acts the world over… as my aunt and her family, incarcerated by the U.S. government in a concentration camp on U.S. soil during WWII for being of Japanese ancestry, could attest.
On the other hand, there are also always people who resist.
My father – who along with his family fled the Nazis and came to the U.S. – had a good friend in NYC who married a Dutch Jewish woman. She and her family survived because they were hidden and kept safe by non-Jewish Dutch citizens.
And my aunt and her brothers were liberated from the camp by the Quakers running Swarthmore College, who admitted a number of incarcerated students while the camps were still in operation.
Ramalama
Trust the Dutch to make that exhibit look really arresting visually while also conveying that eerie and loathesome time. I’m gonna have to check it out if I ever make it back to Amsterdam.
I don’t know if they still do this but the Dutch people used to send a huge bouquet of flowers to the American Consulate in Amsterdam every year as a Thank you to the Americans for rooting out the Nazis from the Netherlands. They were still doing it in the late 1980s when I was there, in the Consulate working as a temp.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo ex-pat)
Thank you for sharing this bit of history. Fascinating and heartbreaking. If I ever get to visit the Netherlands, I’ll make a point of stopping here.
JeanneT
Terrible and important to remember those times. Thank you.
Montanareddog
@Ramalama:
I don’t know if they still do that particular gesture either; but they do take remembrance ceremonies very seriously. 2 examples:
MinuteMan
Typewriters and filling cabinets: the banality of evil.
There’s a transportation camp in Westerbork where Anne Frank was imprisoned before a one-way train trip to the east. The place is another Dutch museum to those tragic times but Felonius Punk and his gang of rabid sycophants are using hotspur to learn the wrong lessons. With any luck well be rid of Putin’s Putz in November but the evil that is attracted to him will likely go back under their rocks to continue their vile work in hopes of reemerging later.
bluefoot
Considering how Meta is dealing with misinformation etc, Google/Alphabet would probably actively help if push comes to shove here in the US, not just allow their platforms to be used.
Thanks for the photos – these were great, if sobering.
mvr
Thanks for this!
My mother used to tell of watching someone die in the street during the hongerwinter.
bjacques
Thanks for this. To my shame, I have lived in Amsterdam 26 years but never visited it. Time to remedy that.
The Unmitigated Gaul
@H.E.Wolf: Lovely story.