February strike

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In the Netherlands, a general strike in 1941 against the German occupation in World War II is referred to as the February strike ( Dutch Februaryistaking ) .

prehistory

After the invasion by the Wehrmacht on May 10, 1940 (" Fall Gelb "), most of the country was overrun in a very short time, and resistance was only offered by a sparsely equipped Dutch army .

On February 11, 1941, after provocative marches and attacks by Dutch National Socialists around the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter Jodenbuurt , clashes and brawls broke out between members of the " Wehrabteilung " and mostly Jewish residents of the Amsterdam quarter. A Dutch National Socialist, Sergeant Hendrik Evert Koot , suffered severe head injuries from which he died three days later. The Germans cordoned off the district, arrested 425 Jewish men and took them to Buchenwald and Mauthausen , where most died during the year and, with two exceptions, none survived the Nazi forced labor . This brutal crackdown is seen as the trigger for the strike. Hans Böhmcker , the representative of Arthur Seyß-Inquart , who was on vacation , ordered Abraham Asscher and two rabbis to put together a Judenrat , whose first duty was to call on all Jews to deliver all kinds of weapons immediately. On February 17, the cordoning off of the Jewish quarter was extended until further notice and the administration was informed of plans to set up a ghetto .

The General Commissioner for Security Hanns Albin Rauter carried out the first raids and mass arrests of Jews in Amsterdam on February 22 and 23, 1941. To justify these measures, Rauter had portrayed Koot's death in a bloodthirsty manner in the NSB party newspaper Volk en Vaderland and wrote that “a Jew tore open the victim's artery and sucked out the blood”, an allusion to the medieval legend of ritual murder . According to the police report of February 18, 1941, Koot was wounded with a heavy object in the head. There was also an attack on an ice cream parlor in the Jewish quarter on February 19, in which a patrol of the German police was wounded.

The strike

A public meeting was held on February 24th at Noordermarkt in Amsterdam , attended by numerous office workers. There Piet Nak and Dirk van Nijmegen called for a strike. During the night the now illegal Dutch Communist Party drafted a strike call, copied it and organized the distribution in front of the factory gates. The demonstrations of February 25, 1941 and the following day in Amsterdam went down in Dutch history as the “February strike” . In Amsterdam, public transport came to a standstill. Trams, whose drivers did not want to take part in the strike, were pelted with stones, stopped or even overturned. City officials took part, shipbuilding in the shipyards was stopped, the steel industry came to a standstill, students left the classrooms, shops and offices were closed across the city. The following day the strike spread to the Zaanstreek , Kennemerland (Haarlem and Velsen , the blast furnaces), Hilversum , Utrecht and Weesp .

On the second day, Rauter began to forcefully suppress the strike and instructed the Amsterdam police and the German security service to also use firearms against the demonstrators. The German military commander, General Friedrich Christiansen , declared a state of emergency over North Holland . There were about forty injured and nine dead. On the evening of February 26, the general strike was violently ended.

consequences

De Dokwerker in Amsterdam

Nevertheless, the strike had shown “that a policy of repression in the Netherlands could not be carried out without resistance, and ...

"... that the Nazification of the Netherlands sought by Seyß-Inquart had to prove to be a chimera from within ."

While the world’s public hardly ever looked at the events in the Netherlands, the international press reported in detail about the general strike. In March 1941 three leaders of the strike were executed in Waalsdorpervlakte . The Reich Commissioner imposed heavy fines on various cities and the occupiers tightened their prohibitions and requirements on the Dutch population.

Every year in Amsterdam on February 25th at the “ Dokwerker ”, the dockworkers memorial , on Jonas-Daniël-Meijer-Platz the strike is commemorated with a silent march .

Interpretations

The Encyclopedia of National Socialism defines the events as a “protest strike” against the anti-Semitic policies of the German administration in the Netherlands, which made it clear to the occupiers that the Dutch were not likely to “self-nazify”.

The legal historian Mathias Middelberg also sees the February strike as a turning point: the mass protests showed the occupiers that the Dutch could not be won over to National Socialism. The rallies brought about a change of strategy in the occupation policy, which now manifestly manifested itself in numerous ordinances directed against Jews: Jews were ousted from working and economic life and soon robbed of their property through the so-called Liro ordinances.

According to many historians, the February strike was for large sections of the population an “outlet for the feelings that had been suppressed since the beginning of the occupation”: resentment at the loss of national independence, the exploitation of the Dutch economy and, last but not least, the repression against the Jewish people Fellow citizens disembarked in protest, which surprised the Dutch police as well as the occupiers.

Although the illegal Communist Party played a role, the collective protest was not controlled by any organization. According to Guus Meershoek, the protesters' motives cannot be determined. Meershoek criticizes the fact that the “official historians” of the Reichsinstitut für Kriegsdokumentation describe the crowd as a general strike and interpret it partly as an “expression of a deep disgust for anti-Semitism, partly as an awareness of the reprehensibility of the German occupation regime”. In this way they would have transfigured the events for the nation as well as for outsiders "a symbol of the Dutch opposition to anti-Semitism." In the collective memory, this act of protest became "a symbol of moral innocence par excellence." In fact, no further initiatives were taken to raise awareness To oppose plans of the occupiers. According to Meershoek, the population cared little about the most threatened group of Jews until 1943, when large groups of people were forced to abduct. Meanwhile, the February strike in all of Europe was the only strike action directed against the coercive measures taken against Jews by the German occupiers during World War II.

Imagery

For a long time it was assumed that the February strike was either not photographed, or that the relevant images were lost. There was only a single recording, but its assignment to the events was controversial. It was not until 2016 that a photograph appeared in a journalist's diary that most certainly shows workers on strike on the morning of February 25, 1941 on the Raamplein in Amsterdam. A year later the weekly newspaper Vrij Nederland published four more recordings showing people on strike in Zaandam , taken from a private family album.

literature

  • Loe de Jong : De Bezetting. Querido, Amsterdam 1966, pp. 135-177: section De Februaryistaking.
  • Nanda van der Zee : "To prevent worse things ...". The murder of the Dutch Jews. Collaboration and resistance. From the Dutch by Bram Opstelten. Hanser, Munich a. a. 1999, ISBN 3-446-19764-8 .

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Document VEJ 5/58 = Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja peers (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 . Source collection, Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940 – June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 .
  2. ^ Israel Gutman et al. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , p. 1002 / VEJ, p. 33, the number 425 is mentioned.
  3. ^ Mathias Middelberg: Jewish law, Jewish policy and the lawyer Hans Calmeyer in the occupied Netherlands 1940-1945. V&R Unipress, 2005, ISBN 3-89971-123-8 , p. 161 ff.
  4. ^ Israel Gutman et al. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , p. 1002.
  5. a b c Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (arr.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. Sources collection, Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940 – June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 , p. 33.
  6. document VEJ 5/56, S. 217th
  7. Document VEJ 5/58.
  8. Horst Lademacher : History of the Netherlands. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1983. p. 446.
  9. ^ According to VEJ, Friedrich Knolle had the supreme command of the units of the Ordnungspolizei. Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (arr.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. Source collection, Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940 – June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 , p. 225 with note 7.
  10. City Archives Amsterdam: Oud nieuws 2006 ( Memento of September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 14, 2019.
  11. Document VEJ 6/60.
  12. Document VEJ 5/61 in: Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. Sources collection, Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940 – June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 , pp. 224–226.
  13. Horst Lademacher: History of the Netherlands. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1983. p. 447.
  14. Document VEJ 5/63
  15. Guus Meershoek: The resistance in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In: Repression and War Crimes. Contributions to National Socialist and Health Policy 14, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-924737-41-X , p. 17.
  16. Document VEJ 5/62: Report of Polizeiinsprektors Douwe Bakker and documents VEJ 5/64, 5/65 and VEJ VEJ 5/66.
  17. Horst Lademacher: History of the Netherlands . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1983. p. 448.
  18. Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (arr.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. Sources collection, Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940 – June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 , p. 35.
  19. Document VEJ 5/55.
  20. a b Wolfgang Benz u. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism. Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-33007-4 , p. 459.
  21. ^ Mathias Middelberg: Jewish law, Jewish policy and the lawyer Hans Calmeyer in the occupied Netherlands 1940-1945. Osnabrück 2005, ISBN 978-3-89971-123-3 , pp. 163-168.
  22. Guus Meershoek: The resistance in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In: Repression and War Crimes. Contributions to National Socialist and Health Policy 14, Göttingen 2007. ISBN 3-924737-41-X , p. 17.
  23. Guus Meershoek: The resistance in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In: Repression and War Crimes. Contributions to National Socialist and Health Policy 14, Göttingen 2007. ISBN 3-924737-41-X , p. 23.
  24. Indrukwekkende foto Februaryistaking opgedoken. In: nos.nl. Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, February 25, 2016, accessed on May 28, 2019 (Dutch).
  25. ^ Harm Ede Botje, Erik Schaap: Geschiedenis op zolder: unieke foto's opgedoken van de Februaryistaking. In: vn.nl. Vrij Nederland, February 23, 2017, accessed on May 28, 2019 (Dutch).