Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog
Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (German: “The Kingdom of the Netherlands in World War II”) is the monumental standard work on the Netherlands and Dutch East Indies in World War II . It comprises 29 sub-volumes; these appeared from 1969 to 1991.
The main author was the historian Loe de Jong , who worked for Radio Oranje during the war and was director of the Dutch Institute for War Documentation after the war . The work is widely praised for its detailed and legible presentation, but is also criticized for inadequate proof of origin.
Since December 11, 2011, the work - around 18,000 pages - can be downloaded from the Internet.
Scope and processing time
The first twelve parts of the fourteen-part work deal in detail with the events in the Netherlands and the Japanese-occupied colony of the Dutch East Indies. The 13th part deals with a work-related representation of De Jong in its two volumes, followed by a corrigenda. Part 14 quotes from reactions to the complete works, whereby De Jong did not take over the editing, but his historian colleagues Jan Bank, Cees Fasseur, AF Manning, Ernst Heinrich Kossmann, AH Paape and Ivo Schöffer .
In 1955, De Jong was commissioned by the Minister of Education to write a scientifically based work on the war in the Netherlands. The work was scheduled for 15 years. After a long period of preparation, the first part came out in 1969. De Jong suspected the work would take at least 25 years. The last part written by De Jong (13) came out in 1988 and the end of the reactions in 1991. In retrospect, De Jong said that he would have lost courage if he had foreseen the breadth of the work.
Overview
According to the initial planning, the work would have consisted of six or seven parts. It quickly emerged that De Jong was writing more and more, so that one volume per part was no longer sufficient, and further parts were planned. From part 4 the parts appeared in two volumes, called “halves”. Two parts 10 came out, each consisting of two halves, and even three of part 11.
Parts 1 and 2 deal with the prehistory up to the German attack in May 1940, parts 3 to 7 the period from 1940 to mid-1944, part 8 prisoners and deportees, part 9 "London" (especially the government in exile there), part 10 the last War year. The three parts of the 11th part deal with the Dutch East Indies , including the subsequent colonial war . Part 12 is an epilogue , Part 13 includes supplements and registers, it was published on November 21, 1988.
Part 14, initially called “Critique”, is about the reactions to the entire work. De Jong had submitted his manuscripts to a monitoring committee and then sometimes made changes; the corresponding discussions are reproduced or summarized. Furthermore, the two volumes of the 14th part reproduce newspaper and magazine articles as well as reviews.
criticism
The multi-volume, state-sponsored work is in many households and libraries, but it has not been received without criticism. De Jong was accused of having made too unnatural statements in some places and therefore of not having drawn a completely correct picture of the situation at the time. The size of the resistance is portrayed too positively and, on the other hand, that of collaboration (cooperation with the occupiers) is underexposed.
In particular, the description of the Nederlandse Unie from 1940/41 received public attention . This organization, which around a tenth of the population had joined, called on the one hand to cooperate with the occupier, but on the other hand was considered "anti-German" because membership in the Unie could be interpreted as a rejection of the Dutch National Socialists. De Jong accused the Unie, among other things, of wanting to exclude Jews from active membership. There was also criticism from Dutch people from the former colony of the Dutch East Indies , especially from veterans of the colonial army . They wanted certain acts of the Dutch armed forces in the Indonesian war to be labeled at best as "excesses" (an otherwise decent conduct of war), while De Jong had written about war crimes.
In the NRC Handelsblad, the historian HW van Asten criticized the decision to have the work published in an academic and a popular edition. Strangely enough, the “popular” reader now has a volume of registers with a practical overall register, while the scientific one has to struggle through the individual registers of the individual volumes. Unfortunately, it should not be stated that Part 13 was not indexed. In 1988 HW van Asten complained about the quality of the registers.
In 1985, Ernst Heinrich Kossmann pointed out the different views of history since the end of the war. De Jong, "whose work can only be talked about in superlatives", set up his concept in the post-war period when people thought: The country has come through a difficult test in which many have failed, but some brave people still have the honor of the country rescued. When the series began to appear in 1969, however, the social climate changed (for example due to the student protests). The new generation grew up with their parents 'and grandparents' memories of war and learned that "resistance" is the right attitude in life. Most parents would not have dared to do that during the war. The radical students wanted to catch up on that, pointing out that fascism still existed and must be fought. So the emphasis was no longer on discontinuity, but on continuity. In this context it should be understood, Kossmann continues, that in 1981 Peter Klein accused Peter Klein of an old-fashioned, moralistic tone in Het Parool Loe de Jong. Klein found the war as an unimportant topic because it did not particularly change the old society.
When Volume 13 was published in 1988, Jan de Roos wrote in the Haarlems Dagblad of a “9 to 5 [o'clock] attitude”, with which De Jong had worked on the project for 32 years. He countered the allegations that he did not cite sources and literature thoroughly enough with the simple but weak argument that he did not have the time. The verifiability of his work remains a weak point, so De Roos. He also regrets that De Jong has said so little about the ideas on which his work was based. Nor do he go into the debates that began when the parts were published.
Web links
- Entry at the DNB
- NIOD - Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (English):