Isabel van Boetzelaer

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Isabel van Boetzelaer (* 1961 in Oosterbeek ) is a Dutch teacher and former ballet dancer . Her book Oorlogsouders was published in 2017 .

biography

Isabel van Boetzelaer grew up on the Boschveld estate in Oosterbeek near Arnhem , where her parents ran a campsite. She trained in ballet in Amsterdam and danced for four years, from 1982 to 1986, with the Het Nationale Ballet , until she had to give up dancing because of back problems.

The bilingual van Boetzelaer then studied German up to the preparatory course and in 1990 did her master's degree in communication science at the University of Amsterdam . In the following years she worked in the travel industry and taught as a German teacher at a school in Amsterdam.

family

Isabel von Boetzelaer comes from a noble family and is a baroness . She is the daughter of Willem Baron van Boetzelaer and his wife Ingrid Baroness von der Recke . Her father was a member of the Waffen SS from May 1940 . During the German occupation of the Netherlands , he worked for the security police in The Hague . Therefore, after the war , he was sentenced in the first instance by the Bijzondere Gerechtshof (special court) to life imprisonment, after an appeal to 20 years in prison. In 1957, after twelve years in prison, he was released early on a pardon. The following year he married Ingrid von der Recke in Darmstadt. It was the second marriage for both spouses.

Book about her family

Isabel van Boetzelaer wrote a book about her family that was published in 2017 under the title Oorlogsouders. Een familiekroniek over goed en fout in twee adellijke families ( war parents : a family chronicle about good and wrong in two noble families ). According to her own statements, from December 2010 she interviewed her parents who were living in Baden-Baden at the time . Her father was 90 years old at the time, her mother 83. The book was presented at the Amsterdam Goethe Institute with a speech by the renowned historian Ad van Liempt .

According to the book, the maternal grandfather, Hilmar von der Recke, was a resister against National Socialism . As a co-conspirator of July 20, 1944 , he was imprisoned in Plötzensee . The grandmother secretly supplied a Jewish doctor with food. Her father, in turn, was a member of the Waffen SS, but had no knowledge of mass murders by this organization in the Soviet Union . This story of a connection between two families of alleged victims and perpetrators met with great interest in the Netherlands, and within a very short time the book was published three times.

criticism

In the summer of 2017, an article appeared on nederlandseboekengids.com in which the publicist Maarten van Voorst tot Voorst sharply criticized the book Oorlogsouders . According to his research, Isabel van Boetzelaer's maternal grandfather, Hilmar von der Recke, was by no means in the resistance, but from 1942 on, he was in command of the prisoner- of- war camp Stalag XII A in Limburg an der Lahn . By the end of the war, around 100,000 prisoners of war of various nationalities were registered there, many of whom were used for forced labor . The number of men who did not survive is unknown. From there, mainly Russian prisoners of war were forwarded to Buchenwald or Mauthausen , 500 of them executed in Buchenwald. In the 1960s, von der Recke was interrogated as part of investigations into the deportations of Russians to Mauthausen concentration camp . The grandmother was an enthusiastic National Socialist and BDM leader.

It is also highly unlikely that his father Willem van Boetzelaer had no knowledge of war crimes in the Ukraine , as his unit was involved in a massacre in Tarnopol ; from 1943 onwards, as a member of the security police in the Netherlands, he arrested Jewish people and resistance fighters.

Van Voorst's conclusion: “The book should never have appeared in this form.” It is a “collage of forgeries, glossing over and plagiarism, embellished with a bit of aristocratic enthusiasm and set pieces from war films”. According to van Voorst's findings, the author plagiarized articles from the German-language Wikipedia , in particular the article Ludolf-Hermann von Alvensleben . However, it is difficult to determine whether it is a deliberate forgery or whether the author was guided by wishful thinking and repression. The events surrounding the book caused a sensation in the Dutch media.

Isabel van Boetzelaer defended herself that she had relied on the stories of her parents. She did not check their reports, she was not a historian. Therefore, she “accidentally made a small mistake”. She announced an improved new edition. A reading announced for September 2017 in the Westerbork transit camp has been canceled.

The revision of the book with the support of the historian Gerard Aalders was published in April 2018, with additions to the person of her grandfather. In the preface Isabel van Boetzelaer admitted that she was “naive” and “inexperienced”, but that she was neither an investigative journalist nor a historian. When asked about a photo of her grandfather among prisoners of war, she said: “Aan deze gevangen zie je niet dat het er vreselijk is. Ze zijn geen walking skeletons. Je ziet aan die foto ook niet dat mijn grootvader een sadist was. " )

Fonts

  • Oorlogsouders. A familiekroniek over goed en fout in twee adellijke families . Just Publishers, 2017, ISBN 978-90-8975-018-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c John Töpfer: Oorlogsouders door Isabel van Boetzelaer: boekbespreking door jonkheer mr. Dolph Boddaert - Nobility in Nederland. In: Nobility in Nederland. April 8, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  2. ^ Vader bij de Waffen-SS, moeder anti-Nazi. In: Omroep Gelderland. March 30, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  3. ↑ a b c d 'Ik was bang dat ze erachter kwamen like mijn vader was'. In: nrc.nl. March 20, 2017, accessed April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  4. ^ Uitvoerende Isabel van Boetzelaer. In: TheaterEncyclopedie. Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  5. ↑ "Jarenlang braneg ik mijn foute vader". In: EenVandaag. April 26, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  6. ↑ John Potter: 'Oorlogsouders' door Isabel barones van Boetzelaer. In: adelinnederland.nl. April 8, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  7. ↑ a b c d e Sven Felix Kellerhoff: Resistance in the Nazi era: Dutch bestseller story is a lie. In: welt.de . November 22, 2017. Retrieved April 28, 2018 .
  8. ↑ a b c d Kim Bos / Bas Blokker: "Zo had dit boek niet mogen verschijnen". In: nrc.nl. August 25, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  9. ↑ Blauw bloed, zwart denkegoed - De lost eer van freule Van Boetzelaer. In: De Nederlandse Boekengids. Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  10. ↑ De vele waarheden over een 'foute jongen'. In: nrc.nl. Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  11. ↑ Securing a barrack of Stalag XII A Limburg - a chronicle -. In: gedenkinitiative.de. April 1, 2016, accessed April 28, 2018 .
  12. ↑ a b Wilhelm Freiherr von der Recke / Adelbert Graf von der Recke von Volmerstein: From lord of the castle to citizen: 750 years of barons and barons von der Recke and Count von der Recke von Volmerstein. A family story 1265-2015 . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-8253-6438-0 , p. 482 f .
  13. ↑ Maarten van Voorst tot Voorst: De wensdenkers en hun nepboek: De affaire Oorlogsouders nader beschouwd. academia.edu, 2018, accessed April 28, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Het boek Oorlogsouders bevat cruciale fouten. In: parool.nl. September 3, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  15. ↑ Lezing Van Boetzelaer geannuleerd in Westerbork. In: nrc.nl. September 6, 2017, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
  16. ↑ Family divorce is another thought: "Ik ben er naïef ingestapt". In: parool.nl. April 13, 2018, Retrieved April 28, 2018 (Dutch).
personal data
SURNAME Boetzelaer, Isabel van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch teacher and ballet dancer
DATE OF BIRTH 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Oosterbeek