Documenting the Holocaust

The Destruction of the Dutch Jews.
by Jacob Presser.
Translated by Arnold Pomerantz. Dutton. 545 pp. $10.00.

In the welter of historical confusion, it is often assumed that the Dutch, more than most other European populations, exerted special (and successful) efforts during the German occupation to save their Jewish fellow countrymen from falling into Nazi hands. Perhaps the misconception derives from the generally held image of Holland as a traditional haven of tolerance, freedom, and prosperity for its Jewish citizens, and a hospitable asylum for persecuted Jews from abroad (an image also in need of correction). More likely, it is the result of the Anne Frank cult, which feeds the all too human wish to regard her fate as exceptional. The statistics, of course, indicate otherwise. When the mass deportations began, the Jewish population of Holland was estimated at about 140,000, of whom some 30,000 were refugees from Germany and Austria. Of these, 110,000 were eventually deported, and fewer than 6,000 returned after the war. Of the remaining 30,000, about half of those who went into hiding were eventually discovered and deported as well. Others survived because they were married to a non-Jewish partner or had a non-Jewish grandparent, and thus belonged to categories that were generally exempt from deportation. Anne Frank’s fate was shared by the vast majority of Dutch Jews.

Briefly, to rehearse the grim facts: After the Nazis overran Holland, in May 1940, the country was placed under a German civil administration headed by a Reichskommissar, the Austrian Nazi lawyer Arthur Seiss-Inquardt. For a while, the Jews were left relatively unmolested, but before long the machinery of destruction started to grind. Among the first anti-Jewish measures was the dismissal of all Jews from government positions, including such minor ones as school teachers, post-office clerks, etc. Then, on January 10, 1941, all Jews were required to register as such, and the following month the Germans established a Jewish Council (Joodse Raad) in all the larger Jewish centers (later, the Amsterdam body came to serve, in effect, as the Jewish Council for all of Holland). On February 22, the first Jews (430 in number) were arrested, in reprisal for the death of a Dutch Nazi during an attack on the Amsterdam Jewish quarter, and deported to Mauthausen, where all perished. (These were the arrests that called forth the famous day-and-a-half protest strike by Amsterdam workers, on February 25-26, 1941. Though the “February strike,” as it has come to be known, must rightfully be included in the canon of heroic anti-Nazi activity, no further strikes, indeed almost no public action of any kind on behalf of the Jews, took place in Holland for the rest of the occupation.) In July all identity cards of Jews were stamped with the letter “J.” Travel restrictions were imposed in September and October, followed by the transfer of Jews from the provinces to Amsterdam. Residence for all Jews in the capital was restricted to three special sections, and the serious business of extermination now got under way: institution of the yellow badge; curfews; denial of access to public transportation, cafes, theaters, parks; dismissal from jobs; forced transfer of valuables and securities to a German-controlled bank; “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses; and finally, from July 1942 on, the mass deportations, to the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught and thence in sealed railway cars to the “East.”

These facts form the core of Jacob Presser’s book, which should serve to dispel any misconceptions on the subject; for while general information regarding the Dutch aspect of the Holocaust has been available to the concerned English-reading public—most notably in such volumes as Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution (1953); Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961); and W. Warmbrunn’s The Dutch under the German Occupation (1963)—the present work, an abridgment of the original two-volume Dutch edition, is by far the most detailed in its field, even if, as we shall have occasion to discuss below, it cannot be considered definitive. In Dutch, the subject has been dealt with extensively, though in less detail, in at least two other works, both written in the early years after the war, and from which Presser quotes frequently: De Oorlog die Hitler won (The War that Hitler Won, 1947), by H. Wielek (pen-name of W. Kweksilber), who came to Holland from Germany after 1933; and De Kroniek der Jodenvervolging (Chronicle of the Persecution of the Jews), by the well-known Dutch Zionist Abel J. Herzberg, which appeared originally in 1950 as part of a comprehensive survey on the German occupation of Holland and was published separately in 1951. Both works have remained largely unnoticed.

Before we turn to more substantive matters, a word about the book’s publishing history might be in order. Commissioned in 1950 by the Netherlands Ministry of Education and Culture on behalf of the State Institute for War Documentation, the study was expected to take, at most, two years to complete and to run to some 500 pages. Instead, fifteen years elapsed before the work was finished, and it turned out to be more than twice the anticipated length. The book, whose publication date ultimately coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Holland, was launched with much fanfare (unusual for staid Holland)—a pre-publication press conference, full-page excerpts in leading newspapers and weeklies, etc.—and became, despite its bulk, an immediate bestseller (over 100,000 copies), with a cheaper popular edition following within a few months. Its success can perhaps be attributed to the fact that for a new generation of Dutch readers there was fresh interest in the apocalyptic events of the 40’s. While one doubts that the book will elicit a similar response among American readers, it should be noted that the abridgment, performed by Louis de Jong, director of the Institute for War Documentation and a close friend and former pupil of Presser’s, is exceedingly deft; indeed, in many instances, condensation has only served to improve upon the original. The translation, too, is excellent throughout.

As for the author, he is a professional historian, who has also published, in addition to historical studies (among others, a history of the United States and a book on Napoleon), a novel on life in Westerbork (translated into English as Breaking Point, 1957) and, in a different vein, two mystery novels (Murder in Moordrecht and Murder in the Poort) . Born in Amsterdam, in 1899, into a middle-class home which no longer held to Jewish tradition, Presser attended the University of Amsterdam and, following his graduation, taught in a municipal grammar school. After the war, he became a lecturer at the Municipal University of Amsterdam, and it was only after he had received the commission to write the present study that he was offered a professorship. An earlier appointment by the Amsterdam Municipal Council—which at that time still had the power to name professors—had been overruled by the government on account of Presser’s left-wing views (this would be unthinkable today). It is said that he was given the commission to compensate for the rejection. Be that as it may, the official nature of the commission afforded him access to materials in the files of the Institute for War Documentation which had not been made available to earlier writers on the subject. Presser thus enjoyed an obvious advantage. Finally, one might observe that before the war Presser evinced little interest in Jewish matters. Like so many others, he came to his Jewish concern as a result of the Nazi experience: in the early clays of the occupation, he was dismissed from his grammar-school post and became a teacher in the Jewish Lyceum, which had been established for the hundreds of Jewish pupils who were no longer allowed to attend general schools (in 1943 the Lyceum was forced to close down, after most of its pupils had been deported).

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The book-jacket of the American edition calls Presser’s work “A Definitive Account of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.” An official commission, of course, is no guarantee of scholarly excellence, and publishers’ accolades are lightly distributed. Does the book, then, merit the description? While the work has been highly praised in the Dutch general press and received a literary prize, in the opinion of some reviewers in Dutch academic journals, who also raised the question, the answer is decidedly “No,” I share their view. For a historical work, with some claim to authority, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews is disturbingly subjective. There is, first, the matter of Presser’s ideology, which colors many of his judgments. Thus, he sees class struggle everywhere—the tendency was already evident in his book on the United States, Amerika—and he makes this a factor in the Dutch Jewish tragedy: thus, the Jewish “bourgeoisie,” according to Presser, sought to save their skins at the expense of the Jewish “proletariat” whom they sacrificed. In point of fact, class distinctions among Dutch Jews in 1940 were far less marked than Presser suggests. The majority of Jews were to be located in the middle class (in all its varieties), and the labels “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” are hardly applicable. Moreover, all the Dutch Jews, of whatever category, each according to his ability (if I may be permitted the phrase), desperately searched for ways to avoid deportation. It is only natural that those with more resources, with better connections, with non-Jewish relatives, say, had a greater chance of success. Presser himself accepted a deferment certificate from the Jewish Council, and later, as the Nazi net grew wider, he took up the offer of non-Jewish friends of a hiding place, where he stayed until the end of the war. One should be as wary of making psychoanalytic judgments as Marxist ones, but perhaps Presser’s “problem” is that he is a survivor, with all the attendant guilts—a survivor, moreover, whose own young wife was deported. He hints at this when he writes in the Introduction:

What sustained me in my efforts to complete the book was . . . a growing awareness of what, in all humility, I felt to be my duty: to speak up for all those thousands now doomed to eternal silence, whose last cries of despair went unheard, and whose ashes no one was allowed to gather up.

Presser’s subjective approach is apparent, too, in his treatment of the Jewish Council (where he presents yet another fashionable approach). Drawing heavily upon his own personal experience, he views matters from only one side of the counter, so to speak, and fails to make the leap that would accommodate the peculiar agonies suffered by members of the Joodse Raad. For a writer of memoirs or impressionistic comment, this might perhaps be permissible; for a historian to abandon the requisite fair-mindedness is a serious lapse. Presser’s interpretations, of course, recall the Hannah Arendt-Judenrat controversy that raged a few years back, and while one has no wish to rekindle the argument, it must be remarked that Presser, too, shows an insufficient understanding of all the terrible pressures to which members of the Jewish Council were subject. The responsibilities they bore were heavy beyond endurance, and the tasks they were called upon to perform varied with the situation, over which they had no control whatsoever. During the first period of the occupation (February 1941 to July 1942), the Joodse Raad was given responsibility for administrative and financial affairs. Maybe its members should have refused there and then to cooperate with the Germans; but this is easy to say now, with all the wisdom of hindsight. In the second period, July 1942 to September 1943, when the Joodse Raad was dissolved and its last remaining members deported, the options became even more limited, and more agonizing. True, the members of the Jewish Council, ill-prepared for their tasks, made many fatal errors of judgment; but they could not have been the egotistic scoundrels and Quislings that Presser implies they were.

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The shortcomings of the volume extend to its style and structure as well. In many places it reads almost like the first draft of a PhD thesis—an indiscriminate piling up of research which makes no distinction between major event and minor incident, between what is important and what is not. (This is more pronounced in the Dutch version: abridgment and translation, as I have mentioned, serve Presser well.) But despite the plethora of facts and Presser’s predilection for anecdote, the book is lacking in essential background information which might have helped us better to understand the events covered. I refer specifically to historical data on Dutch Jewry. It need not have been necessary to go back to the 17th century, but Presser would have been well advised to provide at least a chapter on the Dutch Jewish community in the years immediately preceding the war. Here he might have taken instruction from his onetime pupil, Louis de Jong, who is currently engaged in writing a monumental history of Holland under the German occupation; the first volume, Voorspel (Prelude), which has already appeared, is properly devoted to an analysis of Dutch society and the internal and external political situations in the years 1933-1940.

Other lapses include Presser’s failure to deal more adequately with the over 30,000 German and other non-Dutch Jews who were in Holland at the time of the Nazi invasion (this because he interpreted the nature of his commission “to write about the Dutch Jews only” all too strictly), and his almost total concentration on Amsterdam. To be sure, that is where the bulk of Dutch Jewry resided, but much happened in the provinces, too, where events sometimes took a different turn. Furthermore, Presser relies too heavily on documentary material, especially diaries and memoirs, for which he has always had a particular partiality. Though the value of such personal documents is evident, even more important are interviews with living witnesses.

Presser, of course, did take down personal testimony, but only from people who came to him, and even then he acted more as a simple reporter than as a skilled interviewer; he rarely ventured into the field, to contact those people who might have thrown light on certain episodes he touches upon, who did not write down their experiences for deposit in the Institute for War Documentation. Nor did he seek out, during all the years of composition, any Jews in positions of responsibility, whose intimate knowledge of the period could have clarified various points at issue. Moreover, he has almost nothing to say about the important cultural work that was performed by Jewish leaders during the occupation and which did so much to sustain Jewish morale. He gives only glancing attention to many of the prominent Jewish communal personalities of the time, nearly all of whom perished, and one searches in vain for the familiar names of rabbis, Zionist leaders, educational figures. Because these names meant nothing to him personally, Presser did not see fit to include them.

Finally, the Presser study is not only subjective in its approach and its selectivity, it is also highly egocentric. Though on the one hand the constantly recurring account of the author’s own experiences lends an added dimension of authenticity to the book, we may on the other hand ask why, in what is more or less an official history of the period, Presser, who himself played no significant part in it in any way, should have placed himself and those near him so much in the foreground (though again this is more apparent in the original Dutch than in the abridged English edition).

In sum, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews is a painstakingly detailed account of the fate of the Jews in Holland during the Nazi occupation, and for this we must be grateful; but it is not the historical monument Dutch Jewry deserves. That work remains to be written.

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