In a Netherlands Museum Director, the Nazis Found an Ally

In 1978 I was in the Netherlands, traveling through Britain and Western Europe after graduating from college. I stayed at a B&B owned by a Dutch family. After dinner, as we drank our sherry, the man showed my girlfriend and me his photograph in which he was wearing a Nazi uniform! He said he had collaborated with the Nazis during the War and that, as his penance, he had spent his life since then telling others of his treacherous misdeeds. He was apparently despised in his community. He actually cried as he told us this. I was so stunned I may have been in shock. The thought of turning in his neighbors to be tortured, murdered and incinerated was too much to fathom. As horrific as his actions were, I was also moved by the thought of the awful predicament he’d found himself and his family in, back in the 1940s, when he was pressured to do this. It was one of those experiences in life that you are not sure if it really happened when thinking of it decades later.

I am able to go up on Google Maps and look at the exact locations of my grandfather’s bakery and my father’s candy store in the heart of the business district of Gliwice, Poland (formerly Gleiwitz) for which my father never received a single penny of restitution from either Germany or Poland despite many years of trying. My mother who lost her elderly parents and young brother in Auschwitz after spending nearly two years in the French hell-holes of Gurs and Drancy had a similar experience. There is a widespread rumor still evident in certain circles that Jews made out like bandits in restitution money and returned art works and property in the wake of World War II, but that is far from the truth. My advice to blacks in America who now find themselves in somewhat analogous situations: keep going for the next hundred years until you get every last penny that is owed to you. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. has a large exhibit about those gentiles who helped save/ or tried to save Jews during the Nazi years. I remember one photo that mentioned a family of Dutch farmers who were all killed for hiding Jews..... Consider from the article this statement: "There is no evidence that Mr. Hannema ever expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, Ms. Dekker said, and in fact letters he wrote that are displayed in the exhibition indicate that he tried, mostly in vain, to help certain Jewish contacts avoid deportation." Seems to me someone with Hannema's money and Nazi contacts could have done better if he'd really wanted to.

I knew a family that spent decades and untold dollars to try to regain family art that was held in a museum in the Netherlands. They were turned down but later, when the family discovered a diary, they finally had the art returned to them. There were more pieces and in the end, a deal was made that if the art was returned to its owners, they would donate it to the museum with an appropriate plaque that acknowledged that the original owners had died in a concentration camp. Yes, they were US citizens. and no the government really doesn't involve itself in these things. The situation of the Woman in Gold was an anomaly. Shame on the Dutch for still refusing to return art that should never have been in their hands in the first place. My friends are now deceased. Will their children have to have also died of old age before this is finally resolved?

If any of the family are U.S. citizens, they have the right to use the U.S. court system to pressure the Netherlands government to return the art work in question. In an analogous case, there was a threat from the U.S. to take away the U.S. bank charter of an Austrian bank, unless Austria returned the art work (Woman in Gold). That painting now forms part of the permanent collection in the Neue Museum in New York City.

It continues to amaze me that the Nazis had such an interest in art. They wanted to steal wealth, that I understand, but they showed a focus on art that is incomprehensible coming from such barbarians. What were they looking for in the beauty of art?

WWAFD? What Would Anne Frank Do?

The Nazi leadership, and command structure, had a few more international collaborators than will ever be really be clear. “The Rat Line” is one which comes to mind quite readily...

If the works in question had minor value they would have been returned long ago.

I lived in the Netherlands 1996 - 2001. The matter of restitution of assets seized or forceibly acquired during the Nazi occupation was an on-going discussion then. At some point, the Dutch government stated they had lost any records of such transfers during the occupation. Some time later, student interns found these records in a disused file cabinet in an unoccupied government building much to the chagrin of the government bureaucrats.

The Boijmans was also the museum that fell for the forged Vermeers of Hans van Meegeren. Van Meegeren was arrested after the war when he was accused of selling a Vermeer to Herman Goring. He decided that confessing to forgery was a softer option than treason and painted another 'Vermeer' to prove it. Van Meegeren's Vermeers look so unlike anything the master ever painted that one wonders what was going through everybody's mind.

You know something. I'm not God. That was not a joke. But--consider the extremes. (1) The born collaborators. The traitors. The quislings. The sell-outs. The betrayers. Occupied Europe had no lack of these. Abominable wretches that cringed to the conquerors, hoping for a few scraps--flung contemptuously as to dogs or jackals. (2) The resisters. Literally. People who joined the resistance movements--the maquis as the French put it. Planted bombs. Carried out attacks on single soldiers or isolated outposts. Assassinated powerful Nazis (when they could) at whatever cost to the local population. Such people almost invariably got caught. And died--after long periods of barbaric torture and imprisonment. You see my point? Most people--then and now--would fall between these categories. Just WHERE they might fall--or SHOULD fall--or SHOULD HAVE fallen-- --that's where it gets tricky. Very tricky. What would you do? What would I do? Just WHERE would any of us fall? A question that haunts me personally whenever I read stories like this. And by the way-- --I am NOT writing a covert brief for Mr. Hannema. Or collaborators. Or quasi-collaborators. Or anyone. I don't like quislings or traitors better than anyone else. But the whole question is like so many other moral questions-- --it gets murky sometimes. Very murky. God help us all (should the need arise)-- --to do the right thing! And ONLY the right thing.

Historically the Netherlands have a very strong reputation for religious tolerance, from the late 16th century on. It allowed Spanish-Portuguese Jews who escaped the Inquisition to settle in the Dutch lands. One was the family of Benedict Spinoza, the great philosopher. But it also turns out that during WWII a higher percentage of Dutch Jews were deported and killed in Nazi camps than those in nearby France, Belgium, and other western European nations. The reason was that the Dutch police and authorities cooperated with the Nazi occupiers more than one might have expected. This is something that should be known more widely.