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| The Dutch Resistance Museum opens with questions. What would you do if the Nazis occupied your country? |
One of the chilling features of the Verzetsmuseum is its diary of the increasing pressure on the Dutch as the Occupation, which lasted five years, became increasingly confrontational. The Nazis expected the same cooperation in Holland from their Dutch cousins as they got in Austria.
After the German army moved into Holland, the Verzetsmuseum handbook (English version), quotes from the diary of a housewife living in the Hague about the dread that overtook them all:
Especially for the Jews. Oh, that tormented race. The arrival of the Germans filled them with fear, fear about the fate that was now awaiting them. Many of them preferred suicide to awaiting their fate. Entire families together. (Het Verzetsmuseum, 24, emphasis added.)
For the next few months, however, the occupying Nazis played a clever game, trying to reassure non-Jewish Dutch people that they were benign rulers.
That all changed with the General Strike in 1941.The occupiers behaved properly, hoping to win over the Dutch, as part of the “Germanic brotherhood”, to National Socialism. As a gesture of goodwill, after the Dutch army was disbanded, they released the Dutch prisoners of war. … Many Dutch people thought they ought to reconcile themselves to the situation. (Het Verzetsmuseum, 24.)
