Categorisation. Classification. Confiscation. Dealing with enemy citizens in the Netherlands in the aftermath of World War II (1944-1967)

ABSTRACT

Anticipating the end of the Second World War, the Dutch government in exile classed all civilians with German nationality as enemy citizens. Tens of thousands of German nationals who resided and worked in the Kingdom of the Netherlands were stripped of their assets, regardless of political allegiance or place of residence, and without any Dutch compensation. Some were arrested, imprisoned and expelled; others left of their own accord. Many appealed against their status as enemy citizens, in the hope of clearing their names and regaining their property. This article discusses the categorization and classification of German nationals as enemies of the state, and examines how politics of citizenship and nationality triggered policies of exclusion, but also informed policies of inclusion. Whilst German nationality determined a civilian’s enmity, a seemingly homogeneous Dutch national identity constituted the criteria for so-called ‘de-enemization’ (ontvijanding). German nationals were judged on their wartime and post-war behaviour, and had to prove that they behaved like ‘good Dutch citizens’. In addition, ethnicity, class and gender were used as parameters to judge civilians classed as German nationals. As the case studies in this article illustrate, thousands of civilians categorized by the Dutch government as German citizens were unjustly affected by the status of their (former) German citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• enemy citizens
• expropriation
• citizenship
• restorative justice
• Second World War
• stateless Jews

During and after the Second World War, the notion of citizenship, with its links to nationality and legal protection by the state, underwent radical change. Nazi policies enforced a strict categorization and isolation of civilians, with genocide as the ultimate consequence. The German aggression and ideological constructions of ‘Germanness’ and Brudervölkern had a major impact on the meaning of German citizenship, too. For German nationals living abroad, the status of their German citizenship triggered practices of exclusion.

In the Netherlands, tens of thousands of German nationals were classed as enemy citizens. Regardless of political allegiance or place of residence, they were stripped of their assets after the German capitulation without any Dutch compensation. Some were arrested, imprisoned and expelled; others left of their own accord. Many appealed against their status as enemy citizens, in the hope of clearing their names and regaining their property.

In this article I discuss the treatment of civilians with enemy nationality in the Dutch Kingdom in the aftermath of the Second World War, with particular focus on the categorization and classification of German nationals. I examine the baggage and meaning that came with the label ‘enemy citizen’ (vijandelijke onderdaan) and how politics of citizenship and nationality triggered policies of exclusion, but also informed policies of inclusion. Coloured by feelings of revenge and anger brought on by the German occupation, the confiscation of enemy property was considered a just way to extort reparations from Germany and its citizens. Recent war experiences and financial and political motives dominated Dutch policies towards enemy citizens in the first post-war years and reinforced a nationalistic concept of citizenship. Whilst German nationality determined a civilian’s enmity, a seemingly homogeneous Dutch national identity constituted the criteria for so-called ‘de-enemisation’ (ontvijanding). German nationals were judged on their wartime and post-war behaviour, and had to prove that they had behaved like ‘good Dutch citizens’. In addition, ethnicity, class and gender were used as parameters to judge civilians classed as German nationals. As the case studies in this article illustrate, thousands of civilians categorized by the Dutch government as German citizens were unjustly affected by the status of their (former) German citizenship.¹

Defining the enemy: enemy citizens and the Decree on Enemy Property

On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. Queen Wilhelmina and her ministers fled to London on 13 May, where they would remain in exile during the war. Following the German bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May, the Dutch army capitulated. The Netherlands was brought under the rule of a German civilian administration led by Reichskommisssar Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The only solution for the government in exile in London was to enact decrees based on the so-called subjectieve (staats)noodrecht (‘subjective emergency law’). This emergency law was not constituted on the positive, established rules of law of nineteenth-century tradition, but was commonly acknowledged in the twentieth century as a legitimate judicial foundation for laws. It enabled the Dutch government in exile to formulate decrees alongside official Dutch legislation, in the spirit of the Dutch constitution. In total, 160 decrees were promulgated between 1940 and 1945.² Several of the decrees coordinated warfare; others created systems for extraordinary jurisdiction and post-war restitution of rights and reparations.

The Decree that is most relevant for this article on the treatment of German nationals in the aftermath of the Second World War is Royal Decree E-133, the Decree on Enemy Property. With this Decree, all German nationals and other nationals related to the Axis powers Italy and Japan were classed as enemy citizens. The Decree entitled the Dutch State to confiscate all assets belonging to enemy citizens within the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was promulgated on 20 October 1944, in the political vacuum that existed in the wake of the liberation of the southern parts of the Netherlands and the German capitulation in May 1945.³ The government enacted Decree E-133 to expropriate enemy assets in order to compensate the Netherlands for losses it suffered during the war.

Torn between Dutch interests and Allied demands on the one hand, and the German occupier who still held control over the central and northern provinces of the Netherlands in 1944 on the other, the Military Authority (Militair Gezag, MG) faced the difficult task of overseeing the first steps of this process of ‘legal redress’. After the German capitulation, the Dutch Custody Institute (Het Nederlands Beheersinstituut, NBI), newly established on 9 August 1945, administered and controlled on behalf of the Dutch State all assets belonging to enemy citizens and/or enemy enterprises. The objective of this administration was the liquidation of the assets, by sale or otherwise, to the benefit of the Dutch State. The NBI was also authorized to judge claims and requests of enemy citizens who petitioned for de-enemization to clear their names and regain their assets.⁴

The definitions of ‘enemy citizen’, ‘enemy state’ and ‘enemy property’ as put forward in the Decree on Enemy Property provided were open to wide interpretation. Article 1 stated that Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as territories that had been occupied or annexed by one of these states from 1 January 1938 onwards, were classified as enemy states. Article 2 then defined who enemy citizens were:

1. Civil servants, officers, agents and representatives of an enemy state, as well as people who had fulfilled similar positions between 10 May 1940 and the implementation of Decree E-133;

2. Persons, who were or had been since 10 May 1940, citizens of an enemy state;

3. Legal entities:

a. founded or existing by the law of an enemy state;

b. of which the main seat or head office was located after 10 May 1940 on enemy territory; or

c. of which the actual enterprise or main company was on enemy territory at the time of/after 10 May 1940;

4. Persons, who according to the Royal Decree A6 of 7 June 1940 (as published in the Government Gazette), were declared citizens of an enemy state; and

5. Persons, who were neither Dutch, nor Dutch citizens, who were declared citizens of an enemy state by the Minister of Justice.

This definition left several questions open. How, for example, should the requests of Austrian citizens who, after the annexation of Austria by Germany on 12 March 1938, had become part of the German Reich, be handled? Should they be considered German and thus classed as enemy citizens? What was the status of German Jewish refugees? Although the first cases were settled as early as the summer of 1945, it took years before the procedures were finally crystallized.⁵

Measures against citizens of an enemy state

State-ordered measures against enemy citizens were not a new phenomenon during and after the Second World War. During the First World War, many European governments had enacted laws or acts to prosecute, deprive and expel citizens of an enemy state. In Britain, France, Belgium and Italy, but also in the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the First World War had a great impact on the notion and practice of citizenship. As Daniela L. Caglioti demonstrates in her article ‘Subjects, Citizens and Aliens during World War I’, ‘governments of belligerent European countries redrew the boundaries between citizens and aliens and redefined the path to membership’ and ‘adopted a mixture of not only expulsion, deportation/repatriation, internment and denaturalization but also naturalization and forced incorporation, especially in occupied territories’.⁶

Academic interest in the history of enemy citizens and enemy aliens focuses mainly on the First World War and civilian internment. Panikos Panayi explained in detail the treatment of Germans in Britain, Christoph Jahr and Matthew Stibbe examined the internment of ‘Feindstaaten-Ausländern’ in Germany and Austria-Hungary, Daniela L. Caglioti discussed why and how Italy invented the enemy aliens problem and Eric Lohr researched the campaign against enemy aliens during the First World War in the Russian Empire.⁷ Research on the Second World War mostly fixes attention on the fate of Japanese-Americans in the United States, or British policies towards Jewish refugees from Germany. Studies also investigate the American measures against Germans and Italians.⁸ For both wars, the colonial dimension remains underexposed. Measures taken against Germans in the Dutch colonial empire, for example, have received little scholarly attention so far.⁹

The treatment of Germans considered enemy citizens in the Netherlands in the aftermath of the Second World War has, however, been subjected to scholarly scrutiny. The few studies that have been published on the experiences of Germans post-1945 focused on the Dutch government’s plans to deport all Germans from Dutch territory and to annexe German territory by means of reparations. In 1981, Melchior Bogaarts was the first to publish an article about the expulsion of German nationals, followed by an article on proposed border corrections in 1982.¹⁰ Bogaarts concluded that both plans failed to bring desired results: ‘only’ 3691 Germans were deported, and ultimately only 69 square kilometres of land were annexed.

Recently, the deportation plans, known as Operatie Black Tulip, received more scholarly and public attention.¹¹ The expropriation of German assets was first discussed in 1988 and 1989 by Loe de Jong and Friso Wielenga, respectively.¹² The most detailed studies on the Dutch confiscation policies have been conducted by legal scholars. Jurist Foskea van der Ven published on the confiscation of the island of Schiermonnikoog and several castles and other properties.¹³ Professor of Law Wouter Veraart examined the effects of Dutch confiscation policies on the property of one of the most financially powerful Eastern European families, the Schichts.¹⁴

The experiences of tens of thousands of ordinary German men and women in the Netherlands are not included in the grand narrative of the post-war period. The (de-) enemization and expropriation of German nationals by the Dutch government post-1945 is a forgotten episode in Dutch post-war history. What’s more, in German historiography on the aftermath of the Second World War, the Dutch post-war policies towards German citizens are neglected, too. Historians have either overlooked the history of the circa 25,000 German nationals caught up between their motherland and new homeland, or who did not wish to address the rather sensitive topic of the arbitrary policies towards Germans classed as enemy citizens. Yet the presence in Dutch history and the influence of Dutch–German relations on the Dutch population are hard to ignore. Traditionally, German nationals are a prominent minority in Dutch territory. From the eighteenth century until the census of 1971, Germans formed the largest immigrant minority in the Netherlands, as well as a considerable minority in the Dutch overseas colonies.¹⁵ German–Dutch marriages were, and still are, common – the genealogy of the royal family is only one example.¹⁶ Many Dutch citizens can find a German ancestor in their family trees, although, paradoxically, few Dutch know of the history and the experiences of the German population in the Netherlands during and after the Second World War.

Reichs-, Auslands- or Volksdeutsche

At the outbreak of war, the exact number of German nationals in the Netherlands was unknown. There are no official, national statistics on the population in the Netherlands in the period between 1940 and 1947. Dutch parliamentary records on plans to deport all German nationals from the Netherlands after 1945 speak of a number of 25,000 German nationals.¹⁷ In addition, estimates on the basis of the archives of the Dutch Custody Institute and Alien Police suggest a population of between 20,000 and 25,000 Germans.¹⁸ These numbers do not include Germans in the colonies, and neither do they distinguish between refugees, Dutch women who changed nationality during war through marriage or long-term German residents. In 1947, 27,900 German nationals were registered in the Netherlands.

By contrast, the Italian population in the Netherlands was rather small. In 1910, only a couple of hundred Italians were registered. In 1947, 3400 Italians lived in the Netherlands.¹⁹ Like German nationals, they were classed as enemy citizens. The number of Japanese nationals is negligible: Japanese are not included as category in the national statistics of the late 1940s and there are only three records on Japanese enemy citizens preserved in the NBI archives.

Research on the paper index cards that accompanied the records on enemy citizens showed that the population of civilians classed as enemy citizens in the Kingdom of the Netherlands was very heterogeneous. A great variety of nationalities was found. The overwhelming majority of enemy citizens was German nationals. Interestingly, stateless people constituted the second largest group, followed by Austrian nationals, Italians and Dutch citizens accused of collaborating with the German occupier. The index cards show that enemy citizens marked as stateless were often Jewish refugees from Germany. Officially, the Nazi racial laws of 1935 (and the Elfte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz of 25 November 1941) had deprived Jewish citizens of their German citizenship, but the Dutch government declared all Nazi laws invalid, with the far-reaching consequence that many former German Jewish citizens were registered as German nationals. Other Jewish refugees were categorized as stateless persons from Germany. The group of stateless enemy citizens also included people who had lost their citizenship in the political turmoil resulting from the First World War, or persons with a Nansen passport. This internationally recognized travel document for officially stateless persons was issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees. The passport was provided to Russian refugees who had become stateless after Lenin revoked citizenship for Russian expatriates in 1921, and to Armenian, Assyrian and Turkish refugees made stateless by the Turkish Law of 23 May 1927. But in comparison to the number of stateless people from Germany, the number of enemy citizens from the former Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union is insignificant.

Austrians as Germans

One of the biggest subcategories of German nationals classed as enemy citizens was Austrian nationals. As explained earlier, article 1 of E-133 decreed that citizens of territories occupied or annexed by Germany were considered German enemy citizens. The Dutch argument for the enemy status of these so-called Volksdeutsche (‘ethnic Germans’) was that they had acquired the German nationality during the Nazi regime. Austria, for example, had ceased to exist as an independent country after the Anschluss in March 1938. Its citizens had become part of the German Reich and thus German citizens. According to the Dutch line of reasoning, this made former Austrian nationals accessory to Germany’s debt to the Netherlands.

In retrospect, this argumentation is questionable, as ethnic Germans were not German citizens by free choice. Citizens in territories occupied or annexed by Nazi Germany had been forced by the new authorities to take on German nationality. Already in the Moscow Declaration on Austria of 1943, the Allies had declared the annexation of Austria by Germany null and void. In the document, Austria was called ‘the first victim of Hitler’s typical policy of aggression’, although it was also held responsible for its participation in the war on the German side. After the war, the Anschluss as an act of military aggression constituted the basis for Austria under Allied occupation and the Second Austrian Republic. The general perception was that Austrian statehood had been interrupted and Austria presented itself after 1945 as collective victim of National Socialist Germany.

The Netherlands, however, did not adhere to this ‘victim theory’. On 16 April 1946, the newly established Council for Restoration of Rights equipped with broad and exclusive powers ruled that Austrian nationals were in fact officially German citizens. Seyss-Inquart’s Austrian nationality and his conviction and execution at Nuremberg in 1946 for crimes against humanity and war crimes might have been of significant influence on the way Austrians were perceived by the Dutch. Following the Court ruling, the NBI treated Austrian nationals as German enemy citizens in the first years of the implementation of the Decree on Enemy Property.²⁰ Only Austrian nationals who had solid evidence of their Austrian nationality could petition for revocation of the enemy status. In January 1947, after fierce discussion, the NBI agreed with the Austrian delegate to give preferential treatment to persons with an Austrian Staatsbürgerschaftsnachweis (the official certificate of Austrian citizenship). In addition, when the first guidelines for de-enemization were published in October 1948, Austrian residents in the Netherlands who possessed this official citizenship certificate regained full legal capacity.²¹ Moreover, if they could also prove that they had lived in the Netherlands before the outbreak of war, and that their behaviour had been politically correct according to the Dutch standards discussed hereafter, they received their confiscated assets back. Clearly, the 1948 regulations proved a major improvement for the situation of most Austrian nationals in the Netherlands. Yet those Austrians who had not resided in the Netherlands before 1940, or those who lived outside the Netherlands after 1945, faced a complicated de-enemization procedure. The Dutch government did not plan on releasing their assets – inheritances, and, for example, stocks were held in custody. It took until 1955 before the Dutch and Austrian governments finally came to a financial agreement.²²

Sudeten Germans

Apart from Austrian nationals, Sudeten Germans, residents of the city of Danzig and other ethnic Germans were also affected by their (imposed) German citizenship. To understand this inclusive interpretation of German citizenship, the status of German citizenship in the German Reich requires elucidation. In Nazi German terminology, race was the primary criterion to define Germans living within and beyond the borders of the Reich.²³ The racial policies implemented between 1933 and 1945 asserted the superiority of the Aryan race; Jews, Romani, the vast majority of Slavs and non-Europeans were considered inferior. The racial hierarchy identified different types of Germans: Reichsdeutsche (imperial Germans); Auslandsdeutsche (German citizens residing outside Germany); and Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). Reichsdeutsche were German citizens who resided in the Deutsches Reich, the official name for Germany between 1871 and 1945. Auslandsdeutsche were German emigrants. They held official German citizenship, whilst living abroad. By contrast, Volksdeutsche did not always have the paperwork to prove their legal citizenship, though some originated from Germany or from territories that were lost by Germany during or after the First World War. They were defined as Germans on the basis of race rather than citizenship. Germans of Jewish origin were not considered German citizens.

In the post-war Netherlands, the definition of Germany as an enemy state as put forward in the Decree on Enemy Property followed the geographical borders of the German Reich, including the occupied and annexed territories. According to this reasoning, aside from Austrians, German Bohemians and German Moravians (the so-called Sudeten Germans) and inhabitants of the former semi-autonomous city-state Danzig were also considered Germans, and thus enemy citizens. Whether these ethnic Germans were rightfully considered accountable and co-responsible for financial compensation is debatable, but analysis of post-war case law shows that ethnic Germans underwent long, complicated de-enemization procedures.

The case of the brothers Wilhelm Robert Friedrich Weber and Robert Rudolf Wenzelf Weber from Sudetenland is one example. Their history illustrates clearly the far-reaching consequences of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or Dual Monarchy. The brothers were two of the approximately 3.5 million Germans that had come under the jurisdiction of the Czechoslovak state after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. They were Austrian by birth, but had acquired Czechoslovakian citizenship in 1920. In 1938, when the Czechoslovak government was forced to accept the Munich Agreement and Sudetenland was ceded to Germany, Wilhelm and Robert officially became German citizens.²⁴ A year later Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia completely and imposed German citizenship on almost all ethnic Germans residing in the country. After the German capitulation in May 1945, Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš called for the ‘final solution of the German question’ resulting in the evacuation and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe.²⁵

Many fled, some to the Netherlands, including the brothers Weber. Although they were victims of Nazi aggression and officially refugees, they were treated as German enemy citizens. They appealed their enemy status, but in vain: on 27 May 1953 their request for de-enemization was declined.²⁶ The Council for Restorations of Rights ruled that they were rightfully classed as Germans. However, two years later this decision was suddenly withdrawn again. In the mid-1950s, Dutch legal scholars disputed the citizenship status of Sudeten Germans. They concluded that ethnic Germans never had an option to maintain their Czechoslovak nationality: German nationality had simply been enforced by the German occupier. Thus, the German nationality of Sudeten Germans was not recognized by International Law. On 4 July 1955, the initial verdict was abolished and Wilhelm and Robert received a declaration of de-enemization after all.²⁷

Danzig Germans

Another case that shows the arbitrariness of the wide interpretation of German nationals in the Decree on Enemy Property is the story of Edgar Nix from the city of Danzig. Like Sudetenland, the Free City of Danzig was also incorporated by the German Reich in the late 1930s. The semi-autonomous city-state had been created in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles on 15 November 1920 and existed until 1939.²⁸ It consisted of the Baltic Sea Port of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk in Poland) and some hundreds of towns and villages in the surrounding areas. The greater majority of the population was German-speaking, although a significant ethnic Polish minority was present, too. The Treaty of Versailles ruled that a newly formed state had its own citizenship, based on residency. Thus, the German inhabitants of Danzig lost their German citizenship with the creation of the Free City. A census in the 1920s shows that almost all residents held the Danzig nationality.

Born in Münster on 17 May 1906, Edgar Nix was originally a German citizen. At a young age, he moved with his mother to Danzig, which at that time was still part of the German Reich. When in 1920 Danzig became a Free City, Edgar lost his German citizenship and gained the Danzig nationality. He settled in the Netherlands a few years later, in 1929. In 1934, he married Marie, who was a Dutch-born citizen. As a result of her marriage, she lost her Dutch citizenship and acquired the Danzig nationality. Together, the couple lived in Berlin from 1936 until 1939, where Edgar worked as an accountant. In 1939, Marie suffered from health issues and returned to the Netherlands. Edgar stayed in Berlin until he found a new job in the Netherlands in 1942. As a German citizen he was forced to enlist in the German army in 1944. He chose to go into hiding instead.

After the war Edgar requested de-enemization for himself and his family. Case law shows that the family received a residence permit, but did not qualify for a declaration of de-enemization because of Edgar’s German citizenship and his wartime residence in Berlin. Marie and the children were initially also considered enemy citizens, as during the war Marie had exchanged her expired Danzig passport for a German one. On 23 December 1949, the family’s request for de-enemization was declined by the NBI.²⁹ In January 1950, Edgar appealed this verdict at the Council for Restoration of Rights. In September 1951, the Court ultimately decided that Edgar had rightfully been treated as an enemy citizen because of its years in Berlin, but that Marie and the children qualified for a declaration of de-enemization after all because of her Dutch origins.³⁰

German by marriage

Many Dutch-born women faced a fate similar to that of Marie Nix after 1945. Legally, marriage to a foreigner had far-reaching consequences for the status of a woman’s citizenship.³¹ Whilst German women who married Dutch men acquired Dutch citizenship, Dutch women who married German men lost their Dutch nationality and became German citizens.³² Before 1940, this had never been a problem. A settlement treaty between the Netherlands and Germany signed in 1907 allowed German citizens to work and reside in the Netherlands, and vice versa.³³ Since naturalization was expensive and offered few advantages to the rights safeguarded in the treaty, few German immigrants applied for Dutch citizenship before the outbreak of the Second World War. Many Dutch-born women were thus registered as German citizens. In pre-war Dutch society, this was not an issue. But when in 1944 the Decree on Enemy Property came into effect, these women were included in the definition of German enemy citizens and treated as such. Like other enemy citizens, they had to submit a request for de-enemization to get acquitted from the enemy status. For some women, there was another way out. Article 8 of the Law on Dutch Citizenship of 1892 ruled that a woman could regain Dutch citizenship by divorce or after the death of her husband.³⁴ A request to this end was to be submitted within one year of the marriage ending in divorce or the loss of the husband. Official naturalization was not required: a declaration of intent was sufficient.

Dutch-born women who had married German husbands after 10 May 1940 faced, however, a different situation. In 1943, prior to the Decree on Enemy Property, the Dutch government in exile in London had promulgated a Decree on the undesirable consequences of the acquisition of a foreign nationality by Dutch citizens after 9 May 1940.³⁵ Royal Decree D16 ruled that Dutch citizens who acquired the nationality of a state with whom the Netherlands maintained no diplomatic relations after 9 May 1940 did not lose their Dutch citizenship, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Thus, Dutch women who married Germans during the war or after the war did not lose their Dutch citizenship, but acquired dual nationality. Nationalist interests explain this special Royal Decree. Since the Kingdom of the Netherlands was at war with Germany, it seemed undesirable for the Dutch government that the German occupier could deprive Dutch citizens of their nationality by, for example, marriage. The Decree also prevented Dutch citizens who were found guilty of high treason from avoiding punishment by acquiring a foreign nationality. For German and other foreign women who married Dutch men after 9 May 1940, an additional Decree was issued on 17 November 1945: Decree F278.³⁶ They did not automatically acquire Dutch citizenship. In addition, women who had already acquired Dutch citizenship by marriage lost their Dutch citizenship on the day Decree F278 came into force. The Decree applied to women who had become enemy citizens by marriage as well as women who were not enemy citizens, but who married Dutch men on enemy territory, such as convicts. A special committee was to be established to judge the requests for naturalization of these women. However, guidelines were never formulated and requests were never taken under advisement.

Analysis of cases of (Dutch-born) women classed as enemy citizens shows that in general, the NBI focused primarily on male enemy citizens. Considering the fact that the main objective of the Decree on Enemy Property was the administration and ultimately liquidation of enemy property to the benefit of the Dutch State, the reason for this is obvious. Men were the wage earners and often the house owner, and thus they often possessed the bulk of the assets. Only in exceptional cases was a woman (born) wealthy. If the woman in question was born in the Netherlands, her assets were usually recovered as her assets were considered Dutch interests and thus confiscation would not be in the interests of the Dutch State. By contrast, when the property belonged to a female enemy citizen with children, the assets were confiscated but the woman received payment or a maintenance allowance to support her family. There is also another argument to conclude that in Dutch policies towards enemy citizens, gender as a category was often in favour of women. Apart from (single) mothers, nuns, for example, were given special treatment. In addition, requests for de-enemization submitted by German housemaids were often granted, too.

Doubly deprived: Jewish refugees

In Nazi German ideology, Jews were not Reichs-, Auslands- or Volksdeutsche. Germans of Jewish origin were not considered to be German citizens at all. Yet in the Netherlands, the Decree on Enemy Property included former German Jewish refugees in the definition of German enemy citizen. Since the Dutch authorities declared all Nazi racial laws that deprived Jewish citizens of their German citizenship invalid, they reasoned that Jews received their German citizenship back after the German capitulation. Thus it occurred that although Jews had no legal status in Germany, after the promulgation of the Decree on Enemy Property in the Netherlands in October 1944, many Jewish refugees were registered as Germans. Others were categorized as ‘stateless persons from Germany’.

Analysis of the records and index cards shows that NBI administrators used various ways to mark and identify cases of Jewish enemy citizens. The documents indicate that the administrators showed no sensitivity to differences within the Jewish population. The term or label ‘Jew’ was used as an umbrella term to define a very heterogeneous, ethnoreligious group of Jewish people, with different cultural, ethnic, religious, political, genealogical and personal dimensions. Jewishness was in many cases registered as a nationality; enemy citizens were either marked as Jewish or half-Jewish. In some cases, the term ‘Jewish’ denoted a political status – referring to ‘being Jewish’ as an equivalent of a citizenship status. In other cases, NBI employees interpreted someone’s Jewishness in a religious manner. Next to written remarks, stamps were used to indicate whether a record concerned someone with a Jewish identity. Ironically, the J in the left-hand corner of the index cards resembles the J-stamp used for Jews in Nazi Germany, a DJ-stamp indicated that the file concerned a Duitse Jood (‘German Jew’).

In 1962, in his historical account on the proceedings of the NBI to that date, NBI director Dirk Mulder concluded that Jews were always treated as a separate, special category. Yet research shows that in fact it was not until 1947 that the NBI accelerated the settlement of cases of former German Jews. Victims of Nazi persecution were exempted from the de-enemization procedure, but the burden of evidence lay with the supposed enemy citizen. Like other enemy citizens, Jewish refugees were to submit a request for a declaration of de-enemization in order to recover their rights and property. For this, they had to provide evidence of, for example, their deportation to camps such as Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz. In addition, children and relatives of people who were killed in one of the death camps had to enclose an official death certificate of the person in question. In the first post-war years, these official documents were difficult to obtain. The Red Cross and concentration camps survivors tried to help people acquire testimonies and required documents.³⁷ Sometimes this paperwork delayed cases for months, if not years.

Perhaps one of the most famous cases of a Holocaust survivor who had to undergo the de-enemization procedure is the case of the father of Anne Frank, Otto Frank. Due to Anne’s posthumously published diary, which is one of the world’s most widely known books and has resulted in several plays and films, the story of the Frank family is well known. Otto Frank was the sole member of the Frank family and those who hid in the house behind the bookshelves on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam who survived the Second World War. When he returned to the Netherlands after months of travel following the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in late January 1945, he was informed that his wife and daughters had been killed in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen respectively, as well as that he was classed as an enemy citizen by the Dutch State. As a result, his company Opekta was confiscated as enemy property. Frank had started his jam-making firm in Germany, and maintained commercial relations when the family moved to the Netherlands. For the Dutch authorities, the originally German owner and continuous trade with Germany during the war were reasons to accuse Opekta of economic collaboration and confiscate the company as enemy assets.

Records in several Dutch archives give insight into the complex, bureaucratic lawsuit that Frank started in order to regain his property. For this article, the history of the company is not that relevant, but the Dutch line of reasoning in categorizing Otto Frank as an enemy citizen is. Upon returning to the Netherlands, Frank was first considered a German citizen and thus classed as an enemy citizen. But in the summer of 1946, the government changed its view and took the position that exiled German Jewish refugees were in fact stateless people. This accelerated Otto Frank’s request for de-enemization remarkably. On 7 February 1947, Otto Frank received notification that he was no longer considered an enemy citizen. In addition, in 1949, he was naturalized and received Dutch citizenship. This rather quick settlement is in stark contrast to the experiences of many other Jewish refugees. By the late 1940s, a great number of Jews had emigrated to countries like the United States, because they had no future in the Netherlands without a legal status and residence or work permit. Otto Frank eventually moved to Switzerland but retained his Dutch citizenship. In 1979, he wrote in the Basler Magazin: ‘I can no longer feel myself a German, I now feel much more Dutch. I have a Dutch passport, and that seems perfectly natural to me.’³⁸

Especially poignant are the cases of minor children who were orphaned by the war. For them, it was often difficult to qualify for a declaration of de-enemization and to recover their family assets. The first step was to collect a death certificate as evidence that their parents had been killed during the war. In two almost similar cases, the children’s parents were murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp.³⁹ Almost none of the more than 33,000 people who were deported from the Netherlands to Sobibor survived this death camp. Upon arrival, they were immediately gassed and cremated and all paper trails leading to these people were destroyed. The only way to confirm this cruel death was a letter from the Red Cross, in which Sobibor survivors Chaim Engel and Selma Engel-Wijnberg testified that almost none of the people who arrived in Sobibor survived. But notwithstanding this statement by the Red Cross and the two survivors, the NBI questioned whether the deaths of the parents were legally determined. They reasoned that a de-enemization procedure was required in order to file an insurance claim. The guardians of the children gained custody of the family’s possessions. Ironically, correspondence about this custodianship reveals that there was in fact no property. Ultimately, the parents were not officially de-enemized: the NBI concluded that posthumous de-enemization was not required as they presumably died long before the Decree on Enemy Property was implemented. This is just one example among the various dubious and painful cases.

Criteria for de-enemization

For Jewish refugees, as for all other enemy citizens, a de-enemization procedure was the only way to be released from enemy status and recover confiscated assets. Yet as stated before, it was not until 1948 that a first set of official guidelines was established. Even then, it proved difficult for this particular category of enemy citizens to appeal enemy status successfully: the Government Gazette of 25 October 1948 proclaimed that only when it was 1) in the Dutch interests or 2) when someone met the criteria summed up hereafter, could enemy citizens qualify for a declaration of de-enemization. The criteria were that an enemy citizen had to prove that: 1) he/she had resided in the Netherlands before the war; 2) he/she had been integrated into Dutch society; and 3) he/she had behaved during wartime ‘as the greater majority of the Dutch had done, thus de facto had not sided with the enemy’.

For several German nationals, the first criterion accelerated and simplified their procedures. Many had lived in the Netherlands for at least 5 to 10 years, if not longer. The second criterion had already caused confusion, as the parameters denoting whether or not someone was integrated were not clearly defined. Analysis of hundreds of cases shows that command of the Dutch language, socialization in Dutch schools, and, for example, membership in Dutch organizations were considered in the evaluation of German citizens’ enemy status. Yet in some cases, Germans who met these standards had also been members of German organizations. Several German nationals had been forced by the German occupational administration into memberships of German organizations, such as labour unions, and fulfilled military service in the German Wehrmacht. Naturally, this raised questions from the NBI employees about people’s loyalties. The third criterion was the most important guideline for de-enemization. If an enemy citizen could provide evidence of what was perceived as ‘typical’ Dutch behaviour, he or she was often granted a declaration of de-enemization. But again, what this Dutch behaviour entailed was not specified.

Idealistic, yet unrealistic visions that individuals, throughout the Netherlands, had conducted acts of resistance and taken up a clear anti-Nazi stance defined what it meant to be a Dutch citizen in the immediate post-war years. The positive image of the Dutch role and its opposition to the evil of Nazi persecution became the founding myth in the reconstruction of the Dutch nation. Acts of individual heroism and resistance were not only celebrated, but also taken to be emblematic of the Dutch nation as a whole. Stories of heroic deeds shaped a resistance norm, which created a standard for the evaluation of wartime conduct in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.⁴⁰ As a result, criteria that convinced the NBI employees of someone’s loyalty towards the Dutch and Allied included listening to the radio broadcast from the Dutch government in London (Radio Oranje), circulating illegal newspapers, informing Dutch citizens about upcoming razzias, financial support to the resistance, and, most importantly, helping people hide.

When enemy citizens could prove their residence, integration and pro-Dutch behaviour, they qualified for a declaration of de-enemization. A social network was of great importance as the number of positive testimonies increased the chance of a successful outcome. For Jewish refugees, the 1948 criteria did not improve their situation. In particular, Jews who had stayed temporarily in the Netherlands before emigrating to the United States or other countries often did not meet the three criteria for de-enemization. Moreover, considering the severe persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, most Jewish refugees were unable to provide evidence of ‘typical’ Dutch behaviour. They had either gone into hiding, or had been deported to concentration camps. Close reading of appeals by former German Jews in and outside the Netherlands indicate that the NBI ultimately took Nazi persecution as a criterion for de-enemization, too. Still, many Jews struggled with the slow and laborious de-enemization process before eventually recovering their assets.

Towards the end of the state of war

On 26 July 1951, the end of the state of war with Germany was proclaimed. More than six years after the war, the time for reconciliation had finally come. Cold war tensions and economic integration in Europe had changed the political situation. In addition, the restoration of bilateral relations with Germany was vital for the Dutch economy, in particular after the decolonization of Indonesia in 1949. Yet although Germans were no longer enemy citizens after the official end of the state of war was proclaimed by Queen Juliana, the expropriated assets were not returned. A new Bill, which Parliament passed only a few days before 26 July 1951, arranged that all confiscated assets remained in the hands of the Dutch state. According to the Dutch government, the German government had to compensate the German citizens on Dutch territory. It would take nearly two decades until, in 1969, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) enacted the so-called Reparationsschädengesetz that provided deprived German owners in the Netherlands with the opportunity to file a claim for compensation. As Germany employed the principle of proportional distribution, the few who ultimately filed a claim for legal redress received only small compensation.⁴¹

From a political and financial point of view, the Decree on Enemy Property was fruitful. Assets varying from furniture (spoons, tables, clothes) to insurance, companies and castles were confiscated and liquidated; even an island was seized. Minutes of the Dutch parliament indicate that by the early 1960s, the confiscation and liquidation of German enemy assets had yielded 750 million Dutch guilders, equivalent to billions of euros today.⁴² From a historical point of view, the arbitrariness and inconsistency of the Dutch policies towards enemy citizens, and, most importantly, the lack of compensation for deprived German owners, give cause for criticism. Often, there is reason to doubt the impartiality of NBI administrators. Many archival files echo the personal convictions and reluctance of the officials who processed the requests. In some cases, the comments, notes and definitions of good actions reflect personal moral opinions on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

The experience of the enemy occupation, both in the period 1940–45 and specifically in the final phase of the war from September 1944 to May 1945, when conditions for the (non-Jewish) civilian population were at their worst, is critical for understanding why Dutch classifications of Germans as enemy citizens were arbitrary and laden with subjective views of belonging. The desire for compensation and redress outweighed pleas to take into consideration the rights and interests of individuals. The NBI operated against the background of a ruined economy and traumatized society. Its actions, decisions and ways of categorizing citizens and non-citizens cannot be understood without considering the wider context of post-war legal redress and transitional justice. Dutch post-war policies towards German nationals in the aftermath of the Second World War formed part of the post-war reconstruction of Dutch society. At the same time, the anti-German policies also show that in the process of dealing with the past and building more inclusive societies, procedural standards can lead to new injustices.

Citizenship as mechanism of exclusion

If it does just one thing, the dynamics of the Dutch treatment of German nationals in the aftermath of the Second World War leads us to the conclusion that these post-war politics of citizenship and nationality were messy and thorny.⁴³ Nationality determined enemy status: everyone who was categorized as a German national by the Dutch government was classified and treated as an enemy citizen. Residents of Austria, Sudetenland and other territories annexed or occupied by Germany before or throughout the course of the Second World War were regarded and treated as enemy citizens as well. In retrospect, the definition of ‘German’ in the Decree on Enemy Property is best described as a big net cast out to catch not only big fish, but all fish. The Dutch government categorized all German nationals as enemies, thereby including German nationals who had not behaved like enemies, ethnic Germans or (former) Germans who had even been persecuted by the Nazis themselves.

Normative criteria of Dutch citizenship were taken as criteria by which to judge German nationals who appealed their enemy status. ‘Typical’ Dutch behaviour and an ‘intrinsic Dutch’ position in terms of societal responsibility to serve Dutch interests as well as citizenship as membership of the Dutch national community were considered as guidelines for inclusion and exclusion of German nationals in post-war Dutch society. Enemy citizens were also sorted out and classified by ethnicity, race, class, religion, gender and occupation. However, what was perceived as ‘typical’ Dutch citizenship for the various sub-categories of enemy citizens was never clearly defined.

Analysis of requests and appeals by Germans against their enemy status showed that their German nationality did not designate or decide their loyalties or identities. Rather, their acts show a sense of transnational or multinational loyalty and belonging: they had feelings of national belonging to their country of origin, while at the same time they acted on feelings of national belonging to the country of settlement. The NBI evaluated the deeds of German nationals, rather than the doer. German nationals who helped people in hiding or who had actively supported resistance movements met the criteria of Dutch citizenship that the NBI employees deployed in the evaluation of requests for de-enemization. The more positive testimonies one could provide, the more likely the NBI was to come to a positive judgement. Yet in some cases, there were neither acts of Dutch nor of German citizenship to be judged by the NBI. German Jewish refugees who had arrived in the Netherlands after years of Nazi persecution, for example, faced the problem of burden of proof.

Several cases reveal that even German nationals, who might have constituted themselves as Dutch citizens with their acts, were still not counted as political or social members of the state. Even after naturalization, they remained outsiders. In this respect, the post-war treatment of German enemy citizens in the Netherlands does not only ask for debate on the effect of categorical state-ordered measures in the aftermath of the Second World War, but also invites critical rethinking on how notions of citizenship and nationality tie bonds between an individual and the state. The history of German enemy citizens shows that sorting people along the lines of citizenship and nationality results in institutionalized prejudices and cultural cleavages, and that nationally defined notions of citizenship fuel attempts to sort people into friends and foes. But it also reveals a post-war reconfiguration of Dutch citizenship, involving various dimensions of identity-constructing and civic virtue-building. Citizenship status now represented a strategy for distinguishing insiders and outsiders, to sort out the ‘real’ Dutch members of society.

Interestingly, citizenship in terms of good moral conduct has become the cornerstone of the integration and naturalization procedures for newcomers. Ideas about the stereotypical Dutch citizen and notions of ‘good’ Dutch citizenship in terms of behaviour still play an important role on both policy and societal levels. Having examined the details of how German nationals were treated in the Netherlands in the aftermath of the Second World War, this article makes a strong plea for scholars studying the politics of citizenship and nationality to pay more attention to the link between citizenship and ways of behaviour. This is because linking citizenship with behaviour is not only very subjective, but also very context specific and thus tells us something about the lived experience of citizens.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the authors in the special issue for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Research conducted for the study on which this article was based was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [322-52-010].

Notes on contributors

Marieke Oprel

Marieke Oprel is assistant professor of Political History at Radboud University. Her research focuses on the process of political reconstruction and nation-building in Western Europe after the Second World War. In 2020 she received her PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, after defending a dissertation that explored Dutch citizenship policies towards German nationals in the aftermath of the Second World War. This article is based on her PhD project, which was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Notes

1. This article presents and summarizes some of the most important results of my PhD research on German enemy citizens in the Netherlands conducted between 2015 and 2019. See Oprel, The Burden of Nationality.

2. Romijn and Schumacher, “Transitional Justice in the Netherlands after World War II,” 133–71; and van der Ven, Een omstreden eiland, 171 n. 27. Oprel, The Burden of Nationality, 31.

3. Decree E-133, Staatsblad, October 20, 1944.

4. Oprel, “The Archive as Narrator?” 51–63; and Veraart, “The Assets of the Schichts,” 351–72.

5. Mulder, Overzicht nopens de geschiedenis van het ontvijandingsbeleid; Staatscourant, October 25, 1948.

6. Caglioti, “Subjects, Citizens, and Aliens in a Time of Upheaval,” 497.

7. See, most importantly, Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst; Jahr, “Zivilisten als Kriegsgefangene: die Internierung von ‘Feindstaaten-Ausländern’,” 287–321. See also: Caglioti, “Why and how Italy Invented an Enemy Aliens Problem in the First World War,” 142–69; Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire; and Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany.

8. On Japanese American internment, see: Irons, Justice at War; Robinson, By Order of the President; Kashima, Judgment without Trial; Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy. On Britsh enemy alien measures, see Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945; Hirschfeld, Exile in Great Britain; Cesarani and Kushner, The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain; and London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948.

9. Exceptions are Sandra Barkhof’s study of the German Pacific colonies during the First World War and Mahon Murphy’s work on colonial captivity in the German empire. See also: Panayi, Germans as Minorities during the First World War.

10. Bogaarts, “Weg met de moffen,” 1–18 ; and Bogaarts, “Land in zicht?” 1–19.

11. Sintemaartensdijk and Nijland, Operatie Black Tulip; Schrover, “The Deportation of Germans from the Netherlands 1946–1952,” 250–78; and Molema, Wie is de vijand.

12. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog; and Wielenga, West-Duitsland: partner uit noodzaak.

13. van der Ven, Een omstreden eiland.

14. Veraart, “The Assets of the Schichts.”

15. Annual statistics by the Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek (‘Central Statistical Office’, or ‘CBS’) https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/nl/dataset/37325/table?ts=1552395398797, last accessed July 6, 2019. The overall number of Germans living in the Dutch East Indies according to the 1930 census was 6867. There are no exact numbers on Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles, but according to estimates there lived a couple of hundred German nationals in these overseas territories when war broke out in 1940.

16. The most famous examples are former queens regnant of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Wilhemina, Juliana and Beatrix, all of whom had German husbands.

17. Schrover, “The Deportation of Germans from the Netherlands,” 250.

18. National Archives The Hague (NA), Archive NBI 2.09.16, inv. 10324–10341.

19. Centraal Bureau Statistiek (CBS), Vijfennegentig Jaren Statistiek in Tijdreeksen 1899–1904.

20. NA, Archive Council for Restoration of Rights, 2.09.48.02, inv. 112.

21. Staatscourant, Monday, October 25, 1948, no. 206.

22. The compensation was part of the Austrian State Treaty that re-established Austria as a sovereign state on May 15, 1955. Staatsvertrag betreffend die Wiederherstellung eines unabhängigen und demokratischen Österreich, unterzeichnet in Wien am 15. Mai.

23. Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen; and Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit?

24. McDonough, Hitler, Chamberlain and Appeasement; Mommsen, The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality; Ragsdale, The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II; and Schieder, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa.

25. A bibliography on the expulsion of ethnic Germans is part of: Prauser and Rees, The Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe.

26. Rechtsherstel edition 8 1953/1954, May 27, 1953, no. 53/340, 881–93.

27. Rechtsherstel, edition 10 1955/1956, July 4, 1955, no. 55/486, 1215–17.

28. Mason, The Danzig Dilemma.

29. Rechtsherstel edition 6 1951/1952, September 14, 1951, nr 51/110, 293–9.

30. Ibid., 299.

31. Oprel, “Vijand door haar huwelijk,” 4–8.

32. de Hart, Een tweede paspoort, 216; and Henkes, Heimat in Holland, footnote 43.

33. Vestigingsverdrag 1907: van Eijl, Al te goed is buurmansgek, ch. 4.

34. Wet op het Nederlanderschap en het ingezetenenschap (‘Nationality Act) of 1892.

35. de Hart, Een tweede paspoort, 216–19.

36. Ibid., 216.

37. See the case of, for example, the Grüneberg family, NA, archive NBI 2.09.16.05, inv. 5806 and 4864.

38. http://www.annefrank.org/en/Anne-Frank/Otto-returns-alone/Otto-Franks-nationality/, accessed July 10, 2019.

39. Grüneberg: NA, Archive NBI 2.09.16.05, inv. 5806 and 4864. Schweitzer: NA, Archive NBI 2.09.16.13, inv. 5848 and 167757.

40. Hondius, Return: Holocaust Survivors and Dutch Anti-Semitism, 75–82; and Hondius, “Welcome to Amsterdam?” 135–41.

41. van der Ven, Een omstreden eiland, 235 footnote 272.

42. Acts of Senate, 1960–1961 6250 (R214); van der Ven, Een omstreden eiland, 196, footnote 128.

43. Oprel, The Burden of Nationality, 246.