Anton Mussert was the leader of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB), the Dutch National Socialist Movement, from its founding in 1931 until the end of the war. He held the title Leider, the Dutch equivalent of Führer, and was officially recognised by the German occupation authorities in December 1942 as Leider van het Nederlandsche Volk. The Netherlands under German occupation, with the active cooperation of the NSB, lost around 102,000 of its 140,000 Jews to the deportations, the highest proportional Jewish death toll of any country in Western Europe. Mussert was tried, convicted of treason, and shot at the Waalsdorpervlakte dunes near The Hague on 7 May 1946.
The Netherlands under Seyss-Inquart
The Netherlands was administered by an Austrian SS man, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, from May 1940 to May 1945. Seyss-Inquart held the senior occupation authority, not Mussert; the NSB was the local political instrument, not the formal government. The deportation of the Dutch Jews was conducted under Seyss-Inquart’s authority, with Eichmann’s deputy in the Netherlands, Ferdinand aus der Fünten, running the Jewish desk. The role of the NSB and Mussert was supporting and enabling, not commanding.
The Dutch police
The Dutch police, under occupation authority but staffed by Dutch officers, conducted the round-ups of Dutch Jews in Amsterdam, The Hague and other cities throughout 1942 and 1943. Around 60 per cent of the police rank and file were NSB members or sympathisers. The Amsterdam Police Battalion under NSB chief Sybren Tulp was the principal arrest force in the Amsterdam round-ups. The NSB, on Mussert’s direction, encouraged its members in the Dutch police to cooperate enthusiastically with the German Jewish-affairs office. The result was that, unlike in many other occupied countries, the German occupier did not have to deploy German police to make the arrests. The Dutch did the work.
The Hollandsche Schouwburg and Westerbork
The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg theatre on the Plantage Middenlaan was used as the holding centre from which Dutch Jews were transferred to the Westerbork transit camp in the eastern Netherlands. The transfers were conducted by Dutch personnel under NSB control. Westerbork itself was administered by an SS commandant but staffed substantially by Dutch personnel, including a Dutch Jewish camp police force whose role has been debated and condemned in the Dutch post-war reckoning. From Westerbork, ninety-three deportation trains left for Auschwitz, Sobibór, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt between July 1942 and September 1944.
The Mussert speeches
Mussert delivered approximately weekly speeches at NSB rallies and through the Dutch radio service throughout the occupation period. His speeches consistently endorsed the German antisemitic programme, attacked the Allied bombing of German cities, and called for the integration of the Netherlands into the new Germanic Europe. The texts of his major speeches have been preserved by the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD). They contain explicit antisemitic content, repeated demands for the removal of Jews from Dutch public life, and explicit support for the deportations once these were underway. He cannot be defended on the basis that he had not known what the deportations meant. He had explicitly endorsed them in public.
The Hitler meetings
Mussert met Hitler four times during the war: at the Berghof on 12 December 1941, in Berlin in June 1943, at the Wolfsschanze in December 1943, and at Berlin in February 1944. The transcripts of these meetings, prepared by Hitler’s personal staff, show Mussert advocating an autonomous Dutch position within a wider Germanic federation. Hitler dismissed the proposals. The meetings made clear, however, that Mussert was a pro-Nazi politician negotiating from inside the German camp, not a reluctant collaborator coerced from outside it.
The Anne Frank arrest
The arrest of the Frank family, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, at the secret annex behind 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, on 4 August 1944, was conducted by an SS NCO, Karl Silberbauer, accompanied by three Dutch members of the Amsterdam police, all NSB members. The Dutch policemen, not the German, made most of the practical arrangements during the four-hour search. The arrest is one of around 50,000 individual Dutch police arrests of Jews under the occupation. The case is well-known because of the diary; the practice was routine.
The collapse
Mussert was arrested on 7 May 1945, the day before the German surrender in the Netherlands took effect, by a Dutch resistance unit. He was held in The Hague through the rest of 1945 while the Dutch judicial system was reconstituted.
The trial
Mussert was tried before the Bijzonder Gerechtshof, the special court for war crimes, in November 1945. The case included the founding and leadership of the NSB, the wartime collaboration with the German occupation authorities, the public speeches endorsing the deportations, and treason against the Dutch state. He was found guilty on 12 December 1945 and sentenced to death. The Dutch Supreme Court rejected his appeal on 20 March 1946. He was shot at the Waalsdorpervlakte execution site in the dunes near Scheveningen on 7 May 1946, exactly one year after his arrest. He was 51.
What he was
Mussert was the case of the small-party ideological collaborator who delivered his country’s Jewish community to a German operation while negotiating, unsuccessfully, for a more autonomous Dutch position within Hitler’s Europe. The Netherlands lost three quarters of its Jews. The proportion is the highest in Western Europe. The reason it was so high was that the Dutch police, with the NSB at their core, had done the work.
See also
Sources
- Tessel Pollmann, Mussert & Co., Boom, 2012
- Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945, Arnold, 1997
- Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en België, Boom, 2011
- NIOD: Mussert speech archive
- USHMM: The Netherlands