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June 3, 2021 - Droog Magazine periodical for investigative journalism

'Forgotten' Dutch WW2 victims

Introduction

After the Second World war the Dutch government was very restrictive in giving Dutch war casualties the status of 'official war victim', as doing so would mean that the state would be responsible for the maintenance of the graves and for state pensions for the next of kin.

The definition for war victims originally used by the Dutch Oorlogsgravenstichting (War Graves Foundation), the semi-official organization responsible for the maintenance of war graves and the database of war victims, is:

"Military personnel of the Dutch armed forces who fell after 9 May 1940 and Dutch civilians who lost their lives, either by actively fighting the enemy or as a result of their actions or attitude towards the enemy.

This description also includes Dutch military personnel and civilians who were sent out by the government and who died during humanitarian and/or peace missions."

Source: Oorlogsgravenstichting, 2021;
https://web.archive.org/web/20210520111608/https://oorlogsgravenstichting.nl/vraag-en-antwoord.

In later years also Jews, Roma and Sinti who died in or near concentration camps, civilians who fell victim to German firings squads, European citizens who perished whilst imprisoned by the Japanese and Dutch slave labourers who perished in Germany, were also given the official status.

Many war victims never given the official status

Yet, to this very day, many 'groups' were never recognized as official war victim. Among them the more than four hundred Dutchmen who died because of war related incidents from 1 September 1939 and May 10, 1940; the tens of thousands of civilians who died during bombings and street fighting, the more than ten thousand who died of starvation during the Hunger Winter 1944/1945. Also not recognized and not even known by name are the hundreds of thousands native Indonesians who were subjects of Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina and perished under Japanese rule, 1942-1945.

But also many Dutch Jews and German or "stateless" Jewish refugees who died of war related causes, were never recognized as official war victims.

On these pages we'll try to name and commemorate some of these 'forgotten' Dutch war victims.

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Categories

Mobilisation period, September 1, 1939 - May 10, 1940.

De 432 vergeten Nederlandse oorlogsslachtoffers / The 432 forgotten Dutch war victims (Droog Magazine, 2018-2019)

Jewish victims

- Murdered by "resistance" while in hiding

- Robbery Murders

- Laren, 1942 (the Horn brothers)
- Het zwijgen van Laren (Vrij Nederland, 1991)

- Schiedam, 1942 (the De Vries-Schnitzler family)

- Paris, ca. 1943 (the possible 6 or 7 Dutch victims of French serial killer Marcel Petiot)

- Jewish psychiatric patients

Civilian victims of bombings, strafings, street fighting

Victims of 'Hunger Winter'

Civilian victims of German shootings after the liberation

- Shooting at the Dam, May 7th, 1945 (Amsterdam, at least 32 fatalities)

Indonesian civilians perished during Japanese occupation (1942-1945)

Civilian victims of WW2 munition after liberation

The collaborators

Some 4 to 6,000 Dutchmen who joined the SS or other German military forces died in active service. When they joined these forces they lost automatically the Dutch nationality. So formally seen, not a single Dutchmen died in German military service .

Several hundred Dutch civilian collaborators were killed by the Dutch resistance in 1940-1945.

34 Dutch collaborators were executed after the war, in 1946-1952.
In 1944-1948 an unknown number of collaborators/persons accused of collaboration died without trial in internation camps.

See also:

Verliezen Nederlandse bevolking (Losses Dutch Population), NIOD, Amsterdam, [s.a.], accessed 20-5-2021].
https://web.archive.org/web/20210520182749/https://www.niod.nl/nl/vraag-en-antwoord/verliezen-nederlandse-bevolking