In January 1942, an article by an elderly member of the Dutch Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement, NSB), appeared in the party weekly, Volk en Vaderland (VoVa). The anonymous member reported that he had been a fascist since before 1914: ‘For already then I was burdened with the realization that our entire culture had degenerated.’Footnote 1 To his mind, it was the war which brought degeneration to a crisis, but also a cure: fascism. The time had come ‘to no longer stand and worry alone about the threatening downfall of the Netherlands and Europe’.Footnote 2
In 1931, Anton Mussert founded the NSB, after a number of failed attempts by fascists to create a unified movement in the 1920s. Though Mussert's respectability appalled more radical fascist organizations like the General Dutch Fascist Union or Black Front, the NSB soon outgrew all other fascist parties in the Netherlands.Footnote 3 In the 1935 provincial elections, it won more than 300,000 votes, a spectacular 7·94 per cent.Footnote 4 Against a background of economic depression and dysfunctional cabinets, the NSB exploited the socially notoriously divided nation, portraying itself as the saviour of the Netherlands, intervening when the ruling Catholic–Calvinist coalition seemed reduced to ineffectual bickering, while Bolshevism threatened. The nation was in decline, verval, and faced collapse. A sense of decline is commonly associated with the fin de siècle, but there is much evidence to suggest that despair about the future of Europe was even stronger after the First World War.Footnote 5 For instance, Richard Overy has argued that the ‘fin de siècle consciousness’, the morbid view of the West, civilization as a moribund organism, was even more current by 1939 than it was in 1914.Footnote 6 In 1935, the respected Dutch historian and cultural critic Johan Huizinga published In the shadows of tomorrow, which analysed the degeneration of morality and politics caused by the onset of modern mass culture.Footnote 7 Fear of decline in the interwar Netherlands was quite mainstream,Footnote 8 and the NSB was in a strong position to exploit it, as an outsider that could break up the pillarized political system that defined Dutch politics, and make a plausible claim to being an anti-liberal party of unity.
The controversy around Roger Griffin's ‘new consensus’ has brought themes of rebirth in fascist political culture to the fore in the past two decades, but its implicit counterpart – decline – remains largely unexamined in its own right.Footnote 9 Arguing in the early 1990s that European fascism was best understood generically as a political ideology centred on the myth of ultra-nationalist rebirth, Griffin aroused a debate about fascist myths and ideology at a time when political-cultural history was trending in fascism studies.Footnote 10 While he has produced extensive work on the fascist sense of a new beginning, the sense of decline has often been assumed to be merely a continuation of fin de siècle cultural pessimism.Footnote 11 Historians of fascism like Robert O. Paxton or Stanley G. Payne have produced accounts of the fascist obsession with decline, but reductively treated it as symptomatic of national crises; the origin of the more important dialectical palingenetic response which was the impetus to ideological action.Footnote 12 Other scholars like Aristotle Kallis have analysed how fascist myths, such as decline and rebirth, fed immediately into fascist political action, with real and deadly effects.Footnote 13 But the substance and the production of these myths require further exploration. Decline is a concept that covers a rich variety of narratives. Figures like Nietzsche or Spengler are too often used to summarize quickly a mythic mainstay of interwar fascism that was in reality ideologically complex and highly varied. At the same time, the origins and practical processes behind the construction of these narratives remain to be researched, especially among non-regime movements. The NSB was by no means the only fascist organization in the Netherlands, but it was by far the largest, and the only legal political party during the German occupation, making it a good case-study for comparative analysis. Groups like the NSB are still at times dismissed by scholars, as negligible and ‘mimetic’.Footnote 14
This article focuses on narratives of decline in the NSB during its existence from 1931 to 1945, arguing that these mythic narratives gave the NSB an ideological coherence which Dutch historians have frequently argued the movement lacked.Footnote 15 Narratives of decline fulfilled several functions within the party. This case-study shows that, if we foreground the mythic aspects of fascism, they quickly reveal themselves as unique and ideologically complex organizations, whose relations with other European fascists, especially Italy and Germany, were by no means unidirectional or straightforward. The motif of decline reveals the NSB not as a partaker of a common or generic fascist myth, but as an heir of Dutch liberal-historicist traditions, of immediate importance to its fate.
I
Under Anton Adriaan Mussert (1894–1946), Leider of the NSB, there was no need for rigid ideological conformity. A former member of the liberal conservative Vrijheidsbond (Freedom Union), his work as civil engineer of water management in Utrecht (1920–34) brought him into nationalist politics when the 1925 Belgian Treaty unexpectedly united water management with nationalist politics.Footnote 16 The treaty allowed Belgian access to the Moerdijk channel via Antwerp, and under the treaty, supported by France, the right to pass through the channels with war ships if necessary. Mussert became a leading figure in the nationalist protest against the treaty, which was abandoned under the protest's pressure.Footnote 17 Success in politics eventually led Mussert, a ‘thoroughly decent and respectable bourgeois’,Footnote 18 to found the National Socialist Movement in December 1931, together with his colleague Cornelis van Geelkerken.Footnote 19 Some Dutch historians have claimed Mussert's version of national socialism only had style and appearance in common with ‘real’ fascism.Footnote 20 When pushed to develop ideological doctrine, Mussert proclaimed Dutch national socialism to have three sources: faith in God; love of People and Fatherland; and respect for Labour. No doubt a liberal interpretation of national socialism, he meant there were many aspects to national socialism, ‘like a jewel with many facets’.Footnote 21
Thus, it should come as no surprise that different – even conflicting – ideologies bloomed in the NSB, just as divergent narratives of decline also proliferated.Footnote 22 These narratives underpinned ideological positions in the NSB, highlighting ideological difference. The Hegelian faction, headed by S. A. Van Lunteren, is an interesting case of specific narratives of decline in the NSB. Van Lunteren's influence in VoVa was noticeable from the moment he became editor in May 1933, particularly thanks to his promotion of the Dutch Hegelian philosopher G. J. P. J. Bolland.Footnote 23 Bolland's proverbs were placed in spare spaces between columns, with advertisements for the annual meeting of the Bolland Society (free entrance for NSB members).Footnote 24 A peculiarly Hegelian construction of decline stood out. VoVa consolidated the symptoms of decline into a ‘general crisis in the process of current world history’.Footnote 25 The crisis expressed itself as a struggle of ideologies:
We, as a nation, have to move through the world completely independently, but in doing so we have to participate in the battle of ideologies, in the process of the (West-European) World Spirit…The spiritual life of the Netherlands is luckily not yet petrified in all segments of the population.Footnote 26
While such a narrative easily incorporated popular themes, such as the fall of democracy and the rise of communism, the Hegelians clothed them in theoretical garb. But notions like the World Spirit had little appeal to most NSB members, who frequently found the articles unreadably boring, so that such theorizing was soon relegated to less popular NSB periodicals.Footnote 27
Another example of the distinctive nature of the decline narratives that thrived in NSB discourse is Robert van Genechten, editor of Nieuw Nederland, and head of the party department of education (vorming).Footnote 28 Though himself a former university teacher, he enjoyed attacking the universities as sites of intellectual chaos, especially humanistic Leiden.Footnote 29 Humanism seemed to be his personal obsession, and shaped much of his writing; especially during the German occupation: ‘[national socialism] does not lament the downfall of humanist culture, for it knows that it undermined the people's power’.Footnote 30 Genechten's concern also shaped the departmental material he wrote, such as a 1941 booklet for internal education, listing the ‘cardinal sins of the modern era’: first and foremost humanism, followed by modernism, rationalism, individualism, materialism, and democracy.Footnote 31
The ideological faction which eventually proved most important to the NSB was that of the volkse (racial) fascists, heavily influenced by German Nazism. People like E. J. Roskam, agricultural expert; Hendrik Feldmeijer, future leader of the Dutch SS; and the Austrian-Dutch Rost van Tonningen, a friend of Himmler, who joined the NSB at his behest, employed notions of bloed en bodem, and viewed state and volk as antithetical.Footnote 32 From 1935 onwards, the volkse faction grew stronger in the NSB. Consequently, Jews took an increasingly prominent place in official NSB discourse as the villains in the Dutch story of decline. By 1936 to 1937, VoVa articles warned of Jews in the Netherlands, and the traditional Marxist enemy became a mere precursor to Jewry in the narrative of decline: ‘Marxism prepares the path for Jewish domination.’Footnote 33 In 1938, there was a sharp increase in anti-semitic rhetoric in VoVa, and the theme of International Jewry and German-Jewish refugees came to the fore.Footnote 34 But non-volkse decline narratives not only persisted alongside but in combination with volkse narratives. One speech at a 1938 rally provides an excellent example:
Even under the worst possible form of state a people does not immediately perish. It becomes sick, it languishes, it shrivels, gradually it necrotizes, it is as if it were rotting away. This process can last tens, sometimes hundreds of years, but the end is death, usually through a blow from outside, unless it comes to its senses.Footnote 35
The speaker proceeded to state that this process of decay had affected the Germanic people for centuries, emphasizing an ideological shift that had taken place in the NSB: the victim of decline was the volk, not the nation, and the volk was Germanic, and as such part of Europe, rather than a nation-state. The people needed to be prepared to fulfil its task in Europe, during the last stage of the ‘liberal, democratic, capitalist, Marxist state’.Footnote 36
II
While decline narratives functionally highlighted ideological disparity, they paradoxically also served to tie differences together into a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. VoVa was the principal tool for this purpose. It was widely taken for granted that whoever wanted to know the NSB should first of all read VoVa.Footnote 37 The high sales of the weekly newspaper were attributed not least to Mussert's editorials, which granted it a special air of authority compared to other NSB publications, none of which sold nearly as well. The Dutch daily newspapers usually got their information about the movement from VoVa.Footnote 38 The department of press and propaganda valued the paper immensely: ‘It is known that VoVa is still one of our best propaganda tools’, according to the head of distribution in Haarlem.Footnote 39 The NSB put a staggering amount of organization and resources into propaganda, and VoVa was the core of that effort. At a 1944 meeting between Mussert and NSB district leaders, he still insisted, while the Allies were invading the Netherlands, that ‘[o]ne thing of great importance is the edition of “VoVa”. You must ensure that they are delivered.’Footnote 40 Nevertheless, by June 1944, one district leader had to confess that VoVa sales were decreasing due to material shortages, while distributors found it difficult to get around without bicycles, since no new tyres could be provided. Many copies were bought just to pack fish or flowers.Footnote 41 But before its last years, the newspaper managed to reach hundreds of thousands, as excellent organization, financial resources, and media interest ensured that its message percolated through large portions of the Dutch population.
Considering VoVa’s role within the NSB's propaganda apparatus, it was crucial in the propagation of the movement's narratives of decline. The format of a weekly newspaper proved ideally suited to the narratives’ construction. Naturally a news-focused paper, it was well suited to injecting the ideas of decline that circulated in the Netherlands and Europe with immediate relevance. Issues of VoVa were focused on particular themes to drive home the message of the week effectively. Numerous circulars have survived from the propaganda department which instructed the editorial team and the writers on the weekly topics, and what arguments to make, to ensure a common party line. For instance, the week after 11 January 1936, the topic was the failures of Prime Minister Hendrik Colijn, and their origins in the growing ‘fission fungus’, which threatened to ‘suffocate the last remnants of national unity and power’. The ‘demo-liberal establishment’, individualism, and universal suffrage were to be highlighted as the origins of national division and weakness.Footnote 42 For 7 March, the topic was Franco-Belgian influence on the ‘democratic’ rulers, and ‘communism at the gates!’.Footnote 43
While VoVa recycled many of the themes of decline found in rightist discourse since the early 1920s – unsurprisingly as many NSB top figures had been active fascists in the previous decade – it integrated them with nationally specific topics. Thus, while VoVa employed the familiar rhetoric of the powerlessness of the ordinary political parties, apathy, faithlessness, and division as symptoms of ‘the downfall of the nation’, it painted a specifically Dutch picture.Footnote 44 An article about one of the NSB's favourite target groups, farmers, exemplifies this approach: ‘The farmer in the Netherlands became the victim of his political alienation…That he was ever capable of taking care of himself would be easy to prove, if our government let go its free trade idea.’Footnote 45 Referring to specific laws concerning agricultural pricing and trade regulations, the ‘road of suffering’ of the ‘industrious’ farmers was tied directly to the economic depression, unemployment, and liberal government.Footnote 46 ‘[E]very day new victims fall into the maelstrom of insane state management…In fast tempo everyone goes to the economic abyss, from which they will never rise again.’Footnote 47 Another recurring threat in VoVa’s narratives was the potential loss of the colonial empire. (‘The Indies Lost – Disaster Born’, was an oft-repeated slogan in defence of military spending.) In 1935, as the provincial elections approached – the first in which the NSB participated – VoVa attacked the decadence of parliament, which neglected the navy and air force, threatening to drive the Netherlands off the sea.Footnote 48
The conventional fascist lament of growing national division and conflict was given a Dutch spin by concentrating on pillarization (verzuiling), the segmentation of Dutch society into a confessional and political pillars (zuilen): Catholics, Calvinists, socialists, and to a lesser extent liberals. Each pillar had its own political parties, trade unions, newspapers, radio slots, sport and leisure clubs, creating a sense of community, and optimizing social control.Footnote 49 As much as 90 per cent of the Dutch population was in some way pillarized, even if the efficacy and nature of pillarization have been questioned in more recent scholarship;Footnote 50 nevertheless it was a serious concern to contemporaries.Footnote 51 VoVa contrasted the division of recent years with the idealized unity of the recent war years.Footnote 52 ‘Now behold the result: our people is divided by the party bigwigs into boxes of different colours – gone is unity; since then the Netherlands is divided in itself…we despise all box-building (hokjesgetimmer).’Footnote 53 This sectarianism (hokjes- en schotjesgeest) remained the focus for NSB discourse about division until the very end. In April 1945, VoVa still warned that victory for the Allies would come at the cost of a return of social division to the Netherlands.Footnote 54 Due to the confessional nature of pillarization, it was natural that VoVa paid special attention to religious divisions, which became a frequent theme in the second half of the thirties, when the NSB was under fire from the churches.Footnote 55
Decay (bederf) is always and everywhere present…There have always been people, who abuse their spiritual office to exercise political pressure…But there are times, like at the end of the Middle Ages and our time, when business is sanctioned by ecclesiastical authorities…Each collapsing structure has its own forms of corruption, determined by circumstance.Footnote 56
In the same issue, VoVa portrayed the political alliance between the Roman Catholic State Party and the Reformed parties as a threat to religion. In an article entitled ‘Freedom of conscience under threat: the confessional parties are a danger to religion’, it reproduced a speech by Catholic NSB senator Marchant d'Ansembourg.Footnote 57 The confessional parties had achieved their original objective, ‘the recognition of the Christian foundation of our people’, meaning they were no longer needed. Their coalition in parliament entailed democratic compromise of religious principles, harming religious morality. Unfortunately, the ‘connection of party and church’ made them appear united, and the faults of the party were ascribed to the church; those who for religious reasons did not wish to be part of a confessional party were then regarded as bad Christians.Footnote 58 The article shows more than a little resentment at the treatment of Christian NSB members in their respective churches, but also the stake the NSB had in foregrounding pillarization as the ultimate source of division in the Netherlands. It convincingly rooted the narrative of division and decline in a phenomenon that was an everyday reality for the Dutch, while discrediting the structures that kept the NSB out of power, and defined its place in politics and society.
III
So far, it has been shown that a variety of sometimes mutually exclusive ideological currents co-existed under the aegis of Mussert, while narratives of decline constructed a more or less coherent political message. While VoVa was the principal expression of this function, Mussert also had a personal vision of the decline of the Netherlands, and one which left a deep impression on the NSB from its inception. What Mussert lacked in theoretical schooling and dogmatism he made up for with a myth of Dutch decline which possessed an authority beyond his own, and which provided the Movement with an ideological constant that rivalled and absorbed all others.
The essence of Mussert's vision was the historical Dutch Golden Age (Gouden Eeuw), the glory of the early modern Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, made great through its maritime empire. The Golden Age was invoked by the NSB salute: Hou Zee (Hold the Sea). A 1941 NSB internal training booklet explained:
We use the salute which for hundreds of years, in the times of our greatest national pride, was used between our Holland sailors. Hou Zee!, the salute of van Tromp and De Ruyter [the renowned seventeenth-century admirals], has come forth out of our People and its nature [volksaard]…[Our forefathers] made our flags fly on the sea, they manifested their spiritual power and desire for enterprise, they built the imperium for which posterity can now be proud…Hou Zee! It is the salute, the battle cry, which binds us warriors to the same Dutch ideal. It is the link to the glorious past of the Dutch People with the future which we want and will build!Footnote 59
In one internal speech, Mussert spoke passionately about Dutch history and its abuse by the establishment: ‘We will teach them to keep their hands off our men, who gave their property and blood for the honour of our people, which led an armada [1688], manned with 20,000 heads, and defeated France and England simultaneously to clear the path for the future of our people.’Footnote 60 Golden Age figures of history were reinterpreted as fascists; artists and poets like Joost van den Vondel were held up in contrast to the writers of a decadent modern age. Early modern songs celebrating the Dutch Republic or William of Orange were invariably sung at rallies.Footnote 61 A song of the paramilitary WA reimagined the corps as sixteenth-century Calvinist rebel geuzen reincarnate – ‘for the blood of their fathers burns in their soul / and they fight again as at Brill’.Footnote 62 Dutch history truly started in 1568, and the narrative of decline consequently spanned centuries, reconfiguring contemporary troubles to fit the story of the lost Golden Age. Present decline was understood as the early modern challenges in a modern guise. So the weakness of contemporary government was contrasted with that of the Dutch stadhouders (‘Stadholder Prince William II: his significance for our time’), while the death of William III of Orange marked the initiation of Dutch decline.Footnote 63 From that moment on, ‘like now’, national leadership was weak, ‘and at the end of the eighteenth century entombed our people in the French coffin with pretty slogans, from which it arose, sleepwalking, in 1813, only to, if no great changes take place, finally sink back in this twentieth century or the next’.Footnote 64
Harking back to a past Golden Age was conventional enough for fascist movements, but it was of definitive significance to Mussert's perception of the Netherlands, the role of the NSB, and his own identity. He held on to this vision until the very end, his trial for high treason in 1945–6. Defending his collaboration with Nazi Germany, he vainly used ‘an example from history of someone who has done greater things than me’. Mussert compared himself to Maurice of Orange who in 1607 sought the approval of Henry IV of France in order to continue fighting against Spain.Footnote 65 Being charged with treason, he also likened himself to Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Cornelis de Witt.Footnote 66 In a letter to his wife, after he had received the death sentence, he imagined himself like Hugo Grotius.Footnote 67 This very personal identification with national history can be traced back to the beginning of Mussert's political career in 1925, when he protested the Belgian Treaty, which he interpreted as an act of French imperialism comparable to early modern times, just as he would later draw parallels between contemporary events and historical Dutch crises. In the vindications Mussert wrote in prison for his actions during the German occupation, he returned to the Belgian Treaty as the defining moment of his political development. ‘A healthy people with self-respect does not even get round to debating such an unworthy treaty. It does not even start doing so. There was something amiss in our people.’Footnote 68
Thus, the NSB preoccupation with France, Belgium, and England as arch enemies in NSB narratives of decline should be understood as Mussert's personal mark. In the first issue of VoVa, the paper promoted the ideal of Dietsland – the Greater Netherlands – arguing that Flanders had for centuries been ‘the dam that broke the French tidal wave’.Footnote 69 But, the article continued, now treacherous Holland has abandoned her old provinces, and the northern provinces are at risk of being ‘erased from the annals of history’, ‘after barely a century of greatness, ruined by three centuries of terrible disgrace’.Footnote 70 A new war in Western Europe was impending, and France would consummate her ‘sinister project’, and go yet further than her ‘evil student’, Belgium. The theme of a divided nation under threat from historical rivals continued in the 1930s. The issue of ‘political Catholicism’, the cynical political exploitation of Christianity on behalf of a foreign power (the pope) was explained with the Dutch Revolt:Footnote 71 ‘No, our teeth clenched, the entire people its hands together, [sic] like in the years 1566 and afterwards. Never [will] our land and People [be] under ruthless political Catholicism’, as Mussert wrote in one propaganda brochure.Footnote 72 During the occupation, France had to take a backseat as villain, while England's role was foregrounded, linking Golden Age imperial rivalry to the Nazi struggle against Britain.Footnote 73
A speech by Mussert on 1 May 1941 shows that the adoption of a volkse discourse of blood and race, and the Nazi attack on ‘plutocracy’, could co-exist with Mussert's patriotic narrative of decline. The speech emphasizes how the numerous different themes and motifs of decline that Dutch and German fascism had developed could all be tied together into a single narrative. A titanic European war of Labour was now being waged against Capitalism and Plutocracy, ‘the soulless representatives of a past doomed to collapse’, embodied by Churchill and the Jews. Judaeo-English capitalist exploitation was but yet another instance of the centuries-old desire of ‘bellicose England’ to claim Dutch colonial possessions, and the democrats of the Netherlands were their henchmen, exploiting the unemployed and the peasant class under ‘Christian’ capitalism.Footnote 74 ‘In appearance they had power, ha!, yet in reality the democratic rulers in the Netherlands were prisoners of English plutocracy.’Footnote 75 Several other speeches that year repeated this narrative. In a manuscript for speeches to be delivered from 20 June to 30 August, Mussert's scribbled notes read: ‘England blackmails Europe. After the death of de Ruyter, sovereign at sea.’Footnote 76 In a final rallying speech for the NSB in The Hague, radio broadcast on 7 April 1945, Mussert still considered it relevant to invoke the Flemish battle of 1302 to keep the French spirit outside its borders, and linked it, once more, to the Belgian Treaty.Footnote 77 Mussert's deeply historicist and patriotic narrative of the decline of the Netherlands constructed an overarching vision for the NSB with a force and conviction other narratives lacked, reinforced by the authority of the Leider. Unlike the Hegelian narratives, marred by their academic and theoretical nature, or the dubious racial narratives of blood and soil fanatics, it was not blemished by inaccessibility but unfolded the fascist worldview in patriotic motifs and characters which any liberally educated Dutchman understood. The drawback was that it risked alienating Catholic sympathizers, for whom the history of the Dutch Republic largely meant Calvinist oppression and exclusion, something which still aroused strong feelings at the time.Footnote 78
Mussert created a story for the Movement, and integrated and elevated their concerns in a grand narrative of the decline and fall of the Dutch imperium. National defence, national unity, economic development and trade, freedom of religion – all centre pieces of NSB discourse – were lent extra weight due to their place in Mussert's narrative. It also explains some of the more parochial concerns of VoVa, such as the growing disrespect for national monuments and historical architecture.Footnote 79 It is also in this light one should regard Mussert's efforts and pride in attempting to save the eighteenth-century Hospitality Tower of Zaltbommel in 1945, for which he tried to intervene with Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart to prevent the Wehrmacht from demolishing it.Footnote 80 During his trial, he would bring up the moment as a symbolic act of love for the Fatherland.Footnote 81
Mussert's influence on, and attention to, VoVa is clear by now, and if the ‘face of the NSB’ was also ‘the paper of the Leider’,Footnote 82 then Mussert's vision must be understood to have a special significance for the narratives of decline that did so much to define the NSB in the eyes of its followers and the public.Footnote 83 The assessment of some historians that Mussert lacked ‘clearly outlined political ideas’ and had nothing to contribute in this area must thus be heavily qualified at the very least.Footnote 84 As became even clearer during the occupation, Mussert was by no means ‘a moral and spiritual vacuum’.Footnote 85
IV
On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded the Low Countries. After heavy civilian casualties, and the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch army surrendered on 15 May.Footnote 86 The queen and government fled to London, depriving the Netherlands of (Dutch) political leadership, with a few notable exceptions such as Colijn and Linthorst Homan, leader of the Vrijheidsbond.Footnote 87 While the flight of Dutch leaders was itself a break with the old political order, the rift was complete when Hitler at the last minute decided to install a political authority. A Reichskommissariat was established on 29 May, headed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart.Footnote 88 Though Seyss-Inquart was formally the highest authority in the Netherlands, responsible only to the Führer, he was not an omnipotent dictator in his fiefdom.Footnote 89 Instead, the administration of the Reichskommissariat has been described as a Kampf aller gegen alle,Footnote 90 ‘not a unity, but a conglomerate of individual bureaus’, as both the NSDAP under Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler's SS ensured they had representatives to promote their interests.Footnote 91 Through five years of co-operation, intrigue, conspiracy, and quarrelling, this was the Nazi administration of the Netherlands. Rauter loyally served Himmler's interests, and successfully attained hegemony for the SS at the expense of the party and the Reichskommissar by 1943.Footnote 92
With the collapse of the old order, the NSB suddenly found itself in a radically altered position, as structures central to the narratives of decline through which it understood the world vanished. Within a matter of weeks, its German ideological ally had established a national socialist form of government in the Netherlands, and Dutch fascists no longer found themselves struggling against the agents of decline, but instead supporting the Nazi heralds of renewal. As Joseph Goebbels put it: ‘Today in Europe we implement the same revolution which we have in Germany on a smaller scale. It is only the dimension which has changed.’Footnote 93
A crisis of narrative ensued in NSB discourse, as Mussert and his followers were forced to reconfigure their understanding of their position in the world. After a brief hiatus, VoVa published on 24 May a front page article by Mussert entitled ‘From old to new: the Netherlands on the threshold of a new age’.Footnote 94 The first issue of VoVa since the capitulation is worth looking at in detail, to underline the discursive shift in the new narratives that VoVa initially produced, particularly in the optimistic days before the imposition of the Reichskommissariat. The issue shows a sudden change in style, as news-oriented critical reporting became entirely defunct. Instead, Mussert mentions the recent past in wistful phrases redolent with retrospectively ironic relief: ‘The democratic arbitrariness and injustice, to which we have been exposed for years, is at an end.’Footnote 95 Rather than lingering on past events, the issue was a forward-looking one, and Mussert showed no doubts about the future. There was only one future for the Dutch people, a national socialist future, and the people needed the NSB more than ever, according to the Leider.Footnote 96 ‘Whoever is so foolish as to count on Anglo-French help to bring back the old life, understands nothing of the great time in which we live.’Footnote 97 While not previously averse to overblown biblical rhetoric, at this point motifs of Destiny and Providence started to proliferate. In an article on the heroic war effort of Dutch soldiers bravely defending their fatherland, VoVa concluded:
We live in that great, fantastic time, in which the sword of justice has corrected history; the chaff has been separated from the wheat. Providence still gives us the chance, under the protection of this sword, to put our hands to the plough. Onwards then, Netherlanders: after the night comes the dawn!Footnote 98
The occupation was a peculiar moment for Dutch fascists, as mythic narratives of decline and rebirth seemed to manifest in historical time. Their own roles in the narrative were transformed. With the state of decline relegated to the historical past, fascists now moved onwards and found themselves in the long-awaited state of renewal. ‘The 10th of May is a turning point in the history of our People. History will from now on always turn on this moment.’Footnote 99 The mood seems to have been shared by the rank-and-file as well, who appeared to be fully taken in with the new situation. NSB members felt the time of decline and hardship lay behind them. One member wrote in her diary: ‘The wounds struck in our people will heal. Those who have fallen we remember with reverence and gratitude. Now we must build a new future.’Footnote 100 This sentiment also had a literal dimension in the need to repair the damage wrought by the invasion. Seyss-Inquart's first decree concerned the repair of war damage, so that reconstruction (wederopbouw), metaphorical and literal, would become a keyword during the early occupation period, but would be used by fascists until 1945 to denote the sweeping away of the ruins of the old, and the creation of the Nieuwe Orde.Footnote 101 While the national dailies were filled with images of ruined roads, houses, and farms, with encouragement to wederopbouw, to fascists the notion had a special significance: the rebirth of the Netherlands as a national socialist state.Footnote 102
However, as months passed and the NSB's political situation improved, the general mood of the population changed for the worse. The States-General was abolished, and instead the Germans exercised control through the mayors. Over time, more and more NSB members would be appointed mayor, a dismally unpopular decision as most people regarded them as criminal traitors.Footnote 103 With the restriction of free speech and other civil liberties, unrest grew. In one letter, NSB regional leader d'Ansembourgh warned Generalkommissar Schmidt of the changes in Dutch law, the restrictions and confiscations for the war effort. ‘One experiences these facts with horror and indignation, all the more since one has understood from the words of Herrn Reichskommissar that the internal political situation would remain untouched. It seems necessary to me to suitably clear up this apparent contradiction.’Footnote 104 As resistance against the authorities grew, they had to rely increasingly on the NSB as the only political group willing to collaborate.Footnote 105 By May 1943, Seyss-Inquart confessed to Himmler that the manpower provided by the NSB was indispensable, and that Mussert himself enjoyed too much support from Hitler who had informally declared him ‘Leader of the Dutch People’ in 1942. Within the NSB itself, Mussert's position was too strong to dethrone him.Footnote 106
Yet the NSB would soon become disillusioned with the Neuordnung as well, and this time the ideas of decline would ironically prove a moral rallying point for the Movement. Embarrassingly, the Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies at this time, realizing a crucial NSB fear in March 1942, while to their frustration the Germans took a rather positive view of the Japanese conquest.Footnote 107 But nothing did more to dispel the myth of regeneration and reintroduce decline into NSB narratives than the reality of German rule. Although the only legal political organization in December 1941, the NSB would never be an unequivocal collaborator.Footnote 108 The five years of conflict between the NSB and the SS highlights that the growth of the volkse current within the movement indicated by no means a simple hegemony. It was in 1940–5 that Mussert's Golden Age story of decline really came into its own, and was exploited as a rallying myth against the imperialistic ambitions of the SS. The two fascist organizations had superficially similar narratives of decline, but on inspection it is evident that these narratives had very different concerns, and that Mussert promoted one antithetical to SS discourse. SS periodicals like Hamer were mired in a narrative of the decay of the Germanic peasant-based race, of which the Dutch people were but one part.Footnote 109
Moreover [we] deem it erroneous in this time to first point out in various ways the unreal and real differences between us and other Germanic tribes and Peoples…In particular it has been noticed how many have the inclination to place ‘The Netherlander’ and ‘The German’ in opposition to each other.Footnote 110
The forces that had brought about the decay of the Germanic Dutch were ancient European forces, not national ones: the decadent Roman empire, Latin humanism, the church, etc.Footnote 111 Mourning the death of peasant culture, Hamer pointed the finger at the ‘conquest’ of the countryside by Calvinist preachers, creating a people without Lebensfreude: ‘an alien (volksvreemde) life view, which does not belong here and only became possible, because a people forgot its own nature’.Footnote 112 In the Dutch SS weekly Storm SS, its editor Feldmeijer wrote: ‘The greatest part of our People is no longer conscious of its Germanic origins. It no longer knows [how] to belong to a race.’Footnote 113 The essentially pagan and long-term historical perspective on decline promoted by the SS in the Netherlands made people jest that the SS thought history ended in ad 800.Footnote 114 As one volkse writer put it: ‘They who think volks, see their people rise and fall across the centuries.’Footnote 115
This was a view of history that fitted awkwardly with Mussert's Golden Age vision of the Netherlands, so that these opposing narratives of the decline of the Netherlands underlined the ideological clash between the NSB and the SS. Some historians have emphasized the similarity of NSB and Nazi discourse during the occupation, speaking of a Gleichschaltung of NSB propaganda.Footnote 116 But the narratives of decline show that while the groups did share a discourse, they understood ideological themes of decay, degeneration, national humiliation, cultural decline, and ultimate regeneration in very different, politically charged, ways. Volkse NSB members were overwhelmingly favourably inclined towards the SS, creating sharp internal divisions, but ultimately Mussert remained in control. While the NSB could speak of race and a Germanic regeneration of Europe against the threat of Asiatic hordes, it was clear that the decay Mussert's supporters really feared was not one of race, but of the historical sovereign nation of the Netherlands. ‘[F]or “volk” is not a biological, but a political concept, and the consciousness of “belonging together” is the last word.’Footnote 117
Narratives of decline had a tactical application in this unexpected struggle against nominal allies. The conflict came to a head in the middle of 1943. In a June speech for the party, Mussert spoke of their naivety in regarding every German as a national socialist and a friend – some he deemed to be imperialists who wanted annexation rather than create a true fascist friendship.Footnote 118 The Leider spoke of great historical Dutch accomplishments, and the virtues of the Dutch Republic: freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, ‘ancient Dutch virtues’ which had a peculiar resonance juxtaposed with a neo-pagan SS agenda.Footnote 119 Feldmeijer, who informed on Mussert for Rauter and Himmler, mentioned the great applause the speech received from the audience. He complained that Mussert used a Nazi vocabulary, but twisted its meaning: ‘Everything calls itself grossgermanisch, and with that means something different altogether. Everything that has to do with Germanics has become a fashionable term.’Footnote 120 This happened shortly after a brief quarrel in the fascist press over an article published on 7 May in VoVa entitled ‘The judgement of history’. The article struck a very different tone from NSB publications two or three years earlier, and spoke of the necessary suffering that occurs whenever the new is born out of the old.Footnote 121 It proceeded to apply a familiar tactic: VoVa compared the present state of the nation to the historical decline of the Dutch Republic, and likened the ‘current revolution’ to that of the French and the Patriot movement of the Batavian Republic. The current revolution ‘makes our own revolutionary past of “historical antiquity” come to life once more’.Footnote 122 Feldmeijer responded furiously in Storm SS: ‘These are the same people, whose National Socialism does not in fact differ from that of other bourgeois…who also at every opportunity went on and on again about the great and glorious past and about “Us in the 80-Years War”.’Footnote 123 When faced with a choice between the Nazi New Order as the rebirth the NSB had been waiting for and his own vision of a return of the Dutch Golden Age, Mussert chose the latter. ‘He [Mussert] has, as before, remained the Spieβer and separatist, and in small circles expresses his hatred for the SS at every opportunity.’Footnote 124
By 1944, the NSB found itself in a state of extraordinary isolation. In the last two years of the occupation, the administration was almost entirely in the hands of the SS which had managed to consolidate its jurisdiction after the death of Schmidt. Anti-Nazi resistance grew among the Dutch populace, which increasingly targeted NSB members, including assassinations of the rank-and-file.Footnote 125 In September 1944, the Allies invaded the Netherlands, causing panic among NSB members fearing that bijltjesdag (Retribution Day) had come. As NSB membership numbers spiked following the invasion in 1940, so they dropped as Allied troops closed in and captured The Hague (Reichskommissariat offices were moved to Apeldoorn).
For the final months of the war, private letters survive to and from Mussert, which addressed the sorrows and anxieties of remaining loyalists, contextualizing their suffering as part of the grand narrative of decline. One letter wished the Leider a happy new year with the wish that ‘you may also this year be preserved for the Movement and that you will be spared more great disappointments [the September crisis]’.Footnote 126 Several letters are from NSB members whose children had died in the war, usually as Waffen-SS volunteers on the Eastern Front, and sought consolation from Mussert. One letter from Mussert spoke of ‘[a]ll the evil forces that have been unleashed to prevent this [the protection of People and Fatherland]; they exist in the N.S.B. as well, and they made themselves clearly recognizable precisely after September’.Footnote 127 In letters, Mussert spoke of the necessity to experience setbacks to become a true national socialist, and of the suffering of the Dutch people. While he still showed some faith in the final victory, there was little sense that the situation would improve. ‘Although our land has now been plunged into misery and the lowest point probably has not yet been reached, we keep believing in the final victory, which will bring the foundation of national socialism, through which our people will rise’ was one of the standard phrases with which Mussert now signed off his letters.Footnote 128 VoVa expressed the same sentiment.Footnote 129 In a speech in February 1944 for district and circle leaders, Mussert stated that ‘[e]verything has its origin, rise, and downfall. We merely hope that the downfall will not come in our time and if national socialism wins maybe Europe can still be saved again, for now.’Footnote 130
As the NSB collapsed in the face of military defeat, Anton Mussert, in a final speech in The Hague, recognized the reality of the situation, without illusions about a sudden reversal of fortunes. ‘Admittedly, our being together here has no influence on the war events whatsoever.’Footnote 131 He focused on the ordeal of the movement, and of the Dutch people during war and occupation, and noted that this ‘vale of suffering’ was a consequence of the political decay of the 1930s. But, he noted, there is no Good Friday without Easter, and from present hardship the future is born. The history of the NSB would know three periods: 1931–40, 1940–5/6, and beyond that, the full blossoming of the Movement.Footnote 132
We are now on the threshold of a third period in the existence of our movement, that third period, which will give us the much desired opportunity to finally start reconstruction. From the ruins of the present a larger, stronger, more healthy Dutch people than ever before will re-awaken; that is our calling.Footnote 133
V
Narratives of decline in the National Socialist Movement were not inseparable from the larger story of national rebirth. While the meaning of rebirth was vague, decline was detailed and elaborate. Taking the supposed importance of palingenetic myth to fascism as a starting point, this article has examined one key aspect of that myth in NSB discourse, and foregrounded the variety of narratives. Laying bare the different narratives of verval, from the decadence of humanism and French revolutionary ideology, through urbanization's debilitating effects on the race, to the fading glory of Dutch empire, it has become apparent that there was no generic fascist understanding of national decay – not even within a single movement. The importance of the medium of narrative production has also been shown, particularly the organization of VoVa, which played a key role in strategies of propaganda. VoVa’s news-driven discourse enhanced narratives of decline, and did much to create a sense of Dutch decline, and by extension a Dutch fascist solution. Nor were these narratives window-dressing; they represented and produced ideological difference.
The significance of such differences was foregrounded during the occupation, when NSB collaboration brought Mussert's followers into ceaseless conflict with the SS. What seemed at first like a definitive move towards narratives of rebirth with the establishment of the New Order turned out to be a false sense of regeneration. Relations between foreign and native fascists quickly soured as conflicting interests and ideological goals became apparent, and narratives of decline proved to be a useful tool in the discursive strategy through which the NSB enacted – limited and ineffective – resistance against SS hegemony in the Netherlands.
This is an original perspective on the ideological character of the Dutch Movement, which has emphasized the link between narratives of decline and fascist ideologies, and qualifies the still popular understanding of the NSB as an ideologically haphazard movement destined for domination by German Nazism. Instead, this study has brought out the centrality of Mussert's personal vision of the decline of the Dutch empire since the Golden Age, its ubiquity in official NSB discourse, and its consistency throughout the party's life span. This narrative of decline was an ideological constant which only died with Mussert. While some contemporaries and historians have highlighted Mussert's bourgeois liberal character to question his radicalism, his Golden Age narrative of decline grants us insight into the peculiar compatibility between liberal patriotism and radical fascist culture.
This shows up NSB ideology not just as ‘generically fascist’ in its obsession with decline, but as a surprising heir to nineteenth-century liberal historic romanticism, not unique to the Netherlands. This awkward cultural intersection of liberalism and fascism problematizes the understanding of fascism as ‘palingenetic’; rather than clearly delineating fascism in interwar Europe, it emphasizes significant similarities with one of its traditional enemies. In other words, a sense of decline, and a corresponding longing for national rebirth, was not only something shared by fascists across the continent, but also with liberal nationalists, a shared mythic language that can go some way in explaining the attraction of liberals to fascist movements. Here, rather than distinguishing a unique fascist essence, palingenetic myth seems to mix it up in a much wider cultural spectrum.
Europe's smaller indigenous fascist movements, then, appear less likely to have been unilaterally influenced by more powerful role models (Italy, Germany), but also, and potentially more significantly, by indigenous political cultures, even ones supposedly incompatible with fascism. This could be understood mutatis mutandis as the hybridization that António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis have pointed to,Footnote 134 but I would caution against regarding the NSB as some sort of para-fascist liberal hybrid, and instead heed how contemporaries constructed their ideologies. Fascism was an expansive concept for many European contemporaries. Core myths are clearly one useful basis for analysing fascism comparatively, but when we examine their production, we may have to look beyond merely different ‘fascisms’.
