At the beginning of this year, the Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (Central Archive for Special Criminal Justice) was to go online, containing the files of more than 400,000 Dutch people who were suspected of collaborating with the occupying forces. Shortly before the disclosure, Minister Eppo Bruins decided that only the names and not the complete files would be published online. Nevertheless, on the very first day, thousands of people requested an appointment to view a file in the archive.
“It just shows how much the war is still alive, even more than eighty years later,” says historian Joost Rosendaal. One of the questions that quickly comes up is whether someone was good or bad during the war. Rosendaal: “In the Netherlands, we always think we were the good guys. We want to be either victims or heroes.”
The fact is, however, that there were also plenty of people in the Netherlands who committed crimes and collaborated with the Germans. We like to label those people as bad, but although there are people among them who undeniably did bad things, it is too simplistic to lump them all together, argue Rosendaal and his fellow researcher, Germanist Paul Sars. Through the Goed-Fout project, in which both scientists are involved, they want to provide a space for stories that focus not on judgement but on deeper insight into the context.
Jew hunter or sweet grandfather?
Sars, Rosendaal, and their colleagues do this first and foremost by going into classrooms, challenging students to research the Second World War and create their own stories. “The war is still very much present, but often in the form of clichés,” explains Sars. “Think of a grandfather who grumbles that all Germans are Nazis. How do you present that story to new generations, especially now that fewer and fewer people can talk about the war from their own experience? As a scientist, you can visit and tell the whole story, but it sticks much better when students do their own research and create their own story.”
The project members provided the pupils with sources about the war and brought in experts who could help construct the story, such as a podcast maker and an illustrator.
It was then up to the pupils to tell the story themselves. They delved deeper into the life stories of Anton Wiebe and Martha Waaldijk: people with two faces.
Anton Wiebe was a police officer responsible for the deaths of twenty Jews. At the same time, Wiebe was the loving grandfather of Hennie Derks, who only dared to reveal his grandfather's wartime past at the age of 77.
Martha Waaldijk: a teenage girl, member of the youth division of the NSB, and completely idolising Hitler, to whom she even sent a congratulatory letter on his birthday. At the same time, she was a very ordinary girl with a rabbit who borrowed books from the library (including those by Jewish authors) and had fun with her friends. Rosendaal: 'How can you reconcile that ordinary girl with the one who marched through the streets with the youth storm and called the Queen a traitor? In 1944, Martha was arrested for all her NSB activities. She was imprisoned without trial for two years in an internment camp where she was poorly fed and spied on by guards. When she was finally tried, it turned out that she had been imprisoned for about a year and a half too long.
“It shows how problematic the categories of good and bad are,” say Sars and Rosendaal. “The actions of Wiebe and Waaldijk, for example, are of a completely different order. Moreover, you see that they are not just bad characters. They are people with multiple sides. And they had family members who loved them. By delving into their stories, you discover new perspectives and thereby develop tolerance for ambiguity: you learn to live with something, and that is more important than judging something.” Rosendaal and Sars emphasise that this is different from putting things into perspective. “You don't say about Hitler, ‘He loved his dog Blondie so much, and he was so good with children’. Similarly, you can't justify Wiebe's war crimes by saying he was such a sweet grandfather. But you can learn to tolerate those contradictions, to live with them instead of just judging right and wrong.”
Be less quick to judge
What these stories do illustrate is that there are degrees of perpetration, that someone like Martha Waaldijk can be both perpetrator and victim, and that there are all kinds of ways to tell a story. The story about Wiebe, as demonstrated by students from Maurick College in Vught, can also be told from the perspective of his grandson Hennie, who slowly discovers his grandfather Anton's double life.
Although Goed-Fout is coming to an end, Sars and Rosendaal hope that their teaching method will be emulated. That is why they are organising a symposium on 22 October, where they will demonstrate how to teach pupils about the Second World War through co-creation. “Exposing them to multiple perspectives not only helps them to tell stories from the war in a responsible manner, it also makes them less quick to judge, which is very important in a polarised society.”
Goed-Fout Symposium
The Goed-Fout symposium will take place on Wednesday, 22 October in the Stevenskerk. It consists of an afternoon and an evening programme. Tickets and more information
