My grandfather kept a black-and-white photograph in his study, and I never understood it until I was an adult. It showed a crowd of Dutch men in uniform, right arms raised in a salute that was almost, but not quite, the German one. They were cheering for a man named Anton Mussert, a name my grandfather refused to say out loud for decades. He would just tap the glass frame and mutter, “That is what happens when people forget what they are.
”
The first time I asked him about it, he was peeling an apple at the kitchen table. The knife trembled slightly. He told me that in the 1930s, Mussert’s National Socialist Movement promised to make the Netherlands great again, to restore order after the chaos of the Great Depression. They said they were not copying Hitler, that their movement was purely Dutch.
They even had their own slogan, “Hou Zee,” and their own flag, red and black with a silver emblem. My grandfather said he had been young then, and the uniform had looked sharp, and the promises had sounded strong. But he also told me about the moment he stopped believing. It was a cold evening in 1936, when a party member climbed onto a wooden crate at a market square and began talking about the “Jewish problem.
” My grandfather said the word hung in the air like smoke, and the crowd, which had been nodding along, suddenly went silent. One woman in the front row, wearing a worn coat and a hat with a feather, stepped forward and asked the speaker a simple question. I asked my grandfather what she said, but he just closed his eyes and shook his head, as if the answer was too heavy to carry. What I do know is that Mussert’s dream of a truly independent fascist Netherlands was a lie, because the movement was pushed and pulled by the Germans from the very beginning.
There was another man, Rost van Tonningen, who wanted nothing less than to dissolve the Netherlands into a greater Germanic Reich. While Mussert talked about preserving Dutch identity, his rival whispered in the ears of the SS, and Mussert was forced to ban Jews from party leadership just to keep the movement together. He repeated the German hatred but insisted he was not a German follower. The whole thing was built on contradictions, and my grandfather watched it all unravel.
When the war came, the Netherlands fell in five days, and Mussert was put in charge of a country that was no longer his own. The Germans used him as a puppet, while Rost van Tonningen did their real dirty work. Mussert tried to be a leader, but he was just a figurehead standing on a stage that was already on fire. My grandfather kept the photograph as a warning, and I think about it whenever I see a politician who promises that hatred can be made respectable.
I never learned what that woman said to the speaker that day, and my grandfather died without telling me, but I have a feeling it was the one true thing said in that entire crowd of uniforms.
