“You wanted to see me, Mussert? ”
The German officer didn’t even look up from his desk. Anton Mussert stood in the doorway, hat in hand, trying to read the man’s face. The office smelled of tobacco and cold coffee.
Outside, the streets of The Hague were quiet, but that quiet was the kind that came after a beating. “The Führer has decided,” the officer said, finally raising his eyes. “You will form a regiment. Dutch and Flemish volunteers.
Waffen-SS. ”
Mussert’s jaw tightened. He had hoped for something else, something that would give him real power over his own people. But he nodded.
He had learned by then that arguing with Berlin was like arguing with a wall. If you pushed too hard, the wall would fall on you. The year was 1940, and the Netherlands was under German occupation. The country had fallen in five days, and the Queen and the government had fled to London.
Mussert, leader of the National Socialist Movement, the NSB, believed he could negotiate with the occupiers, that he could save the Netherlands from the worst by cooperating. He thought he could keep the country Dutch while bending to German will. But Berlin had other plans. The NSB was founded in December 1931, and from the very beginning, it was a strange beast.
Its members wore black uniforms and marched in military formation. They called themselves Dutch patriots, but their salute was the same as the Germans. They claimed they wanted a strong, independent Netherlands, but they gave their loyalty to Hitler. And when Hitler’s ideas grew more radical, the NSB grew more radical with him.
Their newspapers blamed Jews for everything. Their slogans called for pure blood. Their marches deliberately passed through Jewish neighborhoods. Not all Nazis in the Netherlands agreed with Mussert.
Two days after the NSB was founded, another party appeared, the NSNAP, led by Ernst Herman Ritter von Rappard. That party was different. It used the swastika openly. It wanted the Netherlands to become a province of Germany.
It hated Jews with a passion that made even Mussert uncomfortable. The NSNAP split into three factions, then split again. Its members argued about who was the truest Nazi, and while they argued, the NSB kept growing. Mussert believed in a federation of Germanic peoples.
He wanted the Netherlands to keep its own flag, its own government, its own culture. He believed he could be the bridge between the Dutch people and the Germans. But there were those in his own party who thought that was weak. Men like Henk Feldmeijer and Meinoud Rost van Tonningen believed the Netherlands should dissolve into a Germanic Reich, one big country ruled from Berlin.
They thought Mussert’s federalism was a betrayal of true National Socialism. And the Germans agreed with them. The German occupation began, and things changed quickly. Mussert was allowed to give a speech in Lunteren.
He stood on a podium, surrounded by black-uniformed followers, and he told them that the Netherlands was not at war with Germany. He wanted them to believe that cooperation was the path to salvation. But in Berlin, the Germans were already planning how to use him. They didn’t see him as a true Nazi.
They saw him as a tool, a way to keep the Dutch calm while they took what they wanted from the country. The German authorities encouraged the NSB to be visible. They let them march without permission. They protected them with the police.
They allowed them to dominate the streets, to beat up opponents, to attack Jewish businesses, to make life unbearable for anyone who resisted. The Dutch who tried to resist, people from the Dutch Union, communists, Jews, ordinary citizens, were arrested quickly. The Germans wanted to show who was in control, and they used the NSB as a blunt instrument. But they didn’t trust Mussert.
They watched him. They let him believe he was in charge, but the real power lay elsewhere. Rost van Tonningen was given important positions. He was sent to Berlin, where he enjoyed the company of German officials.
The Germans played them against each other. Mussert was the public face, the man who could calm the Dutch with his talk of federation. Rost van Tonningen was the man the Germans trusted to do the real work, to integrate the Netherlands fully into the German Reich. Mussert spoke for the Dutch.
Rost van Tonningen spoke for Germany. And the Germans made sure neither man ever had enough power to challenge them. Feldmeijer, meanwhile, was given new responsibilities. He was assigned to organize the Dutch SS, a unit decorated with symbols that had never belonged to the Netherlands.
But the symbol of the Netherlands, the orange, was gone. The Dutch SS took its orders from Berlin, not from Mussert. They wore German uniforms and followed German discipline. They saw Mussert as weak, indecisive, too attached to a Dutch identity that no longer mattered.
They believed the future belonged to Germany, and they wanted to be part of it. Mussert could feel himself being pushed aside. He spoke to his advisors, but his words felt hollow even to him. He wanted a federation of Germanic nations, with the Netherlands as an equal partner.
He believed he could work with Hitler, that he could convince the Führer that a loyal but separate Netherlands was more valuable than an annexed province. He even hoped for a future Dutch army, a force that would fight alongside the Germans but under its own banners. Looking at the German officer’s face, Mussert knew those hopes were fading. The officer slid a document across the desk.
“Make your name useful,” the officer said. “Or we will find someone who will. ”
Mussert took the document and left. The autumn wind cut through his coat as he walked to his car.
He glanced across the street and saw two members of the Dutch SS standing at the corner. They were young, eager, dressed in German steel gray. One of them grinned at him, and that grin told Mussert more than any document ever could. These men didn’t follow him anymore.
They followed someone else, someone who promised action instead of words, revolution instead of negotiation. In the following months, the WA drove their trucks through the streets in the Netherlands. They acted as guardians of the Netherlands, but they were nothing more than a paramilitary faction, carrying weapons and clashing openly with the population. In their attacks, they often burned buildings and homes, further fueling anger against them.
At first, the WA was a so-called emergency organization to protect NSB meetings, but it soon turned into a political combat organization that gave the NSB a visible and intimidating presence across the country. During their armed marches, the WA deliberately chose routes through Jewish neighborhoods and disaffected districts, knowing that clashes would follow. And those clashes always ended the same way: the police would arrest the opponents, not the WA. In 1941, the violence intensified.
In the streets of Amsterdam, the WA stormsquad clashed with Jewish residents in what would later be known as the February strike. The Dutch were preparing for a strike in Amsterdam, an uprising Hitler sought to avoid. This act of resistance by the local population demonstrated that, despite their deep divisions, the occupiers would meet resistance across the board. A few weeks later, Mussert was sitting in his office when the news came in from Berlin.
He was no longer the man in charge. It was now clear that quiet, compliant Mussert was not the man to fit his own movement, nor was he the man to lead the Netherlands in the new era. Hitler had already picked the leaders of the future. Robbery, hunger, and fear ruled the streets, and Mussert was forced to accept it.
He stood on a platform, surrounded by German officers and members of the Dutch SS, and he swore an oath of allegiance to Hitler. As one, those present shouted, “Seig Heil! ” Their voices were drowned out by the German anthem. In May 1942, the Dutch SS officially swore an oath to Hitler.
The Netherlands was in the grip of the SS. Mussert’s party, the NSB, never had more than about 27,000 members before the German invasion. That number rose to around 100,000 after the occupation, as people who wanted to avoid the German SD and protect their interests joined the ranks. The NSB continued its calls for loyalty and cooperation, but it was all done in competition with those who wanted to incorporate the Netherlands into the German Reich.
They felt the direction was only one way by then. Mussert and his colleagues tried to maintain the fiction of power, but in reality, the German authorities ran everything. The German commanders, who were in charge of the Netherlands, went even further. From the spring of 1941, they began to systematically destroy the NSB.
They tried to split it even further, pushing Mussert aside. They preferred to work with collaborators who openly sided with the Germans, men who understood that the future of the Netherlands lay in the Reich. And Mussert got the message. He knew he was being used.
He knew that the Germans were using his party to maintain order while they plundered the country. But he couldn’t do anything about it. He was too far in, too compromised. He believed that if he stepped back, the Netherlands would be completely swallowed up.
He could already hear a man saying, “And why doesn’t the Netherlands follow the example of the NSB with its 100,000 members and join the Germanic Reich? ” Mussert imagined his own humble response: “You speak of blood and iron, but we speak of the soul of our people. ” But he knew that kind of reply wouldn’t work. Not with soldiers who wore the death’s head and trusted only their own.
The Dutch SS members didn’t see themselves as Dutch anymore. They called themselves “German” and rejected everything that reminded them of the Netherlands. They wore German uniforms, sang German songs, and waited for the day when they could prove their loyalty to the Führer on the battlefield. Mussert felt sick when he saw them, these men who had grown up with him as their leader but now saw him as a weakling.
They marched into the East and would find their death there. Mussert watched them leave, knowing he had lost not just his party but his country. He knew that the Germans no longer truly controlled him, but he also knew that he no longer controlled anything. He stood at the window and looked out at the gray sky, thinking about the Netherlands he had wanted to save.
He thought about his certainty that one day he could stand before the Dutch people and tell them he had saved the Netherlands from the worst. But that day would never come.
