Some Thoughts on Liberation Day...

I just happened to be reading a law review article today about Heinrich Boere, a Dutch Nazi sympathizer who carried out retaliation killings on behalf of the occupation forces -- that is, he covertly assassinated innocent Dutch civilians in retaliation for attacks by the resistance movement.

The idea is haunting (though I understand from the article it was not that unusual during WWII): After an attack by the resistance, the word would come down that a certain number of reprisal killings were required. But the local authority would have to decide who, and usually did so randomly. From the article:

For every victim of the resistance movement up to three Dutch citizens were to be shot.... Assassinations were performed either in the early morning or late in the evening. SD officers would usually accompany the assassins. These were disguised in civilian clothes, equipped with false identity cards and drove cars with false number plates. They called on their victims at home. If they did not encounter the victim, the assassination was abandoned and the killers proceeded to the next address on the list. If they encountered the victim, they would verify the victims' identity, shoot at point blank range and disappear.

Even with my nose in a book (rather, journal) this morning, I still couldn't help but notice on my way to work how all the trams downtown had little Dutch flags waving in front, or how all the flags of the provinces around the Parliament's lake had been replaced with the Dutch tricolor (it would be like all the state and territory flags in front of DC's Union Station being replaced with the stars and stripes) - or how last night, coming home from work, all the flags I passed were at half staff, and how the carnival (set up for Queen's Day) was oddly shuttered and silent. And we had previously remarked that for days one of the major television networks had only been airing Nazi/Holocaust movies.


Sure enough, today is a national holiday (which I guess the international organizations don't observe), a muted celebration of the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945 - and the evening of May 4 is a night of remembrance for all those who died during the war.

A WWII monument in the Wassenaar Dunes (sans flag)

I am oddly moved by this. By which I mean, I feel more connected, being here, to the stories I already know well. At a broader level, Jeff and I increasingly feel like the Netherlands is our adopted second country - like a new step-sister forced upon us but with whom we have discovered a surprising affinity. It is haunting, then, to read about Heinrich Boere's victims (whom he admitted killing): the pharmacist Fritz Bicknese of Breda, shot in his store after his last customers left; the bicycle vendor Teunis de Groot of Voorschoten, killed at his front door after the assassins asked to see his identity papers. Frans Willem Kusters was shot in the back after trying to flee what he rightly suspected was a sketchy set-up (like a bad mafia movie).

Names and places that would once have seemed impenetrably foreign now sound like my neighbors: I know where Breda is, I've been to Maastricht (where Boere lived during the war), and we pass through Voorschoten every time we go to Amsterdam or the airport (it's the one town between here and Leiden). Reading about Boere's victims, I could picture the cold-blooded assassination of a software engineer in Hillsboro (from a Portland perspective), or a secretary in the Department of Labor in Prince George's County (from a DC perspective). I guess you can say I had an Anne Frank moment.

And what happened to Boere? Despite conviction in absentia by a Dutch court after the war, he lived openly for decades in Germany. The Netherlands requested his extradition in 1980, but Germany refused, and German prosecutors declined to try him because (they erroneously concluded) his conduct was not contrary to the laws of war as of 1944. In 2003, the Dutch asked Germany to at least enforce the Dutch sentence in German prison, but based on recent rulings by the European Court of Human Rights, Germany determined it could not do so because the in absentia trial had not complied with minimum fair trial guarantees. But in 2008, German authorities launched a new prosecution, and this time they convicted Boere.

In a last minute twist, however, the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty - basically, the Constitution of the European Union - raised serious double jeopardy issues (i.e., that the Dutch prosecution barred a later German prosecution for the same crimes). The German court went ahead and sentenced Boere to life in prison anyway (at least, what's left of it), but the saga is not yet over until the European Court of Justice has its final say on how the new double jeopardy (non bis in idem) rule should be interpreted.

(The article, for all you lawyers out there, is Sabine Swoboda, "Paying the Debts - Late Nazi Trials before German Courts: the Case of Heinrich Boere," 9 J. of Int'l Crim. Just. 243 (2011).)

The take away: The Nazis and their supporters were some scary dudes. We do not acknowledge enough that Germany - and many other western countries, including the U.S. - purposefully turned a blind eye to the criminality of mosts Nazis for forty years or more after the end of WWII. (From that perspective, the fact that several South American countries are now prosecuting the leaders of their deadly juntas a mere twenty or thirty years late looks like a happy improvement.) Most of all, please pause for a moment to think about all those who died - whether in WWII or other conflicts - in the pursuit of freedom, of liberty, or far too often, of innocence.

Update May 9: The New York Times just ran a story about Germany's unwillingness to release files on Adolf Eichmann from the 1950s, connecting it to the broader issue of German reticence about the post-war years.