Dutchmen Don't Forget

Not all Germans are bullheaded and overbearing. Not all Japanese are bucktoothed. Not all Italians pinch bottoms. But last week Adolf Hitler could well agree with the Duke of Alba, Philip of Spain and Napoleon before him that all Dutchmen are stubborn. The evidence:

>At least 80 Dutch patriots have had their heads chopped off during the past month for "communicating with the British" in a cross-Channel liaison that has increased, rather than diminished, in the two years The Netherlands have been under Nazi control.

> A smattering of Dutch "volunteers" in the German army receive parcels and letters from home with notes inside, which read: "We do not care if you are shot to pieces . . . traitors, cowards."

>Charlotte Koehler, The Netherlands' Cornelia Otis Skinner, has flaunted her way into a concentration camp by reading overtones of hatred and scorn for the Nazis into her dramatic sketches. To acknowledge applause she coyly waved a scarf (orange) at her audience.

> So astonishingly dim-witted are the 170,000 Dutch workmen drafted into German factories that Nazi officials consider them "considerably worse" than any other imported workers.

> Executed Dutch saboteurs become national heroes at home.

> A patriotic black market still operates, despite 800 arrests.

> A new law whereby a military sentence of beheading requires no civil court confirmation has not stopped anti-Axis underground propaganda.

> The Nazis are now holding hostages.*

> When bodies are hauled out of canals, passers-by never inquire about the nationality of the victim. They ask only whether he was a Nazi officer or a Nazi soldier.

> After two years of fruitless effort to convert Holland's Germanic adults to Naziism, both German and Dutch Nazis two months ago launched an energetic campaign to win Hollanders through their children, to whose natural barbarism the color and mumbo jumbo of Naziism might appeal. "Fuehrer" Anton Adrian Mussert's Dutch imitation of Hitler's Youth Movement, Nationale Jeugdstorm, has doubled the number of its demonstrations and marches, has opened new offices all over Holland to enlist recruits. To show off the recruits, Sunday-schoolish Hoofdstormer (Youth Movement chief) van Geelkerken last week planned a mass youth rally at Roermond. Friederic Schmidt, dictator of the Adolf Hitler Youth Schools, attended. But Roermond townspeople stayed away. Shops were locked up, streets deserted, blackout curtains drawn. While some 50 corn-haired Dutch children squirmed in embarrassment, Schmidt commented ruefully: "Apparently citizens of this town do not like to see us here." Echoed Van Geelkerken, peering at the blackout curtains: "It looks as if somebody died here."

> So precious has clothing become in The Netherlands that coats are chained and locked to the walls in public buildings. The price for a skinned cat is $2.40. By credit restrictions and excessive taxation the Germans are liquidating all Dutch business firms. Nazi commissioners have been placed in charge of three big corporations, all experienced in colonization through connections with The Netherlands East Indies. Hollanders see this change as the tip-off on how the Nazis expect to organize the resettlement of 3,000,000 Dutch citizens in the German-occupied parts of eastern Europe. Such a move would give Dutch farmlands and businesses to Germans, in effect make The Netherlands a Niedermark, or province of the Reich.

The Day. Against such oppressions and threats to their fatherland the Dutch have only their stubbornness--and a hope. The hope is that a second front will liberate them. To prepare for it they keep up liaison with the British and refuse to reveal hidden arms supplies. In some areas families have been moved inland; in others the Dutch have clashed violently with occupying troops trying to remove all Hollanders from possible Nazi points of counterinvasion.

If a second front comes, the Dutch want only one thing--a day for themselves. Patting little black notebooks containing the names of traitors, and particularly their despised Nazi overlords, Dutchmen talk about that day. They call it Guillotineeringsdag--Guillotine Day.

*A hostage (original meaning: stranger) is a person held as: 1) security for obedience to an occupying army, payment of ransom, fines, etc.; 2) a means of preventing civilian acts of war. The retributive slaughter of hostages has been revived, after long disuse, from an accepted war policy of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. Even holding hostages as security for the carrying out of a treaty has been outlawed since the Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle in 1748.

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