Geschiedschrijving als opdracht

Abel Herzberg, Jacques Presser en Loe de Jong over de jodenvervolging

[p. 1]

Summary

translation Mischa Hoyinck

This dissertation examines the history of the Nazi persecution of the Jews as written by Dutch historians Abel Herzberg, Jacques Presser and Loe de Jong. Their accounts of the wartime persecution are placed in an international perspective. My main focus is the relationship between the personal experiences of these historians and their historical accounts. My premise is that the historians' views on Judaism and Jewish history determined how their personal experiences affected their historical accounts.

The introduction provides an overview of early international historiography of the persecution of the Jews. Dutch research into the subject started relatively soon after the war. In the Netherlands, a professional historian, Presser, was commissioned with state funding to chronicle the persecution. In the rest of Western Europe and the United States, the funding of historical research into the Holocaust was left to private (Jewish) individuals. Worldwide, the first studies of the subject were practically all written by Jews, though not necessarily trained historians. However, by commissioning studies by Presser and De Jong, the Dutch government ensured that - after Herzberg - the task was immediately placed in the hands of professionals. Dutch Holocaust research was also unique in that the persecution of the Jews was seen from the outset as an integral part of the history of World War ii. It is mainly De Jong who was responsible for this achievement.

The introduction is followed by three concise biographies. Abel Herzberg (1893-1989) was the son of Russian immigrants. He became a Zionist at a young age, studied law and eventually became a leading member of the Dutch Zionist Federation. In 1939, Herzberg tried in vain to obtain a Palestine certificate. During the Nazi occupation, he and his wife were imprisoned in a ‘prominent citizens’ camp. In January 1944, they were brought to Westerbork transit camp and then deported to Bergen-Belsen, where they awaited their emigration to Palestine. However, they were liberated by the Red Army in early May 1945.

Upon their return to Amsterdam, Herzberg took up law once again and also started writing. In 1950, he published his Kroniek der Jodenvervolging 1940-1945

[p. 2]

[Chronicle of the Persecution of the Jews 1940-1945] as part of a series of volumes on the Netherlands at the time of the German occupation. That same year saw the publication of his diaries from Bergen-Belsen. Although he remained a Zionist after the war, he did not make Israel his permanent home. Still, he stayed abreast of developments in the Middle East and often spoke out in defense of the young nation under siege. In the 1970s, he became increasingly critical of Israeli politics. He came to be a celebrated writer in non-Jewish circles, but was considered a controversial outsider by the Jewish community.

Jacques Presser (1899-1970) came from a secular and well-assimilated Jewish family in Amsterdam. While he did not deny his Jewishness or the problems associated with being Jewish, he did not draw any (political) conclusions from his identity. He was a socialist, not a Zionist. He studied history and became a schoolteacher. Even as anti-Semitism spread through Germany in the 1930s - making Presser increasingly aware of the perilous position of the Jews in Western Europe - he still kept his distance from Zionism.

After the German invasion in May 1940, he and his wife tried to flee the Netherlands; when their attempt failed, they tried to commit suicide. In March 1943, Presser's wife was arrested and deported to Sobibor death camp. Presser went into hiding.

Soon after the war, he was taken on by the University of Amsterdam, where he eventually became a full professor. In 1950 the state-funded Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (riod) commissioned him to write a study of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands. Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940-1945 [Destruction: the Persecution and Extermination of Dutch Jewry 1940-1945] was published in 1965 and had an enormous impact on Dutch society.

The mass murder of the Jews greatly increased Presser's Jewish consciousness, but he never became a Zionist. He never even set foot on Israeli soil. After 1967, however, he did express growing concern about Israel's security.

Loe de Jong (1914) grew up in a secular Jewish, socialist family. Before the war, he wished to distance himself socially from Judaism and married a non-Jewish woman. In May 1940, De Jong and his wife managed to flee the European mainland, leaving behind his parents, sister and twin brother - none of whom survived the war. De Jong spent the war years in London, working for Radio Oranje, the voice of the Dutch government-in-exile.

Shortly after his return to Amsterdam, De Jong was appointed head of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (riod), which had been founded immediately after the liberation. In 1955, he was commissioned to write the history of the Netherlands in the Second World War. The persecution of the Jews is

[p. 3]

dealt with in the various volumes of Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (1969-1989) [The Kingdom of the Netherlands in World War ii]. Aside from his position as head of the riod, De Jong also gained recognition and respect from television appearances. He worked as a commentator on international current affairs and he presented a series on the Netherlands during World War ii.

De Jong always remained a well-assimilated, secular Jew. During the Six Day War (1967), however, he identified with the Israeli cause. He ardently defended Israel, including the nation's policies towards the Palestinians. Since the death of his wife in 1980, he has been living with a Jewish woman. More and more, De Jong became a conscious Dutch Jew rather than a Dutchman of Jewish descent.

Chapters 3 and 4 compare and contrast how the three historians dealt with two closely connected and crucial themes in the historiography of the persecution of the Jews: Jewish passivity and collaboration. Herzberg argued that the Dutch Jews failed to form an organized resistance of their own because they lacked an ideological and political fundament - which Zionism could have provided them with. At the same time, he appreciated the Jews' often despised defencelessness. By contrast, Presser looked at the existing Dutch resistance movement and maintained that a relatively large number of Jews had participated in it. De Jong, in turn, defined resistance in a broad sense and contested the notion that the Jews had passively allowed themselves to be taken away. His analysis of the Jews' passivity is especially critical of Jewish leaders.

Although he shared the widespread criticism of the Jewish Council, Herzberg ultimately regarded the founding of the Council as something positive. As a Zionist, he applauded the Council's indispensable role in the de-assimilation of Jews which followed the anti-Jewish policies. As an exponent of the socialist critique of Judaism, Presser primarily saw the Jewish Council as a lifeboat for the elite. In his earlier volumes, De Jong presented a Zionist analysis in which Jews in the diaspora were assumed to be living in fear and insecurity, although he actually applied this only to the Jewish leadership. However, in his later discussion of the Amsterdam Jewish Council's policy, the Zionist analysis had been replaced by one founded on the principle of integration.

Both chapters also show how the international historiography on passivity and collaboration developed. They reveal that the Netherlands figured prominently in the international debate, due to its head start in researching the persecution of the Jews. Remarkably, another conclusion is that Herzberg, the Zionist, did not indiscriminately accept the prevailing Zionist analysis. It also becomes clear that Herzberg's approach had a strong personal bias. One wonders whether his relatively privileged position during the occupation prevented him from looking at the Jewish Council's policy from a purely analytical point of view. Moreover, one of the Jewish Council's

[p. 4]

two chairmen had been a personal acquaintance of his from the Zionist movement. After the war, when both former chairmen were prosecuted by the Dutch state, it was Herzberg who provided them with legal counsel.

It is most surprising that the non-Zionist Presser, as if in spite of himself, applied Zionist interpretations of the key themes in the historiography of the Holocaust. Presser identified with the defenceless Jews who had appealed in vain to the Jewish Council. Jewish critics have pointed out that Presser himself was also exempted from deportation thanks to a so-called Sperre.

De Jong's treatment of the Jews' reaction to their persecution is ambivalent. His exile in London meant he had had no direct experience of the persecution during the occupation. But because of the fate that had befallen those in his family who stayed behind, he felt deeply involved in the course of events. De Jong's feelings of loyalty to his murdered relatives probably had a strong influence on his analysis, especially where he speculated on what would have happened if the Jewish Council had taken a different course of action.

Chapter 5 focuses on theoretical aspects of history and discusses the explanations for the Holocaust that were offered by the three chroniclers. Herzberg's interpretation centred on the irreconcilability between National Socialism and Judaism as a cultural historical phenomenon. His primary loyalty was not to professional historiography, but to Judaism, as the embodiment of a universal spiritual principle. He adhered to the largely idealistic interpretation of Jewish history in which religion plays a central role. Herzberg looked upon Jewish history as a discipline in its own right.

Presser did not so much document Jewish history as the history of the Jews. He made himself the victims' spokesperson; Presser had a tremendous drive to commemorate the murdered Jews. In other words, personal motives took precedence over ideological motives. He intentionally wrote his study almost exclusively from the victims' perspective; he did not provide an interpretation of the Holocaust. He was sceptical about the scientific pretensions of historiography and considered himself above all a creative writer.

De Jong regarded the persecution and destruction of the Jews as the outcome of age-old anti-Semitism. In this respect, he concurred with the mostly Jewish and often Zionist historians who saw the mass murder of the Jews as a culmination of a long anti-Semitic tradition in Europe.

On the theoretical level, the three historians' accounts stand out by their matter-of-fact presentation of events. They integrated their own experiences into their writings without sufficiently accounting for this process or reflecting on it. They ignored alternative points of view and clearly considered it part of their role to make moral judgements and to engage in didacticism.

[p. 5]

Chapter 6 examines how the work of the three chroniclers was received. Herzberg's story evoked a limited response, but one which pointed to an awareness of the tragedy that had struck the Jews. From the mid-1950s, the Holocaust became an increasingly important theme in retrospectives on World War ii. Presser's Ondergang met with shock and highly emotional responses. By contrast, the reception of De Jong's work indicated that readers had got over their initial shock at the Holocaust. By the time De Jong's historiography was published, the debate was clouded by irritation. Instead of causing reflection and introspection, his writings met with calls for political activism and engagement.

Although this book focuses on three Dutchmen, the sketch of the international background underscores that they should not be seen as isolated and completely idiosyncratic individuals. The first historians to brave the territory of the Holocaust can be placed into certain categories. One of the important distinctions between them is that some were Western European Jews and others Eastern European. Herzberg was an Eastern European with one foot planted in traditional Judaic religion and the other in secular Jewish culture. He put ideology before method, like many of his contemporaries and Zionist educators such as the Israeli historian Ben-Zion Dinur. Presser and De Jong were clearly descendants of Western European Jews: secular and focused on integration and assimilation. All the same, there were many contradictions in Presser's character and work. Even though he felt no affinity for Jewish religion and kept his distance from Zionism, he still concurred with the views of socialist-Zionist historians. Of the three historians I discuss, Presser remains the most elusive and - in retrospect - the most isolated, both as a historian and an individual. De Jong's ambiguity is more transparent. In his analysis of the key themes in the history of the persecution of the Jews, he is closest to the American scholars Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt. He blamed the leaders of the Jewish community and, in public, identified with Judaism exclusively in political terms.

In terms of content, the Dutch historiographies of the Holocaust share some characteristic features. First of all, they are temporally and geographically isolated. Both Herzberg and Presser limited themselves to a history of events between May 1940 and May 1945. All three historians dealt with the Netherlands in nearly complete geographical isolation. Yet they were well aware of the work of their peers abroad and actively participated in international debates. My study shows that the Dutch historians were strongly influenced by the work of their foreign colleagues when it came to the assessment of certain central themes. They sometimes paraphrased entire paragraphs, especially concerning key themes, but neither Presser nor De Jong ever credited their sources. Both gave similar and similarly unsatisfactory reasons for not quoting their international sources. Especially with regard to

[p. 6]

controversial issues they should have sought a compromise between exhaustive footnotes and no references at all. By opting for the latter, they withheld from their readers alternative views and sometimes even presented others' analyses as their own. Strikingly, it was only the lawyer-historian Herzberg who consistently quoted his sources.

Another, closely related characteristic of these authors is their largely expository presentation. Particularly Presser and De Jong give the impression of simply revealing the facts or clarifying a problem, while leaving alternative views undiscussed. Again, it is remarkable that Herzberg, particularly in his assessment of important themes, structured his argument so that readers could follow it step by step. Moreover, he was the only one to inform his readers of his personal views on Jewish history.

The third characteristic is exclusively Dutch. Though they were professional historians, both Presser and De Jong incorporated and even foregrounded personal experiences in their historical accounts, while in Herzberg's Kroniek, references to the author's personal experiences remained in the background. One explanation I give for this foregrounding mechanism is that particularly Presser and De Jong sought a form of legitimization.

The work of Herzberg, Presser and De Jong has given the people of the Netherlands a view of World War ii more strongly coloured by the Holocaust than elsewhere in the world. In addition, knowledge of the Holocaust is more widespread in the Netherlands than in many other countries. As a result, the ‘deniers of the Holocaust’ have so far been unable to gain a foothold here. However, it is a fact that Dutch historiography has all but lost its initial head start on other Western European countries and the United States.

The work of these three historians has given contemporary historiography an important impulse. The lack of any significant theoretical reflection in their accounts made them easy to read. In addition, their generous attention to the victims' individual experiences - in itself a new weapon in the arsenal of the professional historian - managed to move readers and make them think. Their personal experiences formed an important motivation at the professional level. Therefore, they saw the moral aspect of historiography not as a theoretical issue, but simply as part of their mandate.