In fact, there was little real news under the weather-covered Dutch sky, but the general reaction was still one of great bewilderment: Prince Bernhard had been a member of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler’s party. We had apparently been fooled again – in those denials “with our hand on the Bible” of the prince shortly before his death in 2004. de Volkskrant.
Yet on December 6, 1995, the same newspaper wrote an article on this subject under the headline “Government tried to have Prince Bernhard removed from the Nazi list.” The newspaper referred to a recent study by G. Aalders (Riod) and C. Hilbrink (teacher in Oldenzaal). They had discovered in American archives that Bernhard had been a member of the NSDAP from May 1, 1933 to January 8, 1937 – one day after marrying Juliana. In 1948, the Dutch government made a vain attempt with the Americans to remove the prince’s name.
What had moved Bernhard to this membership in the 1930s and – at least as much – to the SA and the SS? The explanation is obvious: an unhealthy dose of opportunism, coupled with a need for assertiveness and survival. Bernhard also said it himself: “You had to participate somehow in the beginning, because they would let you fail your exam icy cold if they had the idea that you were anti.”
Someone who has written scathingly about such motives is Anna Haag, a German journalist who during the war years wrote a book (recently also published in Dutch translation under the title Stranger in your own country) kept a secret diary. She noted bitterly in 1941: “And the ‘intellectuals’? Insofar as they were not really intelligent, they flocked. (…) And the real ‘intellectuals’, who immediately had a permanent job, well, they initially kept aloof and were disgusted with the proletarian savior Hitler. But when he came to power, they too flew to him, and when they found that it was impossible to move forward without a Nazi trumpet in hand, well, then the group of sincere people became smaller and smaller. Now there are only a few left not belong, who do not use Nazi jargon in their conversations (…).”
Bernhard was ‘only’ one of many, but in retrospect he was unlucky that his ambition drove him to the Dutch royal family.
He is now dead and buried and is no longer bothered by anything, unless Our Lord is still angry because of that hand on the Bible. Meanwhile, ninety years later, ‘we’ are still left with the pieces.
‘We’ – that is, all those people who revered him as a kind of resistance fighter and sympathetic charmer who was close to the common people. In that admiration they were too naive and too forgiving. Because Bernhard was first and foremost a shrewd fool, who did not shy away from lies and deceit in order to continue his privileged existence.
This could also have been known at the Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund, of which Bernhard had been regent since its establishment under the name ‘Spitfire Fund’ in 1940. This fund does good work in the cultural field, but will have to change its name if it wants to maintain its credibility.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 6, 2023 newspaper.