Despite the rather clumsy title of this book, “Victims and Perpetrators. Dutch Shoah, 1933/45 and beyond”, it nevertheless suggests a new and potentially welcome reappraisal of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. Indeed, the author Hans Derks seems to suggest exactly that when on the opening page he refers to the remarkably high levels of mortality suffered by Jews in the Netherlands when compared to other countries in Western Europe. This he regards as “lacking a well-researched explanation’”: a claim he can only make by ignoring many of the works published on the subject in the last 25 years. This does not bode well for the credibility of his methodology or his ability to encompass this most contentious of subjects in recent Dutch historiography.
What follows is little more than a long and sometimes rhetorical polemic encompassing more than 300 pages of text. The book begins with an extensive discussion of the concept of race, before being divided into two sub-sections, the first entitled “The Practice of Being Victims” deals with the situation of the Jews in the pre-war Netherlands and their position within Dutch society, suggesting, for example, that the dominant “pillared society” regarded them as “social scum; outsiders and nonconformists” (p. 51) who were to all intents invisible to “ordinary Dutch people”. Indeed, the book goes on in this vein, using what could be described as inflammatory language while being highly self-referential in criticising contemporary institutions and historians.
In the second sub-section, “Scientists as Perpetrators” Derks takes on a series of issues which he believes have been deliberately misrepresented by historians, often using provocative chapter titles such as “Flemish Historians as Jew Hunters” and “The Perversions of Bio-Anthropology”. He seems keen to unmask those whose wartime careers had some complicity with the fate of the Jews, but who have, in his eyes, escaped the proper judgements of historians. Indeed, he is always at pains to point out where he believes historians and institutions have failed to do their job ‘correctly’. Here again, the style and tone of the writing is highly polemical and over-relies on italicisation and sometimes even capitalisation to emphasise particular phrases within sentences, as though this somehow gives his conclusions more weight.
While there may be some truth to the charges made by the author that individuals and institutions implicated in some way in the victimisation and deportation of Jews from the Netherlands have escaped censure in the intervening 70+ years, his method of bringing this to our attention—through an accusatory and often subjective style does him no credit as the “eminent historian” the back matter of the book claims him to be. Moreover, his use of the English language (despite thanking named individuals for corrections in the acknowledgements), leaves a great deal to be desired. Poor usages and a peppering of slang terms, especially in the endnotes which also include references to Wikipedia entries do not make the work either easily accessible or understandable. Such laxity would undoubtedly be censured in the work of undergraduate students and it should not be tolerated amongst professionals within the academic community. Much of this might have been avoided by assiduous copy-editing but it appears that the publisher’s commitment to high-quality production values ended with the physical appearance of the book.
The debate on the Shoah in the Netherlands and its continuing relevance in present day Dutch society shows no sign of abating. There is undoubtedly a place for more radical assessments of the perceived shortcomings of the Netherlands and its collective overall culpability for the fate of its Jewish citizens, but this needs to be done in a sober and rational manner that is understandable to the reader, not in the convoluted style which this book employs.