They were right 60 years ago, they are even more right today!

The eternal symbol.

I’ve almost finished reading Norman Rich’s two volumes on Hitler’s War Aims. Amidst the usual “black-and-white” version of W.W. II history replete with distortions and Allied biases…all this is to be expected from post-war Allied historiography written by conformist historians (read: Allied propagandists and pamphleteers à la Evans), I came upon a National Socialist analysis of the Dutch and of the Netherlands, which I found to be spot on. I bear no ill will towards the Dutch (I’m part Dutch myself…and my last name is more Dutch than German)…they’re certainly a Germanic people and thus of great racial value. However, this doesn’t keep me from totally agreeing with the following National Socialist assessment of the Dutch spirit as fundamentally corrupted by western liberalism, permissiveness, commercialism, capitalism…in summary, materialism (just like the British spirit has been corrupted by the same forces, even more so perhaps):

[Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: The Establishment of the New Order, vol. II.]

The blood relationship between the Dutch and the Germans, which Seyss-Inquart had emphasized in his first proclamation to the Dutch people, was to remain a central theme of Nazi policy in the Netherlands and was given far more emphasis by Nazi theorists than the similar relationship which they presumed to exist between the Germans and the people of Scandinavia, perhaps because of Germany’s closer historical and cultural ties with the Netherlands…scientific investigation in anthropology and prehistory had proven the Teutonic origin of the people inhabiting the territory of the Netherlands…for many centuries this blood relationship had also been a political relationship. From the year 925 the Netherlands had formed a part of the German Reich until foreign rulers, unable to comprehend the spiritual aspirations of this Germanic folk, had driven the Dutch to revolt. At the German Reichstag of 1578 the Dutch poet Philipp van Marnix had addressed an impassioned appeal for aid to his fellow Germans: “Reflect how much it concerns Germany that these provinces are not torn from the heart of the Holy Empire,” he had cried. Bur the criminally negligent German princes failed to rally to the cause of the Dutch. The Peace of Westphalia detached the Netherlands from the body of the Reich, and after 1648 the Dutch pursued an independent political course. Fundamentally, however, they remained a part of Germandom. Dutch culture remained Germanic culture. A people could not dissociate itself from its racial foundation. “To build on these existing unities and to go back to this common origin in order to create new commonalities within the framework of the new European order is the task in this area,” Seyss-Inquart said….[However,] the long political separatism of the Dutch nation and the gradual adoption of foreign modes of thought had…resulted in the spiritual cleavage which prevented the Dutch from generally recognizing and acclaiming the mission of the National Socialist movement. In the course of the last three hundred years the Germanic Netherlands had moved into the ever-closer spiritual and cultural relations with the West. The rulers of Holland had gained their great wealth and maintained their dominant position at home largely through their overseas enterprises. The dependence of the ruling strata of Dutch society on foreign trade and colonial exploitation had forced Holland into the orbit of capitalist and free-trading countries, particularly into subservience to the sea power of the British Empire. The point of view of the Dutch ruling strata, imposed for centuries on the mass of the Dutch people, had caused the present lack of comprehension for the National Socialist renaissance. This same ruling group had maneuvered the Netherlands into a criminal international position during the present war. Only the alertness of the German Fuhrer and the speed of the German armies had prevented the use of the Netherlands as a base for Anglo-French aggression against Germany.

…Seyss-Inquart believed his most significant task was to regain the Dutch for Germandon…[National Socialists] observed with dismay that the flame of burning idealism had flickered low in the Netherlands. There was no longer the same unrelenting drive toward noblest völkisch expressions, no effort to live according to highest principles pressed to their ultimate demands. Through the centuries an atmosphere of tolerance and liberalism had permeated all phases of Dutch existence, blurring the distinction between false and the true, the base and the beautiful. The tensions of human relationships had been harmonized on a plane of comfortable mediocrity. It was a way of life…which smothered every genuine völkisch revival movement. The National Socialist yearning after higher stature, this convulsive struggle between ideal and reality, between soaring spiritual potentiality and earthbound striving, this tension which was testing the German spirit to the breaking point – all this was as yet foreign to the materialistic Hollander. The Dutchman’s ideal of balance in spiritual as well as in political life, his attachment to material well-being, his bovine satisfaction in a calm existence – all this now had to be altered. “The present war is not being waged for the possession of this or that bit of land or for any dynastic interest,” a Nazi theorist wrote with specific reference to the Netherlands. “It is a war for the racial configuration of a part of the earth in the sense of a Weltanschauung. There is, therefore, hardly a sphere of human existence in which the government of an occupied territory must not interfere.”

[Footnotes omitted.]