(Second blog on the history of 'Dutch statelessness' after the Spanish civil war)
Renaturalization
after occupation
In my first blog I described the
recruitment of Dutch volunteers for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), how the
Dutch state reacted to this recruitment and how it actively sought the names of
those volunteers to revoke their citizenship. At the end of my last blog, I
described how a group of some 120 volunteers returned to the Netherlands by
train and were declared stateless from now on.
Meanwhile I looked into the question
of why this group came back in such an official manner. In a biography about
the first Dutch volunteer in this war, Fanny Schoonheyt,
also called the ‘queen of the machine gun’, the author offers an answer. It was
due to an agreement in the Non-Intervention Committee, a committee which was
set up by France and England and also joined by Germany, Italy and the USSR.
The Committee had the goal of preventing this war from spreading to become an
international conflict. In this committee, it was decided that the repatriation
of the volunteers would be the task for the states where they came from. The
Netherlands agreed to this. Furthermore it was decided that the volunteers
would not be punished for their participation in the war. From the Dutch point
of view, the loss of citizenship was to be considered a measure, not a
punishment.
This point of view was debatable. In
the Nederlandsch Juristenblad (Dutch Advocacy Review) of June
1937, lawyer I. Kisch anticipates the homecoming of the volunteers
and writes an essay on the question of whether they should lose their
citizenship or not. This essay is not only an interesting interpretation of the
(French) history of this law and how it should be implemented, but also a
confession of somebody who has seen, as he writes, ‘the misery of
statelessness’: avoid as much as reasonable any case of statelessness, is his
advice.
Prisoners of war
The misery of statelessness was very
real for those volunteers who became prisoners of war. At least 25 Dutch
volunteers were held in camps in Spain, and their situation became more
complicated as Germany occupied the Netherlands and pressured Spain not to
release any men between 18 and 40 years old: they might join the allied forces.
Also, being repatriated to a country occupied by Nazi Germany was not a good
option for those Dutch anti-fascists, and they were dependent on the good will
and assistance from the Dutch authorities to find a country willing to accept
them. Unfortunately, the Dutch authorities did not always make a big effort to
help them, and for some time did not even feel responsible at all, as those
prisoners were no longer considered to be Dutch citizens. This point of view
was eventually revised.
One option was to absorb them into
the Dutch brigades in England, whereto the Dutch government had fled in 1940.
But the Dutch minister of defense refused to accept communists, although, as he
admitted, they were probably experienced fighters. Finally, in august 1942,
some eleven Dutch POWs were released to Curacao. Upon
arrival there, it was disclosed that two of them were actually Germans
pretending to be Dutch citizens in order to avoid deportation to Germany.
The last prisoners were released
only in 1943, this time directly to England. They wanted to join the armed
forces there, but were only offered the status of volunteers in the Dutch army,
as they were considered stateless and thus not regular soldiers. Confusingly
enough, those prisoners were given Dutch passports before their shipment to England
due to differing opinions on whether they had lost their nationality or not between
Dutch ministries. The business of enrolling in the army was settled in 1944,
when it was concluded that somebody who had lost his citizenship might still be
called up for army service. Other former volunteers in Spain, who had lost
their citizenship and lived in the Netherlands, had received their draft card
in 1939, just like everybody else. It seems that the consequences of losing
one’s nationality with regard to the army draft were not clear.
German occupation (1940-1945)
So, some volunteers back in the
Netherlands received a draft card, and many joined the resistance after the
capitulation of the Netherlands. How did
their statelessness affect their lives?
Before and after the occupation,
there were certain consequences that affected the life of a stateless person.
One was not allowed to vote or to be a candidate in any elections. Now
considerd an alien, one was even not allowed to be politically active at all.
Also, one was considered an alien and had to register as such and apply for a
residence permit, which had to be renewed on a regular basis. To travel to
other countries, one needed a special passport that was more expensive and had
a shorter validity than a regular one. Working as a civil servant, or any job
that required a certain nationality, was not possible. Work was only possible
with a work permit, which was necessary for every new job again, and this
permit had a price - also for the employer. One former volunteer who worked as
a painter described how the alien police would inform the employer about his
past in Spain, and that if he had work, he would always be the first who was
kicked out. At that time, it had a stigmatizing effect, as one’s political
affiliation was revealed.
How the status of being stateless
affected the life of the former volunteers during the German occupation is not
clear. It is known that the Germans were interested in the Dutch files about
those volunteers, and also that after the February strike in 1941, a strike in
solidarity with the Jewish population of Amsterdam, those files were studied
once more by the Germans. Maybe a study of the different biographies of those
volunteers would give a better idea, but I suppose that the statelessness, and
thus the fact that someone had fought in Spain, already made those people some
kind of outlaw and the decision to go underground might have been almost a
necessity for many of them.
Renaturalization
after occupation
The fact that the volunteers were in
an especially dangerous position with regard to the German occupier, was
mentioned as an explanation regarding the re-naturalization of twenty former
volunteers in the end of 1945. However, the renaturalization of the former volunteers
in Spain would become a long story. In the beginning, after the liberation of
the Netherlands, it did not seem so. As mentioned, many volunteers were part of
the resistance, and there was more recognition for the fact that they had
already fought against fascism in Spain. The Dutch Prime Minister Schemerhorn was in favour of granting permission
retroactively, thus reversing the act of revoking citizenship. Unfortunately,
the (Catholic) minister of Justice, Kolfschoten, was against this, and he was granted
the time to come with another solution. Furthermore, the former volunteers were
not the only group asking for Dutch citizenship: in 1946/1947, there were some
8000 applicants for Dutch citizenship. A big group of those applicants were
mostly German, but also Polish or Russian wives of Dutch forced labourers returning
from Germany. Between 1945 an 1947, nationality was not granted automatically
to these foreign wives and some 1000 couples waited in a camp in Bocholt,
Germany, close to the Dutch border, until the ‘Committee for marriages with
women of enemy or other foreign nationalities’ decided about their case.
Finally, Kolfschoten orderd to renaturalize as it was
done before the occupation . So in 1946, twenty former volunteers were
presented in a bill to parliament. Members of parliament had to agree with
their renaturalization all in one. If one person was refused, the other
nineteen would have to wait to be presented again in another group. As the
explanatory memorandum, appended to the bill, was insufficiently informative,
members of parliament made a specific request to the minister concerning the
principle to be applied: the positive system, implying that the naturalization
must be in the interest of the Dutch State, or the negative system, in which
the interest of the applicant would be of primary consideration. The minister
answered that the positive system would be applied, as it was before the German
occupation.
Until 1948, some 62 former
volunteers were given their citizenship back. The slow procedure was to the
disadvantage of the applicants, as the tension between the East and the West
was growing, and communists in the Netherlands were considered more and more to
be an internal enemy. One incident especially stirred up anti-communists
feelings: in February 1949, the French communist leader Maurice Thorez hinted at helping the Soviets against the imperialist West in the event
of war. The Dutch leader of the communist party (CPN),
Paul de Groot, agreed with Thorez, although he
emphasized the importance of avoiding war altogether.
The strongest reaction to this
statement came from the chairman of the catholic political party KVP, Romme. He asked (among a list of other
things) to revoke the citizenship of all communists, as they potentially
intended to take military service for another country (the USSR). Indeed, being
a lawyer himself, he probably knew that this proposal stood no ground legally
speaking. It exhibits, however, that the communists were more and more
considered to be ‘fifth column’, traitors and bad patriots. This must be
understood against the backdrop of the fear of a Russian invasion.
From now on it became official
policy to exclude communists from re-naturalization. Not against whom one had
fought was now of interest, but against whom one was willing to fight in case
of war. According to this new standard, former SS-soldiers who had fought in
the East stood a better chance.
In 1951, the next step by the
government was the introduction of a bill that would re-naturalize all
stateless people in the Netherlands at once – except for those too much aligned
with communism. This was a big group: some estimated 15.000 men and their
spouses and offspring had lost their citizenship due to collaboration with the
Germans, mostly by joining the Waffen-SS. And there were still a dozen former
volunteers who had fought in Spain.
Almost the whole parliament was
against this proposal: against the mixing up of the two groups, and against the
re-naturalization of the former collaborators with one stroke of the pen. The
bill was amended and made law. Now it was only applicable to those who had
served in an enemy state, thus excluding the former volunteers in Spain.
The mixing up of the two groups was avoided, but to the disadvantage of the
Spanish volunteers.
Between 1950 and 1955, only 22
volunteers were renaturalized. In an official document of 1964 the reasons for
the refusal of renaturalization of 45 former volunteers are listed: 16% were
accused of having collaborated with the Germans, 17% of a criminal past, one
person of living together out of wedlock, and 65% had an ‘extreme left
orientation’ (being present at communist meetings was enough evidence). The
first reason, collaboration, is rather curious, as at the same time thousands
of former Waffen-SS soldiers were renaturalized.
Finally, thanks to a particular
individual case, the exclusion of people with unwanted political ideas was
dropped. Former volunteer Siep Adema had applied for renaturalization
twice and was refused both times because of his communist background. He
applied again in 1963, this time with added motivation: West-Germany had
finally come up with financial compensation for those who had been prisoners in
concentration camps. Adema was imprisoned for four full years
in different camps and would get the highest amount possible – but he had to be
a Dutch citizen. It was a bilateral agreement, probably referring to ‚Dutch
citizens’. It was considered too much of an injustice if he could not touch the
money, and the minister granted citizenship retroactively, as this was the only
way of being able to apply. Three more volunteers benefited from this procedure
for the same reason.
From this point on, political
convictions were left out of consideration regarding applicants. By the end of
the 1960s, all applications were dealt with. Whether there were still stateless
volunteers who never filed an application is unknown to me, but it seems quite
possible, as some volunteers refused to apply for renaturalization.
Julia Mattern wrote her master thesis
about the loss of citizenship of Dutch volunteers working for the Nazi
construction organisation “Organisation Todt” during German occupation
(1940-1945). This organisation built e.g. the Atlantic Wall.
Literature:
Hans Dankaart
e.a., De oorlog begon in Spanje, 1985, Van Gennep, Amsterdam
M.D. Bogaarts and C.M.J. Ruijters, De periode van het kabinet Beel, 1989, SDU-uitgeverij, ’s-Gravenhage
Yvonne Scholten, Fanny Schoonheyt, 2011, J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam
Julia Mattern, ‚...Verzoek
ik U beleefd mij
weer als Nederlander op te nehmen...’, 2006, RUN, Nijmegen
I. Kisch, Vreemde Krijgsdienst in: Nederlandsch Juristenblad 1937, p.
719ff
Benjamin
Kaplan et al.,Boundaries and their meanings in the history of the Netherlands,
2009, Brill, Leiden/Boston, p. 217
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