Interviews Wim Pelt with (former) CPN members

Wim Pelt (born Heerlen 1947) learnt the pastry trade and worked in his father’s bakery from 1965-1970. He studied history at the University of Utrecht and the University of Amsterdam in the 1970s and was active in the CPN in the 1970s and 1980s, including in the daily management of the Limburg and Utrecht districts, instructor for the CPN in the Vecht-IJsselstreek district, co-responsible for subscriber recruitment and delivery of De Waarheid in the Rotterdam district, member of the coordination group of the IPSO history group, member of the editorial board of Komma. Pelt worked as a teacher in vocational education.

Wim Pelt received his PhD with Peace through Revolution. The CPN during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-1941)

The role of the CPN in the first year of the occupation has long been a fraught topic, which supporters and opponents of that party could not reasonably discuss. A truly detached scholarly treatment did not come until H. Galesloot and S. Legêne’s book, Partij in het verzet (1986), which devotes just under 100 pages to the controversial period. Again, almost half of W. F. S. Pelt’s dissertation deals with that first year of occupation, though no longer as part of the history of occupation: Pelt’s subject is the period from the conclusion of the German-Russian pact of 23 August 1939 until the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the politics conducted by the CPN during that period. So it is not the domestic political situation in the Netherlands that determines Pelt’s periodisation, but the foreign-political position of the Soviet Union.