R.L. Schuursma interviewed Karel Nort (1913-1981), who as chief broadcaster reported the news of the German Capitulation via Radio Herrijzend Nederland on May 4, 1945. The interview covered Nort’s role in the resistance, his work at the AVRO and his role as chief announcer at Radio Herrijzend Nederland.

Nort joined the AVRO in 1938 as a sports reporter. After the disappearance of many radio stations, he worked for the nazified (Gleichschaltung) Nederlandsche Omroep until early 1943. When this work became too much for him, he left for Maastricht, where he went to work in the station restaurant. There he became involved in the resistance and was involved in arms smuggling. Then, after the liberation of Eindhoven in 1944, he crossed over at Biesbosch and became a contributor to Radio Herrijzend Nederland. With a makeshift reporter’s truck, he toured the liberated part of the Netherlands. Nort gives an account of this occupation here.

When on Saturday, May 5, 1945, the surrender of the Germans became known throughout the Netherlands, the employees of Radio Herrijzend Nederland were still wondering what would happen to the station after liberation. In the first place, the head of the Military Authority decided that Radio Herrijzend Nederland would be taken off the air immediately after liberation. This would eventually happen only in 1946.

For more information about the interview and the interviewee, see: SFW work issue no. 8 (1995), p.34

The seventy-year-old Gerard Slotemaker de Bruine spoke with interviewers Th. Minderaa, J. Rijken, R.L. Schuursma and Sj. Vellenga about his resistance work during World War II.

Slotemaker de Bruine was the son of CHU minister Jan Rudolph Slotemaker de Bruine and Cornelia de Jong. He was very active in the resistance, especially within the spy group “the Swiss Road. The Swiss Road was a common smuggling route during World War II from 1942 to June 1944, part of the Dutch-Paris underground network. Prime Minister Gerbrandy urged Reverend Visser ‘t Hooft to set up an intelligence service to enable contact between occupied Holland and the government in London. Visser ‘t Hooft met Hebe Charlotte Kohlbrugge just at that time, and so the new route was established. The route went via trustworthy persons and addresses from Holland, including Slotemaker de Bruine, to Geneva. Often couriers brought messages to Switzerland via this route that were destined for the government in London. These messages were microfilmed in the Netherlands and often hidden in clothing.

After the war, Slotemaker de Bruine became the director of the scientific bureau of the PvdA. Later he broke away from the PvdA because of the Indonesian issue. Throughout his life he maintained close ties with leading theologians and held many societally relevant functions. Between 1963 and 1967, De Bruine served in the House of Representatives on behalf of the Pacifist Socialist Party.

In the interview, Sieburgh talks about his experiences as a sound engineer. In 1942, together with Koos Groeneveld, he founded the Siegro sound studio in Rotterdam. During the war years, his duties included acting as a “listening post” after radios had to be turned in in the Netherlands and working on (repairing) secret transmitters. Eventually he ended up in the circles of the resistance organization LO-LKP. In 1944 he had to go into hiding for some time. In the last war period and during the liberation, he worked for Radio Herrijzend Nederland. Among other things, he drove around in a report truck of the Internal Armed Forces in order to make as many recordings as possible.

After the war, Sieburgh and Groeneveld continued to expand their sound engineering business, working for professional theater and broadcasters, “doing” radio advertising, and providing sound for films, among other things. For example, Sieburgh made the sound recordings for several documentaries by Herman van der Horst, including ‘t Schot is te boord. In the late 1960s, the company came to an end and Sieburgh continued on his own. Technical matters frequently come up in the interview.

The then director of Arnhem’s Gemeentemuseum Pierre Jansen (1926-2007) interviewed the painter-sculptor Johan Hendrik van Zweden (1896-1975) in 1970 on the eve of a retrospective exhibition of his work in Arnhem to mark his 75th birthday. Van Zweden was a pupil of Jan Altink and Jan Wiegers, who together founded De Ploeg and introduced German expressionism to the Netherlands. Van Zweden was also a member of the Groningen artists’ circle. During his Groninger years, many portraits were made of Van Zweden (nicknamed “Shanghai Bobby” because of his Asian features) by Ploeg members, showing personal friendship and sympathy. During World War II, he joined the artists’ resistance, but was soon arrested and imprisoned in Kamp Vught.

The interview includes a discussion of Van Zweden’s resistance activities during the German occupation and his stay in the Vught concentration camp, to which he was transferred in 1943 after his arrest. There, with the knowledge of the camp commander, he was able to set up his own studio. After the commander’s departure, he worked in the drawing room of the Philips workshop in Vught. In the camp, among other things, he made portraits of his fellow prisoners.

In May 1944, he was deported to Dachau concentration camp, from which he was liberated in April 1945. After the war, he was appointed by Mart Stam, as a replacement for the fallen sculptor Frits van Hall, to teach at the Institute for Arts and Crafts Education (later the Gerrit Rietveld Academy) in Amsterdam.

Carlos Rocha, member of the Central Committee of the liberation movement MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertaçâo de Angola), talks about the liberation struggle in Angola. The interview took place against the backdrop of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal (April 25, 1974), for which the colonial wars that country waged in Angola, among others, were the immediate cause.

Issues discussed include the possible solution of the colonial problem by the new rulers in Portugal; the situation in the already liberated areas in Angola; the relationship between the MPLA and the other Angolan liberation movements, including the FNLA (for a time called UPA); the relationship with the independence movements Frelimo in Mozambique and PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau; the similarity with the (anti-imperialist) struggles in Indo-China. Angola gained its official independence on Nov. 11, 1975. The interview was conducted in French. However, the transcript is available in Dutch translation at Sound and Vision. 

Interviewees:

• J.M. van Ameijde
• H.A. Das, director of the foundation 1940-1945
• S.S.P. de Man, former provincial commander of the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten, gewest 8

Interviewer: the historian R.L. Schuursma and the movie director P. Verhoeven

The three interviews amount to seven hours of material

For more information on the interviews and interviewees, see: Film and Science Foundation (SFW) working edition no. 8 (1995), pp. 1, 10, 32.

Ad de Beer in conversation with the Van Eerdewijk-Sandbergen family about the raid on Coba Pulskens in Diepenstraat in Tilburg on July 9, 1944. Van Eerdewijk was involved in Coba’s illegal work and lived next door to Coba Pulskens.

Gerrit Kobes in conversation with C. v.d. Hooft, during the war district leader of the LO/LKP, Brabant-Oost and with Mr. Hamburg, during the war active in the resistance within Tilburg, Group O.D.

Gerrit Kobes in conversation with Brother Frederico, Father Rembertus (Rooie Rem) and Jan Franken about the illegality within the LO/LKP, Brabant East.

Gerrit Kobes in conversation with Eppo Boer at Beesterzwaag, during the war working as an illegal worker (district leader) within the LO/LKP, Tilburg West region. After the liberation Mr. Boer was active in the establishment of MTN (Motor Transport Nederland), predecessor of the AAT.

Four resistance fighters during the vacations around August/September 1941. With glasses Jac Theelen and to his right Leo Winkelmolen. They came from Limburg and were in hiding with Coba Pulskens – © Regionaal Archief Tilburg

The February Strike was held during World War II in protest against the many anti-Jewish measures and persecution of Jews. Thousands of workers laid down their work. The strike began on 25 February 1941 in Amsterdam and spread a day later to the Zaanstreek, Haarlem, Velsen, Hilversum and the city of Utrecht and immediate surroundings. It was the first large-scale resistance action against the German occupiers in Europe. Since 1946, the February Strike has been commemorated annually on 25 February on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein in Amsterdam, near Mari Andriessen’s statue “The Dockworker”. The collection includes interviews conducted by Jan Dop, Simon Korper and Gerard Maas, among others, with February strikers.

The Foundation Comité Herdenking Februaristaking 1941 was established in 1990 as a successor to the Februariherdenkingskomité.

The interviews were conducted by Jan Dop (1943), (filmmaker who, together with Kees Hin (1936-2020) and Frans van der Staak (died 2001), made the feature film about the February Strike Soldiers without Guns (1985). Jan Dop made some interviews alone, some in collaboration with Simon Korper (1907-1988) and later most with Gerard Maas (Zaandam, 1913 – Amsterdam, 1988) communist, resistance fighter and politician.

Maas wrote about the February strike, a.o. Kroniek van de Februari-staking 1941, Amsterdam, 1961 en 1941 bloeiden de rozen in februari, een korte historische schets, Amsterdam [1985].

Interviews by Wim Bot with ten members of the revolutionary-socialist and Trotskyist resistance in World War II for the purpose of his study on the Marx-Lenin-Luxembourg Front and the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists. The collection includes the digitised files of 15 cassettes containing interviews conducted by Wim Bot in the 1980s with former members of the MLL Front and the CRM on the left-wing resistance during the war in The Hague.

This volume examines the political ideas and activities of the Marx-Lenin-Luxembourg Front, the illegal continuation of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party. The MLL-Front was formed immediately after the beginning of the German occupation of the Netherlands and existed until April 1942, when the organisation’s main leaders were shot. After that, the MLL-Front broke up into two smaller organisations, the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists and the Communist Union Spartacus. It was originally my intention to extend the research to these groups and two other organisations on the left wing of the Dutch labour movement during the occupation period. These were the Trotskyist Group of Bolshevik-Leninists, active under the name Bond van Communisten from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941, and the group around the resistance magazine ‘De Vonk’. The latter group, which existed throughout the occupation, originally worked closely with the MLL Front. However, it broke up in the summer of 1941. I chose this original set-up because all these groups (with the exception of ‘De Vonk’ after the summer of 1941) occupied a special minority position within the illegality. Indeed, they refused to side with the democratic Allies in the struggle against fascism and the German occupation and hoped for a revolutionary breakthrough in a socialist direction at the end of the war. They saw the war as a consequence of capitalism, and war, fascism and capitalism, in their view, had to be ended by the international solidarity of the working class.

A historian from Ghent University, Rudi Van Doorslaer wrote a doctoral thesis entitled “Children of the Ghetto. Jewish Revolutionaries in Belgium, 1925-1940”, submitted in 1990. From 1977 to 1980, he worked as a temporary attaché at CegeSoma, before being hired as a permanent researcher in 1985. For two years, he directed a research project on the Commission for the Study of Jewish Property under the Prime Minister’s Office. From 1996 to 2005, he was editor-in-chief of Cahiers d’histoire du temps présent. He has published in the domains of Jewish history, migration, communism and anti-communism, the Spanish War and other topics related to the Second World War. He left CegeSoma in 2016.

The interviews conducted by Rudi Van Doorslaer mainly concern the Belgian Communist Party. In particular, he interviewed several witnesses who had been active in the PCB during the Second World War in various Belgian cities (Antwerp, Kortrijk, Brussels, Aalst,…), but also in the context of the Spanish Civil War. He was committed to gaining a better understanding of the structure of the party. The interviews were conducted in two stages. The first interviews took place at the end of the 1970s, between 1976 and 1979. They mainly concern the PCB. Then, from 1983 to 1989, he was still interested in the PCB, but his emphasis was on its links to the Spanish Civil War.

Moreover, there are several interviews with Jewish refugees carried out in order to deepen knowledge of Jewish history.