‘Enemy Aliens’ and ‘Indian Hostages’: Civilians in Dutch–German Wartime Diplomacy and International Law during the Second World War

Abstract

Abstract May 1940 marked a turning point in belligerent states’ policies targeting foreign civilians in the Second World War. This study investigates the radicalization of restrictive measures enacted against so-called enemy aliens in the Dutch–German confrontation by linking developments in Europe with those in the colonial sphere. Mass civilian internment in the Dutch East Indies and German reprisals in the form of hostage-taking in the occupied Netherlands affected thousands of men, women and children. Their treatment is analysed in the broader context of the workings of wartime diplomacy and its guiding principle of reciprocity. The article shows that both Germany and the Netherlands made extensive use of the good offices of their respective protecting powers, Switzerland and Sweden. The international laws of war—although underdeveloped when it came to the protection of non-combatants—not only served as a yardstick to assess the treatment of civilians in enemy hands, but also formed a constant point of reference in a propaganda war in which each belligerent sought to justify its own restrictive policies while denouncing its opponent’s. On the one hand, the legal category of nationality was employed by both state authorities and affected individuals in their attempts to define or deny enemy status. On the other hand, nationality proved a fragile concept surrounded by ambiguities and bound up with complex emotions of belonging and alienness—most strikingly at work in the colonial setting, where racial identities determined an individual’s status in a social order vitally dependent on the construction of ‘ethnic’ boundaries.