The 'Bystander' in Recent Dutch Historiography

Abstract

‘Wij weten niets van hun lot’: Gewone Nederlanders en de Holocaust. By Bart van der Boom. Amsterdam: Boom. 2012. 536 pp. €29.90 (paperback). Bart van der Boom has written a controversial book about Dutch society under German occupation. Its title translates as ‘We know nothing of their fate’: Ordinary Dutchmen and the Holocaust.1 With his book, van der Boom seeks to weigh in on the debate about whether the Holocaust should be attributed to the Nazi regime alone or whether gentile societies throughout the occupied territories played a crucial role in aiding the mass murder of the Jews. It became a public issue after van der Boom won a prestigious book award in the autumn of 2012 in response to which a number of Dutch scholars published critical reviews. Occasionally, the current discussion is described as the second round of a Dutch Historikerstreit, a controversy among historians about the place of the Holocaust in the Netherlands. The debate is relevant to historians of the Nazi regime and of the Holocaust and its memory beyond the confines of Dutch historiography because it tackles not only academic issues such as the interpretation of sources and the theoretical and methodological standards being employed but also the intricate relationship between academic historiography and public discourses about history and memory.