World War II came to college, too

After WW II, many heroic stories were told about the students’ resistance, according to Jeroen Kemperman’s new book Oorlog in de collegebanken (Loosely translated to War at college). And students were indeed involved in many resistance activities.

It started in the fall of 1940, when Germans started to meddle in higher education, and announced anti-Jewish measures. Leiden professor Cleveringa held his famous speech against firing his Jewish colleagues. In Delft and Leiden, many students went on strike: they didn’t go to class.

Why didn’t students in other cities go on strike? It was often touch and go, Kemperman says. “Later, one of the people on strike in Delft said, for instance, that they were lucky the decision was taken quickly, because then it became unstoppable. In Amsterdam, for example, the announcement on excluding Jewish scientists was received a little later. There was time to think, worry, discuss, what the Germans were going to do – and that’s not very conducive to decisiveness.”

It’s all in the book, in which Kemperman describes how more and more students joined the resistance. Some published illegal magazines, others joined spy groups or helped people in hiding, and yet others turned to weapons and performed assassinations. Famous resistance members like Hannie Schaft (‘the girl with the red hair’) and Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema (soldier of Orange) were students, too. And resistance work was dangerous: more than four hundred students died during the war.

Dilemmas
Kemperman, who works at the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), takes on a bird perspective in his book as he looks at students in the resistance. He addresses all kinds of stories of several universities and (former) universities of applied sciences, and paints a picture of all the dilemmas students faced back then.

Students, of course, were only human. It wasn’t always a well-thought-out decision to join the resistance. Sometimes, it was just a case of petulance, after fighting with a German soldier in a bar, for example. Especially early on in the war, they weren’t sure how tough the occupier would be, and didn’t necessarily realize the consequences. Professors often tried to calm their bravado. “For others, however, joining the resistance was a way of self-fulfillment, an act that was to give their life meaning.”

In 1943, the Germans demanded the students sign a statement of loyalty in order to remain at university. The large majority of students refused, but this wasn’t always based on principles: social pressure played a large part, especially within students’ associations.

Convincing squads
“Nobody knew what the consequences of refusing would be,” Kemperman says. “For many students, it was, at least partially, a practical decision: my parents paid for college, what happens if I don’t graduate? For that reason, ‘convincing squads’ were created, with the sole task of convincing those in doubt.”

The activists among students made it into a matter of principle, and Kemperman understands that, he says. “If you’re in a war, you can’t say things like ‘it’s nuanced, really’. That won’t get you anywhere. You need to put pressure on it.”

And that worked, even though the number of students who signed the statement of loyalty differed greatly from city to city. At the Technical University of Applied Sciences in Delft, for example, around a quarter of students signed the statement, whereas in Tilburg and Nijmegen, almost nobody did. “But if you look at the big picture, you can definitely conclude that students, on a massive scale, decided to refuse.”

Understanding
Still, Kemperman empathizes with the – often poor – students who did sign the statement. “Those students may have thought they’d only get one chance to go to college, and they didn’t know how long the war would take. Among them were students who hadn’t joined a students’ association, because you had to pay a membership fee for those. They felt less social pressure.”

Were these students judged too harshly after the war? “Perhaps, but there were also students who didn’t sign and were sent to work in Germany, or who had to go into hiding. So naturally, after the war, they held a grudge against those who did sign. At the very least, they felt the people who signed were not to experience any advantages from having studied throughout the war.”

The professors took a more nuanced stance after the war, Kemperman says. “They didn’t want to exclude the students who signed, but include them. It was a time of rebuilding, engineers had to fix the broken dikes and houses. And there were other students who also felt more lenient towards the situation.”

Harsher
In general – “this counts for everything I say: there are all kinds of exceptions” – you could say the professors had already been more reserved than students during the war. “As a young person without bounds, you can afford to be harsher and more outspoken. The professors were responsible for expensive laboratories and entire libraries. They were dealing with a threat against their life’s work.”

Were there betrayers among students, who reported the resistance groups to the Germans? “I hardly found anything about that,” Kemperman says. “There were students who were members of the NSB (Dutch political party that collaborated with the nazis, ed.), but they were fairly visible, especially in the early years. There wasn’t a lot of contact between the groups. But yes, in many cases where a resistance group was caught, it’s unknown whether betrayal played a role, and if yes: who was the betrayer.”

The book presentation last week was accompanied by a debate about students and resistance, during the war and now. Can you compare the war with today’s student protests? It’s tricky, Kemperman thinks: “I myself feel like there are always going to be similarities, but also, especially: enormous differences.”

Translation: Indra Spronk