June 26th, 2005, 7:04 am
This is the not the first time you have equated the Netherlands and Germany. It is inaccurate at best.I have not "equated" Holland and Germany, indeed I can't recall ever doing so.It would really piss off a Dutch person to say that Holland might have become an ally of Nazis. No way. No doubt.It would piss of a modern German to say he might become a Nazi. It would piss off a modern Frenchman to claim that many thousands of French people wouild fight for Nazis. Which is fair enough. We now know the full story.1939 was a very different world. The Nazis were widely admired, western europe had non-trivial parties who officially adopted Nazi ideas, and the ruling classes throughout the region liked the way Hitler ruled strongly, brought order and built big things.Of course a modern Netherlander finds the idea of working with the Nazis loathsome, German friends of mine tell of experiences on holiday in the 1970s 20-30 years laterwhere driving through dutch roads they kept having stones thrown at their cars. However, Holland took a while to realise what was going on, a common failing of course, but they were even slower than the catastrophically incompetent Brits.Few people in 1939 would have realised how crap the Germans were at making allies, and if you recall many Frenchmen fought pretty bloody hard against the British. The Germans certainly did not see the Dutch as a lesser race, and their treatment is rather different to (say) Poles. It's not that hard to see a more competent Germany drawing in Dutch people to it's cause.Also you and I know how WWII worked out. It was different then. Many people believed that WWII would be like WWI, but with civillians being dragged in as well by bombing. However, there was good reason to believe that it would last a lot longer. Holland would have been attacked by Britain in that scenario, it's industry and ports would have been so useful to Germany that there would have been no alternative. Britain was unique at that time as the only power who really got into building strategic bombers to attack civillians. Everyone else, particularly the Germans saw bombers as longer range artillery support for the army. Their big bombers were so crap that all by themselves they dispel the myth of Aryan superiority. Ireland, on the other hand was a different story that you do have intimate knowledge of.The only "intimate" knowledge I have of Ireland is that I'm related to many of them. Almost none of my formal education covered Ireland, and none of it was past the 1920s, Brits are remarkably polite about the behaviour of the Irish government on this matter. To be sure, these links mean I bothered to read a little more in that direction, but ultimately Eire was marginal.