- Dutch government confirms that Prince Bernhard was a member of the Nazi party during World War II.
- Bernhard’s Nazi party card was found among his belongings after his death.
- The Dutch government has confirmed the authenticity of the Nazi party card.
The Dutch government has confirmed that Prince Bernhard, the husband of Queen Juliana, was a member of the Nazi party during World War II.
This is based on a Nazi party card that was found among his belongings after his death. Bernhard had repeatedly denied being a member of the Nazi party, but historians have long believed that he was.
This is supported by the fact that he was a German aristocrat and that he had close ties to the Nazi regime.
In 1996, a researcher at the Dutch Institute for war studies found a copy of Bernhard’s Nazi party card in a US university archive. However, this revelation was widely criticized at the time.
Now, the Dutch government has confirmed the authenticity of the Nazi party card, which means that there is no longer any doubt that Bernhard was a member of the Nazi party.
Bernhard went to his grave swearing he had never been a paid-up member of Hitler’s party. “I can declare with my hand on the bible: I was never a Nazi,” he said in an interview published (in Dutch) after he died in 2004.
He had admitted being part of two Nazi organizations after 1933 – the Sturmabteilung security service and the Schutzstaffel (SS) – but he argued in 1971 that “at the start, you had to take part a little in one way or another” because if they had found out he was opposed, it would be tricky to pass exams.
That was far different from being a voluntary, card-carrying member of Hitler’s political party from 1933 to 1936 and holding on to the card until his death.
As well as a copy of the card showing up in the US in the 1990s, in 2010 historian Annejet van der Zijl found the prince’s student membership card in a German archive that also noted he had been a party member since 27 April 1933.
Flip Maarschalkerweerd says he stumbled on the prince’s NSDAP membership card while carrying out an inventory of the prince’s archives when he died.
He told NRC Handelsblad newspaper that he also came across a note dating back to 1949 from a US military administrator in Germany called Lucius Clay, who wrote to the prince that he had been about to destroy the card, but then decided “you have earned the right to destroy it yourself”.
Journalist Jan Tromp, who interviewed the prince at depth over several years, said that the revelation was not a surprise, but it would come as a shock and a betrayal to those who had taken part in the Dutch resistance and had commemorated the liberation with the prince for years afterward.
Tromp believed that the prince’s lie had eventually turned into self-deception.
“For the prince, there was no other choice but to deny he was a member of the enemy club – a club that had destroyed the country and sent people to concentration camps,” he told De Volkskrant newspaper.
Hours after an image of the membership card appeared in Dutch media, the royal house confirmed the card’s existence and published a picture of it. In a statement, it said King Willem-Alexander attached great importance to independent research and knowledge of the past.
“[The king] is aware of the role and position of the House of Orange-Nassau in the history of the kingdom,” it added.
Several Dutch political parties and Jewish groups have called on Prime Minister Mark Rutte to investigate Prince Bernhard’s Nazi past after the government confirmed the authenticity of a Nazi party card held by the prince.
Naomi Mestrum, of the Israel Information and Documentation Centre (Cidi), said that proof of the prince’s Nazi past was “another black page to a painful part of recent Dutch history.”
Mr Rutte said that while it was an “awful development,” previous research had made it quite convincingly clear that the prince had been a Nazi party member.
In other words, some people in the Netherlands want the government to investigate Prince Bernhard’s Nazi past, while others say that it is already clear that he was a Nazi.
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