Germany's Commissioner for The Netherlands, persuasive Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was near the end of his tether last week. The Dutch just could not be persuaded. On a tour of the country, Commissioner Seyss-Inquart personally distributed batches of pamphlets showing Adolf Hitler as he used to be caricatured in The Netherlands and, beside the caricatures, flattering photographs illustrating "the true, kind personality of the Führer." Dutchmen simply folded the pamphlets to show their favorite caricature, then stuck them in the most convenient frame.
In The Hague the Commissioner ordered a bookseller to remove a picture of Queen Wilhelmina from his window. The bookseller complied, replaced the picture with a full-length photograph of Hitler. Around the Fuhrer's photograph he arranged a display of copies of a book by the famed Dutch swimming coach, Frau Braun. Title: How Do I Learn to Swim?
Germany's failure to cross the English Channel is the subject of many jokes in The Netherlands. Last September Commissioner Seyss-Inquart had to forbid the singing of Wir Fahren Gegen Engelland (We Are Sailing Against England) because small boys followed the singing German troops and on the three drumbeats between verse and chorus yelled: "Swim! Swim! Swim!"
The placid Dutchmen found something to laugh at in everything. The day after all newspapers were instructed not to report that anything except cows were hit by British bombs, a wag wrote to one of the papers urging the erection of a monument to "Goebbels' Unknown Cow." After German airplanes and anti-aircraft batteries had worked over The Netherlands for two hours to bring down a runaway British barrage balloon, somebody cracked: "The poor thing finally burst from laughter."
Poor, patient Dr. Seyss-Inquart was in much the same spot as a fuddyduddy professor in a classroom of rowdy boys. He found it necessary to jail a 50-year-old businessman and his two sons for "demonstratively averting their eyes from the screen on which a newsreel of the Commissioner was shown." He transferred all four Dutch radio transmitting stations to State ownership because of sly jibes in their broadcasts. He was outraged by a decision of the annual synod of the Dutch Reformed Church to begin all church services with a prayer for "Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina, other members of the Royal Family and The Netherlands Government." He lost all patience when the churchmen informed him that and-Jewish laws were contrary to Christian ideals and asked him to withdraw them. To show the Protestants what might be in store for them Dr. Seyss-Inquart began rounding up Catholics and putting them into concentration camps.
How such facts as these leak out of the occupied Netherlands Dr. Seyss-Inquart does not yet know. Other facts leak out too. To trick British airmen into wasting bombs the German Army of Occupation built a vast fake airfield of wood, with hangars and planes painted on it. Next night a lone British plane flew overhead, dropped a lone wooden bomb.