A New Order, a New Empire: The Global Designs of the Dutch Nazi Party

This paper will explore the imperial plans and policies advanced by the Dutch Nazi Party (NSB), and, specifically, its leader, Anton Mussert, from the party’s inception in 1931 to war’s end in 1945. Although never obtaining the kind of political authority and popular legitimacy to which it aspired, the Dutch Nazi Party maintained a visible and vocal presence in both the interwar and German-occupied Netherlands of World War Two.  Mussert and the NSB have long been the subject of popular fascination and scholarly analysis, much of which, rightfully, has focused on the Dutch Nazis’ domestic politics. But the Dutch Nazi Party maintained a truly global agenda, too, as I will examine in this paper.  Before the war, Mussert sought to reunify all members of the Dutch “tribe” presently scattered around the globe, even in those territories presently held by other imperial powers. The German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 forced the party reconsider these global plans, as did the Japanese occupation of the East Indies, the country’s most prized colony, in early 1942.  Mussert, unlike most prominent voices at this time, argued that the Indies had been lost forever; the Netherlands, a truly imperial nation, needed to colonize Eastern Europe in compensation.  German defeat would bring a swift end to these continental plans, but the Dutch empire, in fact, would never be the same.  I argue that, when seen in retrospect, these collaborators provided a most accurate appraisal of the current and future prospects of the Netherlands’ overseas colonies. Yet, their marginal position in society ensured that such dire predictions and warnings would receive scant attention, much to the detriment of official post-war policy, founded as it was upon a fatally optimistic appraisal of colonial realities.