The great thing of being involved in an international research project is that it helps one to discover new material about particular countries. For me ‘Connecting the Wireless World’ has been an inspiration to start digging in Dutch archives looking for collections about the country’s history of international radio monitoring, the topic of the network’s first workshop in York, September 2016.  The last couple of weeks I have made interesting finds that present fresh material and raise new questions about the nature of Dutch international radio broadcasting.

As far as I have been able to see, Dutch radio monitoring has received no scholarly attention. The most obvious problem is an apparent lack of source material. One of the few sets of listening reports, registered as such, was produced by the information service of the Dutch government in exile in London during the Second World War, from June 1940 up until May 1945. However, these reports are in fact a very rich source.

Amongst other things, the organisation monitored Dutch language Nazi-broadcasts in order to obtain information about the situation in the occupied Netherlands, which was circulated amongst Dutch and British officials. The complete set of daily ‘listening reports’, containing summaries and transcripts of tens of thousands radio broadcasts, is fully available at the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam.

It is a pleasure to go through this treasure trove of fresh sources that contains interesting insights in how the Dutch government in exile tracked developments in the country it had left. One type of broadcast that caught the attention of the monitoring staff, particularly in the winter of 1940-1941, were housewives’ talks in which presenters discussed which products were readily available at markets and provided healthy recipes. Such broadcasts were used to get an impression of the general material circumstances of the population.

Obviously the makers of the listening reports were interested in propaganda broadcasts too. The reports often contain full transcripts of speeches of leaders of the Dutch National-Socialist movement NSB and weekly talks by collaborating journalists, of whom the most notorious was Max Blokzijl. This information was useful in recognising figureheads in the occupation-regime, on the basis of which plans were made to purge the Netherlands after the war. In March 1946 Blokzijl was the first person to be executed for his activities for the Nazi-regime.

In addition, information about the enemy’s broadcasts provided ammunition for the government-in-exile’s own propaganda efforts in the ether, which were transmitted to the Netherlands, using BBC facilities, by Radio Orange. A vivid illustration of this interaction occurred in the Summer of 1941, just after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union when the German army advanced rapidly. Nazi-broadcasters in the Netherlands celebrated that news from the Eastern front playing the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony – a soundbite that was first used by the British as the ‘Victory-sign’ – claiming that Germany practicably had won the war. Radio Orange vehemently resisted this appropriation and ridiculed its enemy’s use of the ‘V-sign’ listing other Dutch words beginning with that letter such as ‘Verraad’ (treason).

In many ways, this full collection of monitoring reports is an exceptional one. The voluminous and detailed information provides a clear picture of the propaganda campaigns of various Dutch media during the Second World War. But the significance of this source material stretches beyond the period. Both sides tried to win over the public by invoking particular images of Dutchness that existed before 1940 and continued to be invoked after 1945. This shows that, although the Second World War was in many ways an exceptional period in Dutch history, it also reflected many deeper currents in terms of the long-term history of the creation and dissemination of Dutch self-images via international radio broadcasting.

 

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Co-investigator