One of the fundamental contradictions of the Third Reich was that although it possessed a totalizing ideology based upon race, it often implemented these ideas in a haphazard and highly contingent manner based upon immediate circumstances. The German occupation policies towards Western Europe was emblematic of the many different contradictions within National Socialism. Aside from the segregation and the elimination of racial undesirables, there was little consistency with how the Third Reich dealt with the non-Jewish population of Western Europe.

There was a great deal of friction and debate among the German occupation forces and the upper echelons of the Third Reich about the long-term trajectory of its occupation policies for Western Europe. The case of the Netherlands is instructive of this tension in German occupation. Officially, the Third Reich classified non-Jewish Dutch as "Germanics" (Germanen), but not "German" (Deutsche). They considered Dutch to be a Germanic language and thus would over the long-term be subsumed into the Thousand Year Reich.

The problem was that the Third Reich had very little idea as to how to realistically reach this Germanized Europe. Much of its occupation policy was made had to fit into an ideological extemporization. The dysfunctional satrapies and overlapping organizational structure of the National Socialist state added further confusion. One view, favored by the NSDAP Party officials and the Foreign Ministry was to develop National Socialist parties in occupied countries. This meant encouraging preexisting fascist parties and promoting their members into the occupation apparatus. These mini-Führers would help create a mass movement for Germanization over the long term. In the Netherlands, the fascist party Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland (NSB) led by Anton Mussert and Cornelis van Geelkerken became one of the main organs for Dutch collaboration. The Third Reich encouraged the NSB to become more antisemitic (prewar it allowed Jews into its membership and Mussert modeled himself more after Mussolini than Hitler) and Germanized.

In contrast to the NSDAP, the SS and Himmler favored an approach of selective Germanization through membership within the SS. This meant that a future Dutch elite would come from the ranks of the Dutch Waffen-SS divisions. Himmler's rationale was that speaking German and fighting in the crusade against Bolshevism would create a Germanized elite that after the war would return and assume a position of leadership within the Netherlands. Himmler would later claim that an education in a Germanic ideal would lead these volunteers to

return to their native countries and co-operate in the task of making their own nation occupy the place due to it as a self-assured member of a new European peoples' community.

Volunteering for service in the SS entitled Western Europeans to access in the occupation governments' civil service and two years of service meant they could become citizens of the Reich as well as promises of occupational perks and land within their original country as its new Germanized elite.

But recruiting in Western Europe also strengthened the SS's domestic position within the hierarchy of the Third Reich. The SS had agreements with the Heer limiting the number of recruits it could take in from the Reich, but recruiting among Western Europe helped to bolster the Waffen-SS's numbers. When coupled with the SS flaunting its own restrictions on Waffen-SS recruitment among Germans led to a much larger armed formation of the SS and thus strengthened the SS's own power within the Third Reich's state apparatus. From Himmler's perspective, recruiting in Western Europe sated both short-term domestic imperatives but also suited a postwar new order in which the SS was the forefront of a Germanized Europe.

The problems was that many of the Dutch within the NSB hated Himmler's plan and even though they were fascists, they were also staunch nationalists. Mussert complained "the higher SS leadership considers the Dutch people German. It is terrible. What will come of it?" Mussert tried to appeal to Hitler to create a "League of the Germanic Peoples" with Germany at its head and an enlarged Netherlands as its chief subordinate in the Low Countries. Hitler had very little interest in this particular project. In a December 1942 meeting with Mussert he made it clear that while the Netherlands would not be treated as a conquered country but would be part of the Greater German Reich. Hitler saw the precedent to this was the Austrian Anschluss. The Netherlands would become future Reichsgaue, but that was for the distant future. In the meantime, Hitler split the difference by reaffirming Mussert's leadership of the NSB, but the German occupation forces still controlled the country and the NSB was reduced to being mere collaborators.

Although the SS was able to gather together a number of volunteers, the patently exploitative nature of German occupation minimized whatever appeal that National Socialism might have had after the successes of 1940. Even where German occupation policies used soft power, they tended to achieve little results. Language policies were one example of this failure. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries, the Germans introduced various German-language cultural programs with the broader aim of gradually displacing the native tongues with their alleged mother tongue, German. However, the Germans devoted relatively little resources to these programs and the subordination of education was often delegated to the various fascist collaborator parties such as Quisling's Nasjonal Samling, few of which were enthusiastic about displacing national traditions with a foreign culture. When these efforts at soft power inevitably came up short, the German occupation forces were more than willing to use hard power like arbitrary dismissals of instructors or, in the case of the Netherlands, insisting that all "cultural workers" would need to belong to the German Propaganda Ministry-dominated Nederlandse Kultuurkamer. As with much of the rest of German occupation policy, these moves only further estranged the Third Reich from the few enthusiastic collaborators it had in Western Europe.

Sources

Foray, Jennifer L. "The 'Clean Wehrmacht' in the German-occupied Netherlands, 1940–5." Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 45, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 768-787.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Germany and the Second World War: Volume V, Organization and Mobilization of the German Sphere of Power, Part I, Wartime administration, economy, and manpower resources 1939–1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.