From the BBC:
“Nazi card proves Dutch Prince Bernhard joined Hitler's party”
(The Dutch royal house has published Prince Bernhard's
original NSDAP membership card)
The Dutch government has confirmed the authenticity of a Nazi
party card held by Prince Bernhard, prince consort for decades after World War
Two. A former head of the palace archives, Flip Maarschalkerweerd, said he
found the card while going through the prince's things after his death. Bernhard,
a German aristocrat, repeatedly denied being a member of Adolf Hitler's NSDAP
political party. However, historians gave little credence to his denials. In
1996, a researcher at the Dutch institute for war studies (Niod) said he had
found a copy of the card in a US university archive. Gerard Aalders, who was
widely criticised at the time for his revelation, said on social media that
"Prince Bernhard lied to the bitter end about his Nazi past".
Bernhard von Lippe-Biesterfeld had married Dutch Princess
Juliana in 1937 and escorted the Dutch royal family in exile when war broke out
in 1940. But he was never trusted by British security services, despite taking
part in a Dutch royal broadcast via the BBC in 1943 and being put in charge of
the unified Dutch resistance forces in 1944. He was even decorated for his role
as a wartime RAF pilot. When Juliana became queen in 1948, Bernhard became
prince consort.
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 his death in 2004. He had admitted to being a prospective member of two
Nazi organisations as a student for a time 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 have been tricky to pass
university 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.
(Prince Bernhard, seen here in 1970, was born into German
aristocracy but spent the war in London)
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 in 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 afterwards. 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 political parties and Jewish groups called on
caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte to launch an investigation. Naomi Mestrum,
of the Israel Information and Documentation Centre (Cidi), said that proof of
the prince's Nazi past added 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.
^ I’m sure the Dutch Royal Family has always known the truth
and chose to deny it to its people and to the World for Decades – they only
admitted it once the evidence was already given to the people. It is one thing
to do something horrible – like be a Nazi Party Member – and another to knowingly
lie about it for Decades. ^
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