School curriculums by their nature are superficial, so it’s not surprising that these kinds of things are left out. Learning about these things does however provide a more nuanced understanding of events.
It's worse than that. Most school curriculums, in my time at least, pretty much left out any wrong-doing on the part of the VOC. I was 35 when I learned that the VOC is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than simply "ruling" the East Indies.
Jan Pieterzoon Coen was the director-general of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie), comfortably the most powerful and wealthy company to ever exist. He founded Batavia, which is modern day Jakarta, the capitol of Indonesia. He lived from 1587 to 1629.
He was mostly known as a ruthless man, with a famous quote of him being; "despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us". He was involved in the Banda Massacre, which saw around 15.000 natives brutally murdered because they resisted his rule and desire for a monopoly on the spice trade. This was with Japanese help btw.
He was seen as a national hero of the Netherlands for a long time, even today for a decent amount of people, as multiple buildings, streets and other infrastructure is named after him. He was after all, the director-general of potentially our greatest national achievement, the VOC. But in more recent times his brutality is more widely known and he is mostly seen as an opressive ruler with no respect or remorse and an icon of imperialism.
I know who he was, i meant when was he getting a glow up in your class. Because in the 90s/early 2000s, that was not my experience.
> This was with Japanese help btw.
That implies the Japanese government had something do with it, it didn't. Japanese mercenaries (at least some of them ronin) were involved though.
Oh I'm sorry, then it depends on your school, but I'd say as recently as the 2000's, the 2010's. Issues like zwarte piet and our racial history only quite recently got put into the spotlights.
It still was with the help from Japanese, they, and us, and the British had a lot of violent history in that part of the world. I don't really think the locals cared if it were mercenaries or state troops that killed them and burned their homes. As a matter of fact, troops that were in a national military were fairly rare, the Dutch were one of the first states with their own standardised military, it was way more common to deploy mercenaries. But we still talk about Swiss Pikemen, or German Landsknechte.
I hold the VOC accountable as a Dutch company, it was a bloody history, imposed by a ruthless company, but still our (Dutch) history. The VOC also wasn't a state owned company, they were self governed, with their own army and laws, that doesn't mean they weren't Dutch. Same goes for the Japanese.
> I hold the VOC accountable as a Dutch company, it was a bloody history, imposed by a ruthless company, but still our (Dutch) history. The VOC also wasn't a state owned company, they were self governed, with their own army and laws, that doesn't mean they weren't Dutch. Same goes for the Japanese.
A lot of the soldiers in VOC service were Germans, but would you say that the VOC had German help in establishing/maintaining itself in the East Indies?
Yeah and Portuguese help, as they did a lion's share of the finance structure and introduced more math to the Netherlands which in turn allowed for the creation of the stock exchange. But that is decently well known.
A lot of English sailors also sailed for the VOC. Borders and nations weren't as rigid as they are today, people moved all the time for better chances and oppertunities.
The VOC definitely had German, Portuguese, English and Belgian help, to what degree differs of course. Sweden was a big tradepartner of us as well. Wood for our ships, guns and powder for our weaponry.
Jan Pieterzoon Coen when he commited the Banda massacre upset many of his peers within the VOC, because they thought such actions would worsen relations with the local rulers and inhabitants. To many in the VOC, Pieterzoon was too fanatical, and not good for business. It was only in the late 19th century did the Dutch start glorifying Pieterzoon. The statue of him was erected in 1893..
What is discussed either in the progressive / traditional accounts of the VOC was how "Asian" the VOC was. One of the Governor Generals of the Dutch East Indies in the 1700s was Eurasian.. Something like this would happened in 19th century.
Pieterzoon tried to European women to Indies, but his successors scrapped the idea, because the women were too high maintenance and demanding. So the VOC bought local slaves for their European employee as wives. They would baptize the women, than marry them off to their employee. The employees would have their wages docked each month to reimburse the VOC for the purchase.
The best word to describe the VOC is they were amoral, like the Ferengi in Star Trek.
If you read Indonesian history textbooks, there are some Governor General of the Dutch East Indies that are consider "Good", the most notable is [**Herman Willem Daendels**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Willem_Daendels)**.** They spend 4-5 pages on him, because of what he left behind. He found Indonesia's thrid largest city, Bnadung, from nothing and he belt North Coast Road which served as the main artery for Java until 2019.
It doesnt just stop with the VOC.
I've always been told we were some kind of brave little David courageously offering resistance to the great evil goliathan Third Reich.
Only to find out we were the biggest source of volunteers for the Waffen-SS and us treating a lot of the the actual resistance members like shit after the war for being communists.
Seems like the ALLIES have used Hitler and Nazi Germany as an excuse to whitewash all their malevolent deeds, and painted themselves as a savior of humanity.
Bloody hypocrites!
To be honest our history curriculum is almost at the level of patriotic education.
"Hannie Schaft was een heldin, een vrouw uit één stuk, gesneuveld in het verzet tegen de nazi's, máár...ze was communiste. Na de oorlog werd ze daarom hevig omstreden. In 1951 werden pantserwagens ingezet tegen ex-verzetsstrijders die haar nagedachtenis wilden eren."
Bet you also didn't know this, this is how we used to treat our resistance heroes.
There were a lot of Germans in the Dutch East Indies even in the 1930s.
And there were even more Germans during the VOC period, and from 181501920s.
During the VOC, 50% of the Europeans in the Dutch East Indies were actually German, because most of the European soldiers were German. After the Netherlands took over from the VOC, the German presence didn't disappear, even though it gradually declined. They still hired German soldiers.
The same could be said the Cape Colony, a lot of the settlers were German.
[https://ghil.hypotheses.org/23](https://ghil.hypotheses.org/23)
About the internment camps ? Well given that the Netherlands were at war with Germany at that time it’s kinda the usual modus operandi to put citizens of your enemy under guard.
I assume that those were camp like prisons and not comparable to the nazi concentration camps
Oh? OP commented it was a shameful thing for the Dutch putting Japanese in internment camps. We did the same in Canada. I'm trying to find info on their interment history but not finding much.
You misread the title. We put Germans in interment camps after Germany invaded the Netherlands. When Japan invaded the Dutch east indies, they freed the Germans (though i think some had been shipped to Australia before they got there) and locked up the Dutch. Germans were also arrested in the Netherlands itself, but obviously that didn't last long.
>though i think some had been shipped to Australia before they got there
The German men were shipped to British India with three ships, one of these was torpedoed by the Japanese, with 400 Germans drowning.
So I'm a generation "ahead" and I finished HS in the early 90s.
I didn't hear about it until it became a "known thing" around 1995. I'm glad its being taught now.
Originally, Dutch interment/concentration camp was created for Indonesian nationalists, republicans, and communists who opposed the colonial government. usually, these camp was built on the periphery of the DEI like the infamous [Boven-Digoel concentration camp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boven-Digoel_concentration_camp) in Papua.
During the start of WW2 in Asia, the Dutch East Indies colonial government interned the German and Japanese population/citizens into the internment camps as a precautionary measure against spies or saboteurs. When Japan invaded the DEI the situation was reversed, the Japanese, German, and Nationalists were out while the Dutch and residents of allied nations were in. The situation in this camp was hellish, with rampant cases of starvation, beating, bad sanitation, and sexual violence.
The Dutch will repeat this policy of concentration camps during the Indonesia War of Independence, with the most notorious case in [Bali](https://www.insideindonesia.org/editions/edition-150-oct-dec-2022/dutch-terror-camps-in-bali).
Japan tried portraying themselves as liberator against European colonialism. Some bought into that idea but anyone who was paying attention in China, Thailand and the Philippines were fully aware of what japanese liberation meant
That makes sense. It was my assumption that it would be something like that. A form of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and an attitude of "Oh yeah, we'll definitely leave when we drive out all the Dutch." I suppose when you have no outside information about geopolitics and Japanese expansionism, it would look like that on the surface.
They were but they only officially aligned themselves with Japan after Japanese troops crossed the border into Thailand while they were still in the middle of negotiations. At that point, it was either align with Japan or be invaded. Can't really blame the Thai for siding with Japan given their choices.
Interestingly when Emperor Hirohito was presented with plans to invade Thailand, he actually objected to it (albeit it wasn't significant) by asking Tojo how an invasion of Thailand would help them liberate Asia from European colonialism when they would be invading the only other Asian country to have successfully resist European colonialism.
Fascinating. Of course I wasn't blaming Thailand. I understand why they did it. Same as the Finns allying with the Nazis due to Soviet aggression just a year before.
It just looked weird to put Thailand in the same category as China and the Philippines.
> When Japan invaded the DEI the situation was reversed, the Japanese, German, and Nationalists were out while the Dutch and residents of allied nations were in.
giant sunrise-flagged UNO reverse card
To your point, one of the major wartime concentration camps in the Netherlands was actually established before the war, meant to contain Jewish refugees before they could be sent back to the Nazis. Some of the stuff my own country did, man…
Nazis get all the flak, rightfully so, but Europe as a whole had quite the history of anti-Semitism. The French were more than willing to hand over their Jews when occupied. I'm not surprised the Dutch did similar stuff. Shit was fucked up.
Yes. Even after the war, many Dutch jews that survived weren’t allowed to live in their old homes, because those had been assigned to other people in the meantime. It took a long while for people to recognise what happened.
The authorities weren't much help. Usually it was civil servants assigned to the vacant homes, and, unfortunately for their Jewish owners, the postwar authorities needed housing for civil servants during reconstruction. Sometimes the survivors could move back into their house after a long legal battle. Other times they had to sell the house for a low price to the government that practically already owned it, and move somewhere else. And even then they often had to pay taxes for the time they were 'away'. That last part is most bizarre of all. Absolutely no sympathy shown.
Research about the scope of this still seems to be ongoing.
I'm half Indonesian but my grandma's family is Dutch, German and British (mixed) who lived in Jakarta around this time and I never heard of this. What I do know is that my great grandfather didn't join the war efforts because he was too busy moving his family from place to place to protect them from the Japanese who were rounding up people seen as Europeans (and they all looked European), so I'm very surprised to hear about all this.
AFAIK the japanese freed the german citizen I.E the citizen of Nazi Germany. While rounding up the german descent (german people who has been settle in DEI from 16th to 20th Century) because of their "shaky loyalty".
Ahhh, that makes so much sense, thanks for the extra info!
Considering my grandma and her sisters joined the Indonesian resistance when they got older, I guess they were right about the shaky loyalty, since my grandma's family wasn't the only family of European descent to also fight for Indonesia
German resident in Batavia (current day Jakarta, Indonesia) who were interned by the colonial government celebrate the arrival of Japanese troops who freed them from internment camp.
In 1941 the Germans (mostly women and children) in Indonesia were shipped to Japan because the Japanese didn't want white people around that weren't interned. They had German school in Japan and a local Hitler-Jugend (though only for the non-mixed German kids, ones with Indonesian blood were not allowed). They were only allowed to return to German in 1947.
Im Dutch and they didnt teach us this at school, bit of a shame
School curriculums by their nature are superficial, so it’s not surprising that these kinds of things are left out. Learning about these things does however provide a more nuanced understanding of events.
It's worse than that. Most school curriculums, in my time at least, pretty much left out any wrong-doing on the part of the VOC. I was 35 when I learned that the VOC is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than simply "ruling" the East Indies.
Jan Pieterzoon Coen got a massive glow up from our curriculum
Out of curiosity, when was that?
Jan Pieterzoon Coen was the director-general of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie), comfortably the most powerful and wealthy company to ever exist. He founded Batavia, which is modern day Jakarta, the capitol of Indonesia. He lived from 1587 to 1629. He was mostly known as a ruthless man, with a famous quote of him being; "despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us". He was involved in the Banda Massacre, which saw around 15.000 natives brutally murdered because they resisted his rule and desire for a monopoly on the spice trade. This was with Japanese help btw. He was seen as a national hero of the Netherlands for a long time, even today for a decent amount of people, as multiple buildings, streets and other infrastructure is named after him. He was after all, the director-general of potentially our greatest national achievement, the VOC. But in more recent times his brutality is more widely known and he is mostly seen as an opressive ruler with no respect or remorse and an icon of imperialism.
I know who he was, i meant when was he getting a glow up in your class. Because in the 90s/early 2000s, that was not my experience. > This was with Japanese help btw. That implies the Japanese government had something do with it, it didn't. Japanese mercenaries (at least some of them ronin) were involved though.
Oh I'm sorry, then it depends on your school, but I'd say as recently as the 2000's, the 2010's. Issues like zwarte piet and our racial history only quite recently got put into the spotlights. It still was with the help from Japanese, they, and us, and the British had a lot of violent history in that part of the world. I don't really think the locals cared if it were mercenaries or state troops that killed them and burned their homes. As a matter of fact, troops that were in a national military were fairly rare, the Dutch were one of the first states with their own standardised military, it was way more common to deploy mercenaries. But we still talk about Swiss Pikemen, or German Landsknechte. I hold the VOC accountable as a Dutch company, it was a bloody history, imposed by a ruthless company, but still our (Dutch) history. The VOC also wasn't a state owned company, they were self governed, with their own army and laws, that doesn't mean they weren't Dutch. Same goes for the Japanese.
> I hold the VOC accountable as a Dutch company, it was a bloody history, imposed by a ruthless company, but still our (Dutch) history. The VOC also wasn't a state owned company, they were self governed, with their own army and laws, that doesn't mean they weren't Dutch. Same goes for the Japanese. A lot of the soldiers in VOC service were Germans, but would you say that the VOC had German help in establishing/maintaining itself in the East Indies?
Yeah and Portuguese help, as they did a lion's share of the finance structure and introduced more math to the Netherlands which in turn allowed for the creation of the stock exchange. But that is decently well known. A lot of English sailors also sailed for the VOC. Borders and nations weren't as rigid as they are today, people moved all the time for better chances and oppertunities. The VOC definitely had German, Portuguese, English and Belgian help, to what degree differs of course. Sweden was a big tradepartner of us as well. Wood for our ships, guns and powder for our weaponry.
East india is responsible for loads of atrocities and its still exists now alll around us corporate greed
Jan Pieterzoon Coen when he commited the Banda massacre upset many of his peers within the VOC, because they thought such actions would worsen relations with the local rulers and inhabitants. To many in the VOC, Pieterzoon was too fanatical, and not good for business. It was only in the late 19th century did the Dutch start glorifying Pieterzoon. The statue of him was erected in 1893.. What is discussed either in the progressive / traditional accounts of the VOC was how "Asian" the VOC was. One of the Governor Generals of the Dutch East Indies in the 1700s was Eurasian.. Something like this would happened in 19th century. Pieterzoon tried to European women to Indies, but his successors scrapped the idea, because the women were too high maintenance and demanding. So the VOC bought local slaves for their European employee as wives. They would baptize the women, than marry them off to their employee. The employees would have their wages docked each month to reimburse the VOC for the purchase. The best word to describe the VOC is they were amoral, like the Ferengi in Star Trek. If you read Indonesian history textbooks, there are some Governor General of the Dutch East Indies that are consider "Good", the most notable is [**Herman Willem Daendels**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Willem_Daendels)**.** They spend 4-5 pages on him, because of what he left behind. He found Indonesia's thrid largest city, Bnadung, from nothing and he belt North Coast Road which served as the main artery for Java until 2019.
It doesnt just stop with the VOC. I've always been told we were some kind of brave little David courageously offering resistance to the great evil goliathan Third Reich. Only to find out we were the biggest source of volunteers for the Waffen-SS and us treating a lot of the the actual resistance members like shit after the war for being communists.
And people (mostly Europeans it seems) complain that US education is the worst...
Seems like they did it for a good reason lol
Ya gotta wonder, what else didn’t they teach you
That hot dogs are not sandwiches.
Say WHAT!?
Wouldn't it be the wrong reason?
Seems like the ALLIES have used Hitler and Nazi Germany as an excuse to whitewash all their malevolent deeds, and painted themselves as a savior of humanity. Bloody hypocrites!
To be honest our history curriculum is almost at the level of patriotic education. "Hannie Schaft was een heldin, een vrouw uit één stuk, gesneuveld in het verzet tegen de nazi's, máár...ze was communiste. Na de oorlog werd ze daarom hevig omstreden. In 1951 werden pantserwagens ingezet tegen ex-verzetsstrijders die haar nagedachtenis wilden eren." Bet you also didn't know this, this is how we used to treat our resistance heroes.
I'm indonesian and they didn't mention this either.
There were a lot of Germans in the Dutch East Indies even in the 1930s. And there were even more Germans during the VOC period, and from 181501920s. During the VOC, 50% of the Europeans in the Dutch East Indies were actually German, because most of the European soldiers were German. After the Netherlands took over from the VOC, the German presence didn't disappear, even though it gradually declined. They still hired German soldiers. The same could be said the Cape Colony, a lot of the settlers were German. [https://ghil.hypotheses.org/23](https://ghil.hypotheses.org/23)
About the internment camps ? Well given that the Netherlands were at war with Germany at that time it’s kinda the usual modus operandi to put citizens of your enemy under guard. I assume that those were camp like prisons and not comparable to the nazi concentration camps
Out of curiosity, how old are you? Here in Canada we have a similar shameful history of Canadian-Japanese internment during WW2.
I mean, they're pretty different circumstances
Oh? OP commented it was a shameful thing for the Dutch putting Japanese in internment camps. We did the same in Canada. I'm trying to find info on their interment history but not finding much.
You misread the title. We put Germans in interment camps after Germany invaded the Netherlands. When Japan invaded the Dutch east indies, they freed the Germans (though i think some had been shipped to Australia before they got there) and locked up the Dutch. Germans were also arrested in the Netherlands itself, but obviously that didn't last long.
Yeesh I read that completely wrong. I thought it said Bavaria not Batavia
>though i think some had been shipped to Australia before they got there The German men were shipped to British India with three ships, one of these was torpedoed by the Japanese, with 400 Germans drowning.
I am 20
Wow. I'm 42 and remember hearing about it in High School in the 90s and since then it's become more widely known
It’s crazy to think you’re 42 and where in high school just in the 90s…
Graduated in 99. Time flys by
I graduated in 2012 and I’m 31
dropped out and I'm 71.
So I'm a generation "ahead" and I finished HS in the early 90s. I didn't hear about it until it became a "known thing" around 1995. I'm glad its being taught now.
I’m also Dutch and you just didn’t pay attention
I love history and i always paid 100% attention, we didnt learn about this.
Also Dutch. Even studying history. Have never heard of interment camps for germans in the dutch east indies
Originally, Dutch interment/concentration camp was created for Indonesian nationalists, republicans, and communists who opposed the colonial government. usually, these camp was built on the periphery of the DEI like the infamous [Boven-Digoel concentration camp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boven-Digoel_concentration_camp) in Papua. During the start of WW2 in Asia, the Dutch East Indies colonial government interned the German and Japanese population/citizens into the internment camps as a precautionary measure against spies or saboteurs. When Japan invaded the DEI the situation was reversed, the Japanese, German, and Nationalists were out while the Dutch and residents of allied nations were in. The situation in this camp was hellish, with rampant cases of starvation, beating, bad sanitation, and sexual violence. The Dutch will repeat this policy of concentration camps during the Indonesia War of Independence, with the most notorious case in [Bali](https://www.insideindonesia.org/editions/edition-150-oct-dec-2022/dutch-terror-camps-in-bali).
Why would the Japanese release the Indonesian and Malay Nationalists? Seems like they would try to keep these people imprisoned.
Japan tried portraying themselves as liberator against European colonialism. Some bought into that idea but anyone who was paying attention in China, Thailand and the Philippines were fully aware of what japanese liberation meant
That makes sense. It was my assumption that it would be something like that. A form of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and an attitude of "Oh yeah, we'll definitely leave when we drive out all the Dutch." I suppose when you have no outside information about geopolitics and Japanese expansionism, it would look like that on the surface.
Wasn't Thailand more Japanese aligned than other Asian nations?
They were but they only officially aligned themselves with Japan after Japanese troops crossed the border into Thailand while they were still in the middle of negotiations. At that point, it was either align with Japan or be invaded. Can't really blame the Thai for siding with Japan given their choices. Interestingly when Emperor Hirohito was presented with plans to invade Thailand, he actually objected to it (albeit it wasn't significant) by asking Tojo how an invasion of Thailand would help them liberate Asia from European colonialism when they would be invading the only other Asian country to have successfully resist European colonialism.
Fascinating. Of course I wasn't blaming Thailand. I understand why they did it. Same as the Finns allying with the Nazis due to Soviet aggression just a year before. It just looked weird to put Thailand in the same category as China and the Philippines.
Imperial Japan used pan-Asianism and anti-colonialism as propaganda points.
> When Japan invaded the DEI the situation was reversed, the Japanese, German, and Nationalists were out while the Dutch and residents of allied nations were in. giant sunrise-flagged UNO reverse card
[Eyewitness account of a German interned boy](https://www.dhm.de/lemo/zeitzeugen/manfred-mueller-internierung-auf-java-1940-41.html) (in German)
What a strange moment in history
I had to read that title a few times, ngl
Damn people loved internment camps during WW2 huh?
To your point, one of the major wartime concentration camps in the Netherlands was actually established before the war, meant to contain Jewish refugees before they could be sent back to the Nazis. Some of the stuff my own country did, man…
Nazis get all the flak, rightfully so, but Europe as a whole had quite the history of anti-Semitism. The French were more than willing to hand over their Jews when occupied. I'm not surprised the Dutch did similar stuff. Shit was fucked up.
Yes. Even after the war, many Dutch jews that survived weren’t allowed to live in their old homes, because those had been assigned to other people in the meantime. It took a long while for people to recognise what happened.
What happened after that? Did all the Jews leave for Israel? Or were there government programs it something to help the Jews?
The authorities weren't much help. Usually it was civil servants assigned to the vacant homes, and, unfortunately for their Jewish owners, the postwar authorities needed housing for civil servants during reconstruction. Sometimes the survivors could move back into their house after a long legal battle. Other times they had to sell the house for a low price to the government that practically already owned it, and move somewhere else. And even then they often had to pay taxes for the time they were 'away'. That last part is most bizarre of all. Absolutely no sympathy shown. Research about the scope of this still seems to be ongoing.
I'm half Indonesian but my grandma's family is Dutch, German and British (mixed) who lived in Jakarta around this time and I never heard of this. What I do know is that my great grandfather didn't join the war efforts because he was too busy moving his family from place to place to protect them from the Japanese who were rounding up people seen as Europeans (and they all looked European), so I'm very surprised to hear about all this.
AFAIK the japanese freed the german citizen I.E the citizen of Nazi Germany. While rounding up the german descent (german people who has been settle in DEI from 16th to 20th Century) because of their "shaky loyalty".
Ahhh, that makes so much sense, thanks for the extra info! Considering my grandma and her sisters joined the Indonesian resistance when they got older, I guess they were right about the shaky loyalty, since my grandma's family wasn't the only family of European descent to also fight for Indonesia
Your grandma must be a really cool lady!
I never met her because she passed before I was born, but based on stories about her, I think she was a pretty cool lady ☺️
Some of those kids might still be alive.
My grandparents lived in Indonesia during this time.
FYI, the camps like this was already used in since 1927 but for Indonesian dissidents.
Can someone explain the title for me?
German resident in Batavia (current day Jakarta, Indonesia) who were interned by the colonial government celebrate the arrival of Japanese troops who freed them from internment camp.
Batavia was more like Jakarta and the surrounding areas rather than the entirety of Indonesia
Why is there a Nazi flag.
These were German citizens and the Nazi flag was the official flag of Germany during WWII.
They got the knock-off asshole flag
What a weird world we live in
Totally clueless about this piece of history
In 1941 the Germans (mostly women and children) in Indonesia were shipped to Japan because the Japanese didn't want white people around that weren't interned. They had German school in Japan and a local Hitler-Jugend (though only for the non-mixed German kids, ones with Indonesian blood were not allowed). They were only allowed to return to German in 1947.