Ismee Tames, “Ashamed about the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and Their Families in Post-war Dutch Society”

In this book chapter, based on her book on descendants of Dutch Nazi collaborators, Besmette Jeugd (only available in Dutch), historian Ismee Tames explores the crucial roles of shame and shaming in the Dutch public discourse on the history of collaboration. She discusses how Nazi collaborators and their descendants coped with the social demand for expressing their shame and admitting their guilt, usually coming with the shaming narrative that scapegoats them for the destruction of the Jewish population in the country.  

Starting with the collaborators, Tames points out that, in the attempt to be re-integrated into the society smoothly, the collaborators developed various integration strategies and narratives to reduce the harm arising from the problematic past while responding to the dominant narrative about shaming for the collaboration in the past. On the one hand, strategies such as remaining silent about the past or religious conversion, were widely adopted by former collaborators and their families. On the other, some collaborators publicly denied their guilt by beautifying their devotion to National Socialism in the attempt to reclaim the past, which usually ended up provoking the public, since their counter-narratives transgressed the post-war moral order, reminding the public of the humiliating past of occupation and cohabitation during World War II.

Tames then turns to the descendants of collaborators and the narrative of shame presented by them. She focuses on the emergence of “the narrative of innocent children” in the late 1970s, which sympathetically describes how children of collaborators suffer from shame relating to their parents’ inglorious past or shaming targeting at them, and which sometimes calls for an end to punishing the children because of their parents’ wartime collaboration. Tames concludes that such narratives became the basis for a shared identity for the descendants of collaborators and opened up the “possibility of a new self-confirming narrative for all those of later generations who felt shame about the disturbing past” (61).

Author of this entry: Chihhen Chang

Ismee Tames, “Ashamed about the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and Their Families in Post-war Dutch Society.” Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016): 47-64.