Peter Romijn

History: War crimes in the Past and Present : A Historian's Perspective

The chapter discusses how historians contribute to their society’s attempts to deal with war crimes and related mass violence, in particular the Holocaust and other genocidal processes. This relates to the primary role of historians—to describe and explain the dynamics and the causes of these processes, but at the same time to address the role of historians themselves in shaping the memory of these atrocities, both as individual scholars and as part of their institutional environment. The author takes his examples from the Dutch case of which he is part.

Learning on “the job”: Dutch war volunteers entering the Indonesian war of Independence, 1945-46

This article discusses the recruitment and first deployment of Dutch ‘war volunteers’ as a part of the effort to restore colonial authority in Indonesia in the aftermath of the Second World War. The central issue is how these men, who had joined the armed resistance against the German occupier of the Netherlands, could now become involved in atrocities and violations of the rules of war. I will argue that answers may be found in the way in which they were socialized in the violent conflict. They met with a violent conflict that did not match the framing of their intended role as true patriots and liberators of the Indonesian people. When confronted with atrocities, the volunteers learned to rephrase their assignment as ‘a job’, one that turned into war crimes before they knew it. Analysis of one specific case teaches us that the Dutch colonial military and civil authorities consciously did not prioritize the prevention of such war crimes.