Apples and Oranges. Maarten Asscher
let his conscience speak again after the war. The second occasion was in relation to an appointment rather than a dismissal, the issue was more complex, there was no public opportunity to magnify his protest, and the majority of people (as is so often the case) had other things on their minds. The second Cleveringa protest thus enjoys significantly less recognition than the first. It turned around the following.
Rudolph Pabus Cleveringa, professor of mercantile law and civil procedural law and dean of Leiden University’s Faculty of Law, who was forced to pay for his objection to the anti-Jewish measures of the German occupier with two periods of six months in prison, became chairman, after the liberation in 1945, of a commission set up to purify Leiden’s student community of traitors and collaborators. Students who had signed the so-called ‘student declaration’, hoping, among other things, to avoid forced labor in Germany, were informed via a radio address delivered by the Minister of Education, Art, and Science on August 24th, 1945, that the government was extremely serious in its plans to sweep the Dutch academic house clean. The minister addressed them in the following words:
The assignees, however, will presently have to accept the consequences of their decision. […] Many of those who had to decide were still very young. A great many, alas, can seek exoneration in the advice of their professors. But none of this changes the fact that they made the wrong decision. They cannot appeal to the national interest that has need of an educated generation. The nation’s honor precedes its interest.
I am not aware if Cleveringa was listening to the radio on August 24th, 1945, but the resolute words of the recently appointed minister—Gerardus van der Leeuw, former pastor and professor of theology at the University of Groningen—will not have gone down very well in whatever way he finally heard them. After all, hadn’t a significant number of the Dutch authorities been particularly accommodating to the Germany occupier? The permanent secretaries, the police, the civil service corps, the professors? But now the students were being forced to take the brunt of post-war reaction with heavy-handed accusations and with ‘the honor of the nation’ being tossed in their faces!
Before looking at what Cleveringa did next, the reader might be interested to know the content of the declaration every student was expected to sign in the spring of 1943:
The undersigned […] hereby solemnly declares on his word of honor that he will conscientiously conform to the laws, decrees and other dispositions in force in Dutch occupied territory, and will abstain from any act directed against the German Reich or the Dutch authorities or engage in any activity that might imperil public order in the institutes of higher education in view of the present circumstances.
Quite an alarming declaration to have your nose rubbed into, and not exactly surprising that the majority of the close to 15,000 Dutch students at the time refused to sign it. More than 2,000, however, did sign the declaration, among them both NSB (Dutch National Socialist Movement) sympathizers and people who were or had been active in the student resistance. Of those who refused to sign, roughly 3,500 were sent to Germany and put to work in the country’s war industry.
But the student declaration of 1943 is far less ominous than the declaration that was presented for signature in 1940—a full two and a half years earlier—to every Dutch government official. It was that declaration, the so-called Aryan Declaration, that directly occasioned the dismissal of a number of Leiden professors and thus also the Cleveringa protest of November 26th, 1940. Here too it is useful to familiarize ourselves with the exact content of the declaration that officials were expected to sign:
The undersigned […] declares according to the best of his/her knowledge that neither he/she him/herself, nor his/her partner/ fiancé/ée, nor one of his/her/their parents or grandparents has ever belonged to the Jewish faith community.
The undersigned is aware that he/she exposes him/herself to immediate dismissal should the preceding declaration prove to be incorrect.
Every civil servant in the Netherlands received two variants of this declaration on October 5th, 1940 and each was expected to fill in and sign one of the two: declaration A, which stated that they were not Jewish and thus Aryan, or declaration B, which stated that they were Jewish. One of the declarations had to be signed and submitted within three weeks; otherwise the person in question was to be considered Jewish. A few weeks after the deadline, thousands of people were dismissed from their public service jobs on the basis of the completed declarations. Cleveringa was also among those to receive such an Aryan declaration in the fall of 1940, first as a deputy judge in The Hague and then as university professor alongside seventy-two of his Leiden colleagues.
Together with fellow professor Benjamin Telders, Cleveringa tried his utmost to persuade if not all then at least a considerable number of the members of Leiden’s professorial corps not to sign, but his efforts were to no avail. All of them signed. The best they were able to achieve for their endeavors was to have sixty Leiden professors include a letter of protest drawn up by Telders when they submitted their completed Aryan Declaration.
The situation wasn’t much different in other departments of the machinery of government. The permanent secretaries, the commissioners of police, the provincial and local civil servants, and even the Supreme Court justices signed the declaration and later stood idly by when Mr Lodewijk Ernst Visser, president of the Netherlands’ highest court of justice, was dismissed from his post by the German occupying authorities on November 21st, 1940 for no other reason than the fact of his Jewish origins.
So it’s easy to imagine why Cleveringa was still troubled to some degree by the entire student cleansing policy in the months that followed liberation. Students who had been obliged in 1943 to declare that they would not imperil the public order at the university were now being threatened with suspension, i.e. exclusion from classes and exams for varying periods of time. The majority of civil servants, judges, and police officials, on the other hand, were simply left to continue their work or resume it, in spite of the fact that they had first facilitated the identification of their Jewish compatriots, then their disenfranchisement and ultimate persecution by signing the Aryan Declaration en masse three years earlier.
The last straw for Cleveringa was the recommendation submitted to the House of Representatives on December 13th, 1945, concerning a number of vacant seats on the Supreme Court. The name P.H. Smits figured on the recommendation, a man who had served as a member of the country’s highest court since 1941 and throughout the remainder of the occupation. While Smits’ judicial talents were never called into question—he had already been recommended for a vacancy in the 1930s—the very fact that he had been appointed by the Nazi Reichskommissar to the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart was reason enough to make him a controversial magistrate. As court justice during the occupation, moreover, he shared responsibility for a number of questionable and plainly reprehensible judgments rendered by the Supreme Court at the time. It should have been clear to everyone that his reappointment would only serve to further undermine the Supreme Court’s already sullied reputation. The House of Representatives was clearly not wholehearted in approving Smits’ appointment. Three ballots were required, and in the last analysis the appointment was only agreed on the basis of a rather slim majority, 35 votes to 31. Cleveringa was unable to swallow Smits’ reappointment and resigned in protest as chair of Leiden’s Student Purification Committee.
Rudolph Pabus Cleveringa evidently had a built-in moral compass, a conscience so aligned that he was not inclined to hesitation, where others, based on a multitude of considerations and excuses, demonstrated their capacity to accommodate when faced with emerging injustice or injustice that was already burgeoning. In a book review published a few years later in De Gids—the Netherlands’ oldest literary journal—he further underlined his critical stance towards the practice of law during the German occupation, which resulted in an angry letter to the editor from someone connected to the District Court in The Hague. The keenness of his capacity to judge is always in evidence together with the purity with which he deployed his sense of justice. In a time like ours, when some historians consider it fashionable to pretend that it’s impossible to make a distinction between right and wrong, as if morality is nothing more than an opinion with hindsight, it comes as a genuine pleasure to see the needle of Cleveringa’s compass pointing resolutely in the direction