Book Excerpt: The Netherlands' German Problem

The central argument of my book is that Dutch policymakers and politicians were able to render American power into solutions for often-intractable domestic and foreign policy challenges. American power after World War II offered its allies policy choices that they would not have had otherwise. In this excerpt from my book, I survey the nature of the Dutch German problem after the war, and hint at how American economic aid and military support coalesced in The Hague to provide a way out of the conundrum.

The Dutch were largely absent from the allied councils that determined the fate of Germany after WWII.

In its postwar prostration Germany was the source of much that bedeviled postwar Europe. Yet there was no one “German problem.” The challenges that the defeat and occupation of Germany brought to France were different than those appearing to the Russians, to the Americans, to the British, and so on. The Netherlands faced its own paradoxes, insoluble dilemmas, and desired outcomes in its German policy. The Dutch desperately needed German economic recovery but dreaded economic domination. They pressed claims of justice against German perpetrators but appreciated the need to welcome Germany back into the community of nations. They naturally feared German aggression but came to accept Germany’s armed role in Western security. The demand for border corrections recurred, both as compensation for the war and for commercial and economic advantages, even as most statesmen outside the Netherlands insisted that the era of territorial aggrandizement had passed. There would be an American role in the resolution of each of these questions.

​Germany was not merely a geopolitical quandary for the superpowers, whose ongoing disagreements over how and whether to rebuild German political and economic institutions catalyzed Cold War tensions. The German problem encapsulated the challenges of postwar Europe more broadly. Deep psychological wounds persisted among nations East and West, giving rise to demands for territorial and economic concessions, reparations, and judicial redress. Fears of German revanchism remained strong within Russia and France, fueling calls to keep Germany weak, its industry enervated and incapable of supporting further German aggression. Yet the surrounding smaller powers had always depended on trade with Germany, and it was impossible to imagine a European recovery that did not include a strong German economy. The British hoped to remain clear of continental entanglements and rebuild their imperial system, though British occupation responsibilities rendered that position untenable. The Americans had preferences as well, to rehabilitate the German economy as an engine of European recovery, and soon to include even the rearming of Germany as a bulwark against Soviet aggression. European neighbors were votaries in each of these contending camps, often simultaneously. Strategic interests, memory, and ideology clashed for powers near and far.
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Germany was the problem of largest concern in which The Hague held the least amount of leverage. Despite Germany’s importance to Dutch affairs, officials could do little else but complain about Allied policy. The Hague was mostly absent from the high councils of Allied diplomacy, as officials did not wish to bear the economic and political costs of Germany’s administration and the neutralist traditions of the prewar era had initially left the Foreign Ministry ill-equipped for delicate international diplomacy. The Hague’s German policy had to account for other European partners, all suddenly now more relevant in the new age of multilateralism, who could be easily offended by a false step taken and who maintained decided notions about Germany themselves. In time Dutch diplomats would take a leading role in European diplomacy and in the historic agreements in which the fate of Germany was to be adjudicated. In the aftermath of liberation, however, the Dutch were more often perplexed by German and European developments than participants in their resolution, their German policy “a self-contradictory combination of ambition and weakness.”[1] In these early years the mitigating role of American power was not yet in evidence in these matters, its attention drawn elsewhere on the continent.

Looming over security fears and the moral quandary of reparative justice, the chief Dutch concern was trade. Allied occupation meant structural changes in the flow of German trade, now directed to the dollar area and away from markets of which the Netherlands had always been a prominent part. The Dutch lamented that German commerce had been altered by allied authorities to an “almost complete adjustment . . . to the dollar and the dollar area, ignoring other possibilities and diverting the flow of trade from its natural channels.” Dutch officials bemoaned the disquieting tendency of the occupying Americans to favor their own interests in German administration at Dutch expense, such as the rehabilitation of German ports rather than the riparian trade which flowed through Rotterdam. In certain transit arrangements the Americans acted as middlemen between German and Dutch commerce, resulting in higher prices to Dutch customers; the Americans justified such arrangements by arguing that they bore the costs of occupation. In return the Dutch pressed the Americans for commercial access in the US. Negotiators requested a greater share of German shipping and transit requirements, return of more German trade to its “natural” Dutch routes, and the unblocking of Dutch assets and investments in Germany.[2] As emotionally insistent as reparations and annexations undoubtedly were, trade was the priority. As the US embassy informed Washington, “for economic and political reasons Holland wants a friendly unembittered Germany.”[3]

One of the significant reasons, therefore, for The Hague’s support of the Marshall Plan was the hope that American aid would accomplish what American occupation policies were confounding, the weaving of the German and Dutch economies more closely together. Yet at first the Marshall Plan appeared to further entrench the Americans’ baleful rerouting of German trade to the dollar area. With Marshall Plan dollars in abundance, many Germans were learning to procure needs from the dollar area and ignoring Dutch sources of supply. This deflection worked harm the other way as well, as it forced the Dutch away from the German market and toward the dollar area, exacerbating the dollar gap. The great challenge was to restore trade activity, but to diminish or remove the danger of economic dependency on Germany, which had always rendered the Netherlands vulnerable to German influence. The Dutch needed the Americans to open the spigots of German trade, but also to help protect it from German domination.


[1] Hellema, Dutch Foreign Policy, 114.

[2] H. M. Hirschfeld, “Memo. on the Netherlands-German Economic Relations,” 1949, inv. nr. 26, Van der Beugel papers, NA.

[3] Embassy to secretary of state, 6 Oct. 1948, no. 538, RG 59 Central Files 756.6215/10-648, RSC.


​--David J. Snyder