Research versus war trauma
The fight over Kamplaan 8
Door Christien Boomsma
By Christien Boomsma
Christien Boomsma
Christien is sinds 2016 achtergrondcoördinator bij UKrant. Ze plant de achtergrondverhalen en begeleidt de auteurs. Bij haar eigen verhalen ligt de focus op wetenschap en academisch leven. Daarnaast schrijft ze veel over onderwerpen als sociale veiligheid en maakt ze graag persoonlijke interviews. In haar vrije tijd schrijft ze jeugdboeken en geeft schrijftrainingen.His response to the whole thing is remarkably even.
‘Of course I don’t like it’, says Maarten Duijvendak about the ongoing conflict between him and the Blankensteins, a Jewish family he researched. ‘I’ve got feelings too, you know.’
But the only way to deal with the issue, the retired history professor says, is to keep it strictly business. To stay professional. ‘I have to stay rational and keep my facts straight.’
Whenever possible, he tries to explain how he reached certain conclusions. After all, historical sources have their limits, since some have been lost to time. All that’s left to do is put together everything you know and deduce the most likely scenario.
Besides, he realises how sensitive the matter is to victims. ‘Perhaps we didn’t pay quite enough attention to that when the family’s story, which is certainly very important, didn’t match the dry facts.’
Five lines
The conflict between Duijvendak and the descendants of the Van Blankenstein family, the original owners of the house at Kamplaan 8 in the expensive neighbourhood in the south of Groningen, has been going on for two years. He and his fellow researchers wrote just five lines on the matter in Lege Plekken, the study on how the municipality of Groningen handled property belonging to its returning Jewish inhabitants.
Until the summer of 1951, the building was rented by the NBI [editor’s note: the agency that managed the assets of people who disappeared during the war, such as Jewish people who’d been deported, but also collaborators and Germans living in the Netherlands] who stopped managing it in June of that year. A year later, the house was rented to Jan Tuin, who’d just been sworn in as mayor. The municipality then bought the property to use as an official residence.
‘We used it as an example of the complicated situations that arose when it was time for redress after the war’, he says. The government was tasked with detangling a legal mess of possessions that had been sold during the war and were now the subject of competing interests.
Different view
But Hubert van Blankenstein, whose mother was the sole survivor of the family, didn’t appreciate the business-like tone of that single paragraph. Because, he said in an emotional email to the city, ‘while I appreciate how much work went into the study, I simply cannot agree with the way the history of the buildings has been written’.
According to Van Blankenstein, the report completely ignored the story behind the sale of the house. ‘What’s unusual about this story is that, after the war, every effort was made to ensure that the house was NEVER returned to its legitimate owners’, he wrote. That was the thing he felt should be revealed: how ‘games and chicanery’ by the mayor meant his parents had no choice but to sell their house.
Every effort was made to NEVER return the house to its owners
~ Hubert van Blankenstein
He added his own view of the events and asked the municipality to send it on to the researchers, so they could amend the report.
This happens more often than you might think, says Duijvendak. ‘It’s the loss of expertise’, he says. ‘People think science is just an opinion, but not everything can be disputed.’
Historians who write about sensitive subjects such as World War II experience this more than others. ‘People can react with strong emotions when the research results don’t match the story that descendants have pieced together over the years. But what’s “true” and “right” in that context?’
Even though Duijvendak re-examined the situation concerning Kamplaan 8 at the municipality’s request and wrote an additional report, he found nothing to substantiate Van Blankenstein’s version of events.
Criticism
The Van Blankenstein family then claimed 328,000 euros in damages with the municipality of Groningen, based on the fact that the house was originally sold for less than it was worth because it had previously been rented out. These damages have since been paid. The mayor also apologised for the way the family had been treated after the war. Although the city has not disavowed the report.
Van Blankenstein himself ended up writing a book about the house he grew up in, criticising Duijvendak’s views. This led to the national media reporting on the issue, including Nieuwsuur and Pointer, as well as an escalating email exchange between Van Blankenstein’s publisher, Van Blankenstein himself, and Duijvendak.
The last email was an ‘open letter’ by Van Blankenstein with the subject line ‘J’accuse’, in which he accused the historian of a ‘false narrative’ and ‘willful ignorance’. The email’s subject line was a deliberate reference to the open letter by Emile Zolá from 1898, in which he defends Jewish officer Dreyfuss, who had been unjustly sentenced to prison. In other words, Van Blankenstein was indirectly accusing Duijvendak of being anti-Semitic.
Hard and soft sources
For Duijvendak, a renowned socio-economic historian, the situation is difficult to navigate. He simply did what he was supposed to do: he consulted the sources and wrote a report about what he found. It’s not like he doesn’t know that the history of the house is like an open wound to the Van Blankenstein family. He also knows that what he’s written doesn’t match the history as told by that family.
Unless he produces facts, I can’t change my conclusions
~ Maarten Duijvendak
But does that mean he’s supposed to throw himself at their feet, as Van Blankenstein’s publisher suggested? Is he supposed to just adopt Van Blankenstein’s story, when that version doesn’t match the facts? ‘Unless he produces some facts, a document that I haven’t found that proves me wrong, I can’t change my conclusions. But so far, he hasn’t.’
The problem, Duijvendak thinks, lies in the difference between the professional historian and the amateur; the latter may be passionate, but has no formal training. ‘When it comes to history, there are hard sources and soft ones’, he explains. Hard sources pertain to decisions by the city council, or deeds from the civil registry. They can be used as a basis for legal facts. Soft sources are things like letters or personal documents such as diaries. ‘They’re very important, because they allow us insight into experiences and motives.’ But these documents are often subjective, and not always correct.
It’s also important to put facts in context. How likely are certain scenarios? Are there any facts that make certain insights more likely, or even less likely?
Rental agreement
Based on his professional knowledge, Duijvendak thinks the following happened: the claim on the house at Kamplaan 8 was voided as soon as the Germans left Groningen in April of 1945. But when the family returned, they found the house had been rented. The rental status of the house was recorded in their financial administration.
But there were consequences to this. ‘If you’re receiving rent, it means there’s a rental agreement, and the tenant has legal protection’, says Duijvendak.
That meant the city couldn’t just kick them out. It wasn’t until the tenant left in 1951 that the family could possibly return. Except the municipality wouldn’t allow it. Instead, new mayor Jan Tuin moved into the property. A year later, the house was sold to the municipality in its rented state, for the asking price.
‘You could say that this was a morally questionable act by the city’, Duijvendak admits. But he also says it’s easy to condemn them in hindsight. After the war, there was an immense lack of housing. ‘People were living in old tram compartments at the Friesestraatweg’, he says. ‘That’s how bad it was.’
The rules concerning the allocation of living spaces were extremely strict. ‘Civil servants came before municipal officials, and municipal officials came before ordinary citizens.’ It didn’t matter if someone was a war victim or not.
Claim
But Van Blankenstein feels this view insults his late father. He says the city never relinquished the claim on the house after the war, precisely because it was the ideal property to house municipal officials in. In 1951, his father had no choice but to sell the house, at an ‘enormous financial loss’.
There is an administrative trail on other properties, but not this one
~ Maarten Duijvendak
Duijvendak should have known this, says Van Blankenstein, since his father’s memoirs, which had been published in the eighties, were in the municipal archives. According to those memoirs, his father and his ever-growing family had never been allowed to move into the beautiful and suitable villa. ‘No motivation was given for this decision’, his father wrote. ‘The municipality had claimed the villa and I always strongly suspected they didn’t think we fit into the neighbourhood.’
That word ‘claim’ is crucial. According to Van Blankenstein, it is fact. Doubting his father, a victim of the war, is unthinkable to him. He is convinced the mayor was playing some sort of dirty game so he could move into the house himself.
Conspiracy theory
‘But it’s possible Van Blankenstein’s father was using a metaphor’, says Duijvendak. ‘Perhaps the fact that the city wouldn’t allow him to live there felt to him like they’d laid a claim on the house.’ Besides, he says, there’d be an administrative trail if the claim had been official. ‘But I haven’t found any. There are documents on different properties, but not on this one.’
It would also have been pretty much impossible for the mayor to bypass the housing laws, says Duijvendak. Communist party CPN was part of the opposition and would have jumped at the chance to thwart the mayor. ‘He simply wouldn’t have had the political space to pull something like that’, thinks Duijvendak.
He feels that Van Blankenstein is essentially proposing a conspiracy theory. ‘If you say the earth is flat, you have to come up with some convincing arguments. If you say a claim by the German Wehrmacht continued for nearly two decades after the war and you also implicate a mayor and a municipal secretary, you have to be able to prove those unfounded assertions’, he wrote in an email to the publisher.
But in the meantime, there’s still that open letter with all its accusations. Van Blankenstein is too polite for Duijvendak to be able to press charges for defamation. ‘Plus, the right to free speech is very important. I can only defend my reputation by continuing to do proper work.’
Response by Hubert van Blankenstein
It’s a shame. Professor Duijvendak has been unable to refute any of the assumptions for which I provide hard proof in my book. Even now. My supposition was unequivocally endorsed by dr. Gert Jan Van Setten’s PhD thesis, Oorlogswinst (see page 364).
In his awkward and failed attempt at disproving me, professor Duijvendak keeps contradicting himself. It’s a technically complicated legal issue that won’t be of interest to many people, but the falsehoods that professor Duijvendak peddles essentially mean my father is to blame for a bad deal he made selling his house to the municipality.
However, the municipality even tried to ‘smoke out’ my father and hurt his business (his paint factory). What’s more, they succeeded. So while the municipality mistreated my family, professor Duijvendak is unjustly adding insult to injury. The family is, to put it mildly, not amused.
Professor Duijvendak is incapable and in fact too vain to get over himself to admit his mistakes. And I owe it to my father and the rest of my family that survived the war to continue fighting this injustice.
It is a difficult fight because the UG has made a lot of money on professor Duijvendak’s research. They are closing ranks. That is simply unacceptable, especially in a city which has the highest number of deported and murdered Jewish people. Approximately 90 percent of Groningen Jews didn’t make it through the war, with the national average at 75 percent.