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| Dutch Police Founded by the SS? |
2/16/2007 |
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AMSTERDAM — A German war criminal founded the Dutch police system in its present-day form, reads the new "History of the Dutch Police" by Cyrille Fijnaut of Tilburg University.
The Second World War played an important role in the history of the Dutch police, Fijnaut told De Volkskrant.
Ever since the mid-19th century, there have been many arguments about what the national police should be like, and it was the German occupation forces in the 1940s that gave the Dutch police its permanent structure. The Higher SS and Polizei Führer Hans Rauter simply put an end to the divided opinions on the matter. After the war, the Dutch authorities decided to keep Rauter''s model.
This decision has been criticised for a long time, since the Dutch police were anything but innocent during the war years. Of the 16,500 police agents active in 1944, seven thousand were accused of collaboration after the liberation and two thousand were fired.
The police still suffers from the stains on its reputation when its role in the persecution of Jews is brought up, Fijnaut says.
The new coalition thinks it has provided for all the necessary reforms to the police, but at the presentation of the new accord last Tuesday Minister of Interior Johan Remkes said it was "inevitable" that the police would have to be reorganised again in a decade.
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