The Netherlands in the First World War

The Netherlands of Queen Wilhelmina came through the war as a neutral state, although it bordered on Germany and on occupied Belgium. For four years it kept its army under arms, took in hundreds of thousands of Belgian refugees and interned soldiers of both sides who crossed its border. Its trade became a battlefield between the British blockade and German submarine warfare, and in 1918 the country found itself on the brink of famine and war. After the armistice the Netherlands gave refuge to Emperor Wilhelm II.

Armed neutrality

In August 1914 the Netherlands had been a neutral state for more than sixty years. Unlike Belgium’s, its neutrality was guaranteed by no great power: it was the choice of successive governments and was to be protected by the country’s own army. The Dutch took particular care of international law, and The Hague hosted the peace conferences of 1899 and 1907, which adopted the Hague Conventions.

The government of Pieter Cort van der Linden ordered general mobilisation on 31 July 1914, a day before Germany. The country of 6.5 million inhabitants put about 200,000 soldiers into the field. The Dutch did not know that the Germans had already dropped the idea of marching through Limburg, reckoning that a neutral Netherlands would be more useful to them than its railways. On 2 August Berlin gave an assurance that it would respect Dutch neutrality, and when Britain entered the war the Dutch closed the Scheldt to warships bound for Antwerp.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Cornelis Snijders, refused any demobilisation, even a partial one, because the country lay right next to the front in Flanders. In the spring of 1916 the Germans warned The Hague of a supposed British landing in Zeeland, and the government cancelled all leave. The alarm proved false, but it showed that the army had become a piece in the great powers’ game. Neutrality held above all because it paid both sides better than war.

The government also made sure that the press did not undermine neutrality. The exception was the Amsterdam paper “De Telegraaf”, which took an openly pro-Entente and anti-German line, and the drawings of its cartoonist Louis Raemaekers became a weapon of Allied propaganda. In December 1915 the editor-in-chief was arrested and charged with endangering neutrality, but in October 1917 the highest court acquitted him. In the same month the French shot the Dutchwoman Mata Hari, a dancer condemned for spying for Germany.

Refugees and internees

The hardest trial of the first months was the fall of Antwerp. During the siege and after the capitulation of the fortress in October 1914 about a million Belgians fled to the Netherlands. People were put up in churches, barracks, factories and tents. Most went back after a few weeks, but about 100,000 Belgians stayed in the Netherlands until the end of the war, many of them in refugee camps.

Under the Hague Conventions a neutral state had to disarm and intern foreign soldiers. Some 30–40 thousand Belgian soldiers crossed the border, and according to other tallies the internees included 33,105 Belgians, 1,751 British and 1,461 Germans. The British were mainly sailors of the 1st Brigade of the Royal Naval Division, about 1,500 men, who were interned in a camp at Groningen. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire, but some internees were allowed to work outside them, in 1917 among other places in the mines at Heerlen.

In time German deserters also fled to the Netherlands. In the Hague agreement of July 1917 the Netherlands agreed to take in up to 16 thousand British and German prisoners of war. The transports began on a larger scale only in early 1918, and by the end of the war far fewer had been interned than the limit allowed.

In 1915 the Germans fenced occupied Belgium off from the Netherlands with a fence carrying 2,000 volts. Until then volunteers for the Belgian army, couriers and intelligence agents had crossed the border, and Allied soldiers had also escaped from occupied Belgium with the help of the network of Edith Cavell. According to different studies, between more than a thousand and about 3,000 people died at the fence.

Trade and the blockade

Before the war the German industrial heartland on the Rhine traded with its overseas partners through Rotterdam. The Royal Navy therefore stopped ships bound for the Netherlands if it suspected that their cargo would reach Germany. The government in The Hague could not ban transit, because it would have violated neutrality and the Rhine navigation convention, and grain was starting to run short in the country. On 13 November 1914 the Netherlands protested against the British changes to the Declaration of London, and in March 1915 against the blockade.

The solution was the Netherlands Overseas Trust (NOT), a private company founded in November 1914. An importer signed a contract with it promising not to export the goods to Germany and paid a high deposit, and the Allies let through the blockade cargoes addressed to the trust. Britain backed the system with an export act in June 1915, and in successive agreements with the trust limited imports of important goods to the country’s own needs. The system was not watertight: smuggled goods crossed the border, and Dutch farm produce was sold to Germany at a large profit.

At sea the Dutch paid for their neutrality. On 25 March 1915 the German U-28 sank the steamer Medea, the first ship under a neutral flag known for certain to have been sunk by a submarine. After the announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 most Dutch ships stayed in port. In June 1918 the North Sea claimed the hospital ship Koningin Regentes. Dutch war dead numbered in the hundreds, mainly fishermen and sailors.

The crisis of 1917–1918

In 1917 crop failures and the lack of ships brought high prices and shortages. In June and July food riots broke out in Amsterdam, in which troops opened fire on the crowd. By September 1918 fifty-five articles of food and raw materials were rationed, and for the first time in centuries the country faced famine.

In January 1918 the British demanded that the Netherlands charter part of its fleet to the Allies in return for permission to import grain and coal. The Dutch reply to the March ultimatum was conditional, so on 21 March the United States and Britain requisitioned the ships lying in their ports, 132 vessels in all. The queen called it theft, but the government confined itself to a protest.

Germany then demanded compensation for this compliance with the Allies, including free transit of sand and gravel through the Netherlands to Belgium. The British were convinced that the Germans used them to build concrete shelters and bunkers in Flanders. In April the country stood on the brink of war, and at the beginning of May The Hague gave way, to which London replied in July with a formal protest.

The end of the war

In September 1918 a new Christian democratic government under Charles Ruijs de Beerenbrouck took office. On 10 November Emperor Wilhelm II arrived at the Dutch border from his headquarters at Spa. The Dutch granted him refuge as a private person, and two days later Crown Prince Wilhelm also crossed the border. On 28 November, in the castle at Amerongen, the emperor signed the act of abdication. Despite the demands of the victors, who in the Treaty of Versailles announced that he would be put on trial, the Netherlands never handed him over. He died at Doorn in 1941.

In the same days the socialist leader Pieter Jelles Troelstra announced a revolution, but the government quickly got the situation under control by promising demobilisation and larger food rations. A dispute with the Allies arose over the permission given to 70,000 disarmed German soldiers returning from Belgium to march through Dutch territory. On 25 November 1918 the Netherlands concluded a trade agreement with the Allies, and after the war its economy quickly made up its losses. In March 1920 the country joined the League of Nations without giving up its neutrality.