Smart, but not very brave

Professor Frans de Liagre Böhl had already had a successful academic career when he founded the NINO together with some colleagues right before the Second World War broke out. During the war he was faced with a great dilemma: resign with unforeseen consequences, or stay on as professor and submit to the German government and everything it stood for.

This is a box of glass slides that belonged to professor Frans de Liagre Böhl. Professor Böhl was enormously prolific, and the glass slides of his travels to Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Turkey serve as tangible evidence of his knowledge of the Near East, which he gathered at the scene. Traveling was everything to him…

Herman: And he said: ‘Flying, it’s a kind of geography, you can see all the countries laid out really nicely.’ Yes, he loved that.

However, while Professor Böhl fearlessly went on planes to faraway places as early as the 1930s, he proved himself a lot less brave during the Second World War.

Herman: My father’s operations then were unfortunate, yes. And people blame him for it.

This is Herman de Liagre Böhl, son of professor de Liagre Böhl, and a well-known historian with several books to his name.

Herman: He was quite tall, about 5’9. He hunched over when he walked. He wore very strong prescription glasses. He almost always wore a three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain. And yes, his feet were sort of difficult. He had had a clubfoot as a child, but had a successful operation. But he always wore high-laced black boots. He was also really absent-minded, he never knew which way he had to go when he came out of the house. [laughs]

For the last few years, Herman de Liagre Böhl has been working on a biography about his father. The book, titled Bible and Babel, recently came out.

Herman: Yes, we just finished it, it turned out really beautiful, if I do say so myself, beautifully illustrated.

The biography describes the highly successful academic career of professor Böhl in great detail. He was born in Vienna and educated in Berlin and Leipzig.

Herman: At the age of 30, he was already a professor in Groningen. He was a Hebraist, a professor of the Old Testament. And meanwhile he is also appointed professor in Assyriology, because he was educated in two fields . He had written two dissertations too. In Hebrew and in Assyrian.

Böhl became a professor of Assyriology at Leiden University, where he had his most productive years, academically speaking, partly because of the founding of the NINO in 1939 - right before the Second World War. At the NINO, Böhl was, together with curator Arie Kampman, the big man of the institute.

Herman: My father was the academic and Kampman was the businessman. Yes, they made a good team.

After the war broke out, and the occupation of the Netherlands, there was one question that quickly became urgent among people working in government positions: how do I relate to the German administration? It goes without saying that this question also rose among the employers of Leiden University. Unfortunately, as a professor, Böhl did not show a lot of courage here.

Herman: He is not very brave, he is hesitant, and I think that’s unfortunate.

Böhl belonged to what Willem Otterspeer called the “Greater Circle”. To this group belonged the employees that did not participate in active resistance, the ones that expressed doubt, showed fear, and had to be pressured to go on strike, which came down to resigning.

Herman: And here my father makes some unfortunate choices: he turns to the people that are in charge of the strike, and he asks them if he can be exempt from going on strike because he has four children, four small children.

The Small Circle was not happy about his lack of courage. And they tried to talk to him to change his mind.

Herman: Yes, and he listened to them. He did it anyway, eventually, he went on strike. Yes, but he had a lot to say about it behind the scenes.

He was granted resignation on January 28, 1943, by the Secretary-General of Education. But word about the story of Böhl putting forward his children as an argument not to resign, made its way around Leiden. A lot of the ‘good’ people in Leiden knew about it and disapproved.

Herman: And he even tried to get a job as a professor in Germany during that time. And they were not happy about that at all, the fact that he did that. You could call it collaboration, but he never went through with it, luckily. I think they immediately went and told him that there, too: We don’t like this. We’re not doing that.

On top of all of that, he was married to a German woman. And the fact that he had been friends with the now-deceased German emperor didn’t help his case either.

Herman: My mother and father and their children were a German family. They were certainly not pro Hitler though, they were not Nazis, absolutely not.

On July 20, 1944, Claus Graf von Stauffenberg made his famous, failed assassination attempt on Hitler. Professor Böhl realized upon hearing the news that he had a cousin who was married to a brother of Von Stauffenberg.

Herman: And immediately, he thought: they’re after me. The entire family was arrested. I was one-year-old baby then. And I was taken too.

Like a little lamb wrapped around a maid’s neck, Herman was taken as well. By train, heavily guarded by German soldiers, transported to a command post in Arnhem.

Herman: And there my father was questioned by a Gestapo officer. And, well, that’s when he thought: we’re going to jail…

… but during the questioning, the arrest turned out to have a completely different reason: Böhl had recently corresponded with a colleague of his, an American Assyriologist. And the Gestapo saw that as ‘consorting with the enemy’.

Herman: So my dad was relieved that that’s what it was. […] It was just like ‘What’s the deal with those letters?’ And then he explained that it was all very innocent. And then the family was released again.

They took a train back to Leiden, and before they could even open their door, a few of their neighbors came to congratulate them.

Herman: Where they lived, they were always kind of looked down upon, being German. But after this incident, that was over. And the news traveled fast. Everyone thought: ‘I guess they’re not that kind of Germans after all.’ So that all ended well, eventually…