A myth with some truth to it

Het Horzelnest (The Hornet’s Nest) is the book Willem Otterspeer wrote about Leiden University during WWII. The cover shows a picture of a group of students on strike at the Law Faculty building of Leiden University. The students had just attended the now-famous speech by Rudolph Cleveringa, then dean of the Leiden Law Faculty. On November 26, 1940, he made a speech out of protest against the imminent lay-offs of Jewish employees of the University. The speech resulted in a large-scale strike and a long-lasting shutdown of Leiden University. The NINO, however, remained open during all those years. How come different choices were made here?

Otterspeer: A myth is a very functional thing. It can have a negative outcome, but it might very well have a positive one, and as an historian, there is the ever-present urge to debunk myths, while bringing them back to life at the same time.

This is Willem Otterspeer, professor emeritus University History at Leiden University.

The NINO is closely connected to Leiden University. While the institute operated independently during the war, most of the employees worked for Leiden University. In The Hornet’s Nest, Willem Otterspeer tells the story of Leiden University during the Second World War. It’s a captivating read full of real heroes, real collaborators and a big group of timid, unworldly, or just frightened people.

Otterspeer: Some of the people that were branded as instigators were arrested and brought to Gestel or Vught. But others were simply fired, some of them with salary, some with no salary left at all, so they had to start tutoring, or something like that… There was a very clever food bank set up in Leiden... But true hunger, yes.

Leiden University is the oldest university in the country. And for a long time, it was the most prestigious as well. Leiden was the place where the future elite was educated. And even though all universities were officially equal due to the higher education act, the reputation of Leiden University as the Netherlands’ most important university still very much held true before the war.

Otterspeer: Certainly in their own perception, of course, but also in that of their peers, in the Netherlands and especially outside of it, Leiden’s reputation was still firmly and old-fashionedly in place. And this is why I could at a certain point determine, based on the source material, that the Germans very explicitly chose Leiden as a kind of pilot project, based on the belief that ‘once we take Leiden, we have the entire intellectual heart of the Netherlands and we can adjust the rest accordingly.

A tactic that failed, by the way, because the Germans never actually ‘Nazified’ Leiden University. A fact of which, it should be said, the people of Leiden were perhaps a little bit too proud.

Otterspeer: After the Second World War, the general communis opinio was that Leiden was the only ‘good’ university.

Otterspeer calls this qualification of Leiden as the ‘good’ university a myth, because, as opposed to other universities, Leiden closed its doors for a long time during the war. Its students went to study elsewhere, or were forced to terminate their education. And without the responsibility that came with the students, it was of course a lot easier to decide to take a stand against the German administration.

Otterspeer: And yet, there was some truth to it.

For the university did have a carefully laid-out strategy to oppose the demands of the Germans as effectively as possible.

Otterspeer: As early as the summer of 1940, there was a small group of professors who organized themselves in what was called The Small Circle: 20 people, over 20 people, who were highly motivated. They immediately put together a Great Circle on the side, consisting of people that weren’t as highly motivated, but that were used as a kind of conversation partner, and a kind of indoctrination forum. The second Circle was constantly pressured by the motivated first Circle, and slowly but surely, they pressured people who were afraid, or who didn’t feel like taking part in this war at all, to such an extent that they eventually gave in and took part in that fundamental decision of January 1942, to hand in everyone’s resignation. The canonical quote here was that of dermatologist Siemens, who at one point said something like: ‘We have to scare them so much they become brave’.

So the people in that second Circle were constantly told things like: ‘You’ll never be a part of the Leiden community. We will chase you even in your sleep if you don’t eventually conform to our position.’

And while a large portion of the Leiden professors eventually handed in their resignation, and the university closed its doors, the academic institutes remained open. Including the NINO.

Otterspeer: I do think with the academic argument that if you kept those institutes going, even a little, you protected them from dismantlement or large-scale plunder, and things like that.

Of course, one might sympathize with the Leiden academics that just wanted to keep working, undisturbed in their libraries, institutes and labs, immersed in value-free knowledge.

Otterspeer: The continuation of an institute such as the NINO was actually very logical – they never had to make any individual efforts to remain open either. Which is not the case – and that’s why I paid extra attention to it in my book – for the continued operation of a lab such as Kamerlingh Onnes, which had to constantly reach out to the occupier to remain open. Because there was always the threat that important lab personnel, and especially lab equipment, would be transported to Germany to be deployed in the war effort.

Still, one might also say that they had lost sight of the fact that a university is not merely an academic institution – it is a moral community as well.

Otterspeer: Those academic ethics give one an obligation to prevent any form of collaboration – if not in the form of an active protest, then at least in the form of refusing as much collaboration or accommodation as possible.

Because I think that in the end, anyone who completely immerses themself in science has to ask themself what the general value pattern of that science is, why that science is important. And it’s not just because we are so keen on keeping all these clay tablets here. It’s because that science, represented as a whole by the university as such, stands for a cultural and societal function that will eventually spill over in general terms such as freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of things, etcetera, and if you don’t take that into consideration, you undermine your own efforts in every detailed or specialized form of science.

Today, ethical dilemmas still play a part in studying the ancient Near East. How to deal with plundered and illegally dug up antiquities? Should we study such objects, knowing that they were unlawfully acquired? In recent years, there is an increasing focus on questions such as these, caused in part by the war in Syria, where many archaeological sites were plundered. The point of view that gathering knowledge is more important than anything, and that science is something that stands apart from society, is losing more and more ground.