Abolitionism and Palingenesis : Jews, Marxists, and The ‘Establishment’ in Dutch Fascist Propaganda, 1933—44

The ‘Volk en Vaderland’ (VoVa) weekly newspaper served as the principal propaganda tool which allowed the Dutch fascist organisation National Socialist Movement – Netherlands (NSB) to propagate a meticulous blend of antisemitic, anti-Marxist and anti-‘establishment’ conspiracy theories, operating in complementary capacity to the ill-defined palingenetic vision of Dutch national rebirth (‘palingenesis’). Later in the wartime collaboration years, the various components of Dutch fascism were concretised (‘finished’) not by the NSB but by the Berlin-directed civilian occupation regime. As will be presented, utilising mixed-methods content analysis, VoVa’s double scrutiny in both a quantitative and qualitative examination points to the conclusion that the collaboration period had a stout germanisation effect on the completion and even replacement of the various facets of the initial NSB ideology: With pan-Dutch nationalism becoming increasingly outphased by pan-Germanicism; anti-jewish measures being introduced in the Netherlands by Berlin supported by NSB propaganda; and, finally, the revitalisation of ‘abolitionist’ antisemitic and anti-Marxist rhetoric occurring in virtue of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Thus, skewing the expectations of the natural fascist development under a heuristic fascist studies theory model, with particular attention paid to the elements most relevant to Holocaust & genocide studies, the NSB case study alludes to various noteworthy effects of intra-fascist wartime collaboration, and how it completed or even altered the propagated visions for societal transformations and persecutions. Therein, the thesis finishes with the recommendation that other national fascist organisations across World War Two Europe may have suffered equal changes to their abolitionist and palingenetic agendas following intra-fascist wartime collaboration with Germany and Italy; requesting further research is engaged in on other such fascist organisations across Euro