Hitler's Brudervolk: The Dutch and the Colonization of Occupied Eastern Europe, 1939-1945

Hitler's Brudervolk: The Dutch and the Colonization of Occupied Eastern Europe, 1939-1945 by Dr Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel (International and Political History) is the first academic book on Dutch colonial aspirations and initiatives during WWII.

About the book

Between the summers of 1941 and 1944, some 5,500 Dutch men and women left their occupied homeland to find employment in the so-called German Occupied Eastern Territories: Belarus, the Baltic countries and parts of Ukraine. This was the area designated for colonization by Germanic people. It was also the stage of the 'Holocaust by Bullets', a centrally coordinated policy of exploitation and oppression and a ruthless anti-partisan war. Von Frijtag seeks to answer why the Dutch decided to go there, how their recruitment, transfer and stay were organized, and how they reacted to this scene of genocidal violence. It is a close-up study of racial monomania, of empire-building on the old continent and of collaboration in Nazi-occupied Europe.

About the author

Geraldien von Frijtag is Assistant Professor of History and Art History at Utrecht University. Her fields of interest encompass fascist and Nazi-ideology, German occupation policy, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in twentieth century Europe. She is also the author of Het Geval Calmeyer (2008), which deals with the Holocaust in the occupied Netherlands and, more specifically, with the application of racial laws and regulations in the Netherlands during that time.

• Title: Hitler's Brudervolk: The Dutch and the Colonization of Occupied Eastern Europe, 1939-1945
• Author: Geraldien von Freitag Drabbe Künzel
• ISBN: 978-1-138-80315-2
• Publisher: Routledge, 2015