The Hitler Wannabe - Dutch Quisling Mussert

As a Dutchman I want to emphasize that having a romantic relation with one’s aunt is not a Dutch custom

“What is it exactly that makes corporals turn into dictators?” An interesting bit of history and a good chuckle as a bonus. Well done Dr.Felton!

Thank you for sharing this history. My great uncle was killed by the NSB/Gestapo at that same prison in The Hague. He was involved with the underground free press. His body was buried in the sand dunes in a mass grave and only identified 2 years ago. Sharing history about what happened is the best way he and others like him can be remembered. With respect to why there wasn’t more resistance from the population, I find these comments mostly made by people posting from countries that were never occupied - US, UK and Australia, etc. Respectfully, they never faced the same terror as those people who were occupied.

I'm from a small town in Northetn Brabant in the Netherlands, and the town where Mussert was born and where he lived (Werkendam) is just over 10km from here. In the local area it's kind of a running joke that people from Werkendam are attracted to their family members, as it's a pretty closed-off heavily christian town, so the fact that Mussert had romantic relationships with both his aunt and his Niece is absolutely hilarious to hear.

Funnily enough some of the bridges he designed while he was an engineer are only now being replaced. He was a better engineer then he ever was a Quisling.

According to my grandfather, Mussert was more hated in the Netherlands than Hitler himself. Even the nazi’s didn’t take him serious..

“Stunning couple with stunned locals” - brilliant!! Thank you

Two things you should never give a Corporal, a map, and a compass. They start to get delusions of Grandeur.

I was a corporal and have no ambition to become a dictator. Thanks and regards from the Netherlands.

A Dr. Felton video about the Netherlands during WWII! "bedankt!" 👍

Another fantastic video Mark, thank you. I'm 30, spent some time in the military in the UK as a teenager/early 20's and now live and work in Australia. I'm married to a half Dutch Australian and when we visited the Netherlands in 2016, I got to meet my wifes Grandmother, she was a teenager in Amsterdam in the war, as my own grandparents were in Northern England. I'd grown up listening to stories about the war from them, rations, air raids on the steel works, one grandfather was a RAF engineer from 1940 and took part in the occupation of Germany post-war. But hearing it from someone who experienced the Nazi occupation was very different and quite sobering. Particularly her recalling people simply disappearing. It may not have been clear to all politicians at the time, but hindsight shows us that Britain undeniably made the right choice to fight on.

One of the reasons that Mussert was far more successful in establishing a fascist party in the Netherlands than any of his predecessors or competitors was his respectability: he was a university-trained civil engineer - and a good one. His character could not have been more different from that of Hitler: the work-shy bohémien romantic ‘genius’ without any formal education versus the scientific, methodical and thoroughly unromantic regular worker. Yet, Hitler fascinated Mussert (which is pronounced ‘Mus-surt’, not ‘Moe-zurt’) from the first meeting they had in ‘36. This was not reciprocal: Hitler deemed Mussert to be a petit bourgeois conservative nationalist, ‘definitely not a nationalsocialist’. In the first years of the movement, the NSB (which stands for ‘Nationaalsocialistische beweging’, or ‘nationalsocialist movement’ pained itself on distancing itself from the German Nazi’s: Mussert underlined for instance that his NSB had no racial ideology and was open to Jews and in the Netherlands East Indies to Indonesians and people of mixed blood. That only changed after it became clear that the NSB could not gain a majority in parliament, despite the relative succes in the 1935 provincial elections (not national elections, as the video incorrectly states). Only then Mussert started leaning heavily on the Nazi’s, always half-heartedly and always overtaken by fanatics in his own party, such as Feldmeijer and Rost van Tonningen. Mussert generally supported Hitler’s policies, but he despised Himmler and the SS, always fearing that Himmler wanted to annex the Netherlands to Greater Germany and believing that the only way to prevent that was to stay as close as possible to Hitler, of whom he believed that he was a proponent of Dutch independence in a future nazi-dominated Europe. He wrote a number of memo’s for Hitler in which he laid down blueprints for a future Europe that would be a confederate union of autonomous states under German leadership, the so-called Germanic Union of States (Germaansche Statenbond), in which all of the member states would work together closely and be politically united by nationalsocialism, but would still be relatively independent and maintain their own army and (in the case of the Netherlands) its overseas empire. Needless to say that Hitler was utterly uninterested. Yet Mussert soldiered on, hoping against hope to win over the Dutch people for his version of nationalsocialism on the one hand and convincing Hitler in the other hand of the benefits of Dutch political autonomy. In both, he failed miserably. But although he was undoubtedly a criminal, Hitler was probably right in dismissing him as ‘not a nationalsocialist’. He was a civil engineer who got lost in politics, a man of strong beliefs and a thoroughly calvinist work-ethic, a weak character and little talent for politics. He was thoroughly uncharismatic, yet to his followers he was almost a messiah. Anton Adriaan Mussert probably deserved the death penalty: but he was a far more interesting and complicated man then just ‘the Dutch Hitler’.

Thank you so much for your high quality content. My parents lived through the occupation and the "hunger winter". Anton Mussert was indeed the most hated man of the Netherlands. "NSB-er" is still a very common insult when you really dislike someone.

To her dying day my late grandmother would maintain that the Netherlands were betrayed by the NSB during the German invasion of 1940. This theory was quite popular in the aftermath of the German invasion but proven to be false by historians after the war. But as my grandmother proved, once you get an idea in, its next to impossible to get it out. Which is why politicians and generals are always so quick to publish their memoirs. The real villain and biggest traitor was of course not Anton Mussert, who was a joke, but Rost van Tonningen. Who was to Mussert what Heydrich was to Himmler. Far more cunning, far more brutal, far more traitorous. And his widow, nicknamed the black widow, became a post-war focal point of Dutch Neo-Nazis, remaining a staunch Nazi.

"No tears were shed for Anton Mussert."

Please make this a series! All the Quislings need to be covered!

The reason most of us come here for these videos is the shear depth of detail. I realise in documentaries they have to allow for time but often the 'experts' just give a vague comment that doesn't really add anything. The fact you manage to get so much detail into a ten or so minute video is fantastic. A guess that's too much History, for the 'History' Channel. Have a great week all!

Stunning couple with stunned locals 😂😂😂

Mussert was born in a village in Noord-Brabant called Werkendam. I'm a history teacher in a village close by. His elderly home was for sale a couple of years ago. Its a interesting region it was not liberated during operation Market Garden but close to the border which was. Therefor it was full of resistance activity and a couple of German divisions got stationed here. During the last days of ww2 alot of crimes got committed. Every village in the region has memorials for people that died for acts of resistance. There are also alot of old forts and fortified cities close by from earlier periodes in history. You can find the NSB headquarters building in Utrecht on the Maliebaan 35 aswell.

"At this time, as well as being married to his own aunt, Mussert was also having an affair with his niece" 😂 😂😂