Hitler's Bounty Hunters. The Hitler's Bounty Hunters

Drawing upon administrative documents and post-war trial records, Ad van Liempt reconstructs the membership and activities of the so-called Colonne Henneicke group within the Dutch Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration. Originally engaged in tracking down Jewish goods, this group of just over fifty civilians started tracking down Jews in hiding in the spring and summer of 1943. Although not authorised to arrest individuals, they ignored such legal niceties and handed over an estimated 8,500 Dutch Jews. Despite post-war claims to the contrary, van Liempt points to the payment of seven guilders fifty per Jew as a critical incentive to these activities. This money came from the proceeds of Jewish property sales, and was thus another example of self-financing genocide seen elsewhere in Holocaust Europe. Financial gain was, van Liempt suggests, ‘the most important motivating factor’ (p. 210) for the group of ‘middle-aged men, social failures, almost all of them members of the NSB [the Dutch National Socialist Movement], most of them profoundly anti-Semitic’ (p. 209) that tracked down Jews in hiding in 1943. Van Liempt also hints at the importance of peer pressure, the threatening behaviour of the group's leaders and a gradual acculturation to their new role. Yet in exploring the wartime actions of these men, the critical issue of motivation remains much less developed than in, for example, Christopher Browning's case-study of another group of perpetrators, Police Battalion 101. Another area that remains relatively under-developed is the role played by informants. It is clear that many Jews were tracked down after tip-offs, given by a range of ‘bystanders’. These included, van Liempt suggests, Jews as well as non-Jews, and those who were hiding Jews as well as those with an axe to grind. His portrayal of a woman informing on her sister-in-law as a way of settling personal disputes resonates with recent studies of the role of denunciations to the Gestapo in Germany. Given the current historiographical significance of denunciations in dictatorship, it is perhaps a little disappointing that more attention is not paid to those men and women who provided information to van Liempt's ‘bounty hunters’. It is those men, and particularly their leader Wim Henneicke, who dominate the book. The result is more a series of meticulously researched biographical sketches than historiographically-informed analysis of the motivations of perpetrators, the role of denunciations or of native collaboration during the Holocaust. Yet in piecing together these biographical sketches, a broader picture of the complexity of the Holocaust and its aftermath in the Netherlands does emerge. Here is a glimpse of the interplay between ideology and economics, the role played by the Dutch as well as the German authorities, and the seeming contradictions of those who were simultaneously tracking down some Jews while also letting other Jews go. The complexity of what these ‘bounty hunters’ did and did not do, and why, is carried over into van Liempt's tracing of post-war justice (and its lack) in both the Netherlands and Germany. The majority of the ‘bounty-hunters’ (van Liempt suggests 80 per cent) were prosecuted in a variety of post-war trials. But their leader, Wim Henneiche, never made it to the end of the war, being assassinated in December 1944, and others not only survived the war, but also escaped post-war justice, in particular through escaping to Germany from where their extradition was not sought in the changed post-war climate. Once again broader themes are left under-explored, reflecting the author's tendency throughout to concentrate on individual biographies. That said, those that van Liempt gives us are both fascinating and disturbing, and confront us with a group of individuals whose stories have not previously been told

Archaeology · Deportation · Economic history · Economics · Emigration · Genocide · Immigration · Incentive · Judaism · Political science · Prejudice (legal term · The Holocaust · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law