How Dutch clergy acted during WWII

The Call of Conscience: Protestant Clergy and Jews in the Netherlands, 1935-1945

Johan Hegeman
Summum Academic, 2024.

During the 1930’s the Netherlands was, according to Dutch statistics, a deeply religious nation. The majority of its citizens were church-going people. In The Call of Conscience, Dr. Johan Hegeman addresses difficult questions about this time in history. What happened when the rubber of all that church religiosity of the 1930s hit the dark road of Hitler’s murderous antisemitism during the years of his dictatorial rule over the Dutch people? And how much did the church people help the Dutch Jews who were being hunted down by the Nazis and sent to death camps?

Dr. Hegeman addresses that larger question by examining the words and actions of the Protestant church leaders during the five years before (1935-1940) and the five years when Hitler ruled the Netherlands (1940-45) and succeeded in murdering over 100,000 Dutch Jews. What did those church leaders do or say as they became aware of Hitler’s horrific murder program (Holocaust)? How effective were those words and actions in slowing down the Nazi horror campaign?

One of the key booklets published during the war has the following title (loosely translated) “We pretty much missed the boat.” That statement is, in summary, also the main thesis of Dr. Hegeman’s book. The Dutch clergy did much to support their Dutch Jewish countrymen but, when it came to putting the brakes on Hitler’s death machine, they were largely ineffective.

Dr. Hegeman explores the four main reasons why the Dutch Protestant clergy did so little to help the Dutch Jews who were being systematically murdered. He emphasizes that the clergy was deeply divided among themselves about how to respond to Hitler’s war mandates. He also notes that many among the clergy were, secondly, also infected with what Dr. Hegeman describes as religiously rooted “social antisemitism.”

The third reason for the ineffectiveness of those church leaders was the fact that, as a group, they failed to grasp the deadly nature of the hatred for the Jews that animated Hitler’s Nazi movement. The fourth and final reason for their ineffectiveness is that many stayed too long in their theological ivory towers. Consequently, in practice, they “simply ignored the creeping threat to the Jews” – until it was too late to carry out effective coordinated actions.

Now, in 2025, there are two very important reasons for Christians to become familiar with the insights presented in The Call of Conscience. The first reason relates to the new tidal wave of antisemitism that is invading the modern world. This book about the Protestant leaders of the 1930s and 1940s reveals that antisemitism is not a one-size-fits-all ideological package that those leaders either accepted or rejected. Dr. Hegeman, in his book, takes his readers along many of the highways and byways which some of those leaders travelled along before arriving at different kinds of anti-Semitic ideologies. While watching those dark roads the Christian reader of this book is invariably confronted with a very clear question. Have I, with my understanding of the Scriptures and my faith, at times also travelled along one or other of these roads? This is an important question to ask in this era when rank antisemitism is again raising its head in all parts of the world.

The second reason this book is an important resource for present-day Christian believers is Dr. Hegeman’s clarification of ideas from important church leaders working against anti-Semitic ideas. Rev. Jan Koopmans is one example. Through his writings and actions, Koopmans tried to steer his fellow believers away from all the various roads leading to the different forms of antisemitism. As that theologian said in his Bijna te Laat booklet “[We must not obfuscate] the clear difference between good and evil.” There are other such leaders listed in a person index in Hegeman’s book (more names and stories can be found in Predikanten in de frontlinie by Jan Ridderbos.)

The main takeaway from this careful study is that antisemitism, like racism in all its forms, is a deeply evil line of thinking and living that can swiftly creep, like a chameleon, into the life of the church and, as with the church of Sardis, turn believers into sleeping (“dead”) followers (Rev. 3:1-6) whose moral compasses have become very “murky.” To all such slumbering Christians, Jesus says what he also said to his sleeping disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Be awake and watchful.”