NIOD Rewind Podcast on War & Violence

The Diamond of Banjarmasin, a diamond looted by the Dutch in 1859 and sent to the Netherlands two years later, will be restituted to Indonesia. Anne van Mourik talks about the restitution with Klaas Stutje (Expert Centre Restitution NIOD). How does the restitution of looted colonial objects actually work? What does it mean to return such a colonial object, and can we see it as a form of transitional justice? And what histories does the diamond reveal?

Wist je dat tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog er een compleet verscholen dorp bestond in Nederland? De bosrijke omgeving rondom de Gemeente Epe kwam goed van pas kwam bij de onderduik van Joden, verzetsstrijders en anderen die zich verborgen moesten houden voor de nazi’s.

In deze aflevering duiken Anne van Mourik (NIOD), Catharine Aretakis (Universiteit Utrecht) en Epenaar Willem Veldkamp in het oorlogsverhaal van de omgeving van Epe. Hoe kan het dat er in Epe een ‘goede geest voor verzet’ was? Wat moesten deze mensen op het spel zetten? En, als we wat uitzoomen en Epe vergelijken met andere regio’s in Nederland: waarom verschilde de mate van verzet tussen verschillende lokale gemeenschappen? En wat leren geschiedenissen als die van Epe ons over de rol van sterke lokale gemeenschappen in het afremmen van massaal geweld?

Afbeelding tegel: Het Verscholen dorp, Pas-Opweg, 8076 Vierhouten. Gelegen nabij Vierhouten in de provincie Gelderland. Wikimedia Commons.

Fotocredits: Lodewijk Booij, Mariette Veldkamp

Language:This is a special one-off episode in Dutch. All upcoming episodes will be back in English. A big thank you to Catharine Aretakis for being so flexible and for joining us in Dutch, which is not her native language.

What is happening in Tigray? In this episode Anne van Mourik speaks with Teklehaymanot (Tekle) Weldemichael (University of Manchester) about the strong evidence that Ethiopia committed genocide in Tigray, and the (lack of) academic freedom to publish on it. 

The war between Ethiopia and Tigray began in 2020 and saw widespread atrocities, including mass killings, systematic rape, starvation, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. How to analyse this mass violence? Did the ceasefire of 2022 truly end the violence? How became the bodies and especially wombs of Tigrayan women sites of violence during the conflict? And what kind of challenges do scholars face, who want to publish on what is happening in Tigray?

Image: Protestor holding sign in support of women in Tigray 2021, CC BY 2.0 Wikimedia Commons.

Are perpetrators of mass atrocities really “monsters”? Or are they, in fact, normal people, like us? Anne van Mourik and Lucy Gaynor interview Professor Alette Smeulers (University Groningen), who argues that those who commit extreme violence are often far more ordinary than we would like to believe. We discuss Alette’s research - which looks at many cases including the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, Apartheid in South Africa, and military dictatorships in South America - and ask: what patterns emerge? Do different contexts produce different types of perpetrators, such as “fanatics”, “masterminds”, and “followers"? Does social media, in our modern age, act as a kind of fanatic infrastructure, creating spaces like the manosphere, or even enabling perpetration? What is the role of “strongmen” like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu, in the perpetration of atrocities? How do other leaders, like NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, play a part in normalising violence?

Photo: Adolf Eichman in Ramle Prison1961 (Wikimedia Commons)

In the first episode of Season 7, Anne van Mourik talks with Susie Protschky (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) to explore the question of perpetrator trauma in the aftermath of the Dutch–Indonesian War. They look at how members of Indies diaspora and former combatants in the Netherlands live with (post-)war trauma, including those implicated in violence and oppressive regimes. 

What does perpetrator trauma mean? How does trauma show up in everyday life and in political discourse? How is it sometimes used to shape narratives of victimhood that aim to mitigate questions of responsibility? 

As the conversation unfolds, Susie and Anne end up circling a familiar knot: why focus on perpetrator trauma at all? Are we in danger of losing sight of historical violence and suffering by shifting attention to memory politics and postwar narratives? Or is this precisely where the political work of history continues to unfold?

Image: Burial at sea of Dutch soldier, 1950 (NIMH)

In this episode, Anne van Mourik speaks with historian Tatjana Tönsmeyer (University of Wuppertal) and Peter Romijn (NIOD and UvA) about Tönsmeyer’s groundbreaking book Unter deutscher Besatzung: Europa 1939–1945 (Under German occupation: Europe 1939-1945). The book offers a Europe-wide account of life under Nazi occupation told from the perspective of the occupied, exploring fear, deprivation, and everyday strategies of survival. How did a climate of fear affect daily life in occupied Europe? Why is it not useful to talk in terms of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’? And what can the book teach us about how to understand and respond to situations of occupation today?  

Did European colonialism truly end in the 20th century, as we often assume? In this episode Anne van Mourik (NIOD) speaks with Martin Thomas (Exeter University) about his book The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton University Press). He argues that decolonization was not just the transfer of power from colonizers to the colonized, but a global, often violent process that forged new alliances, reshaped international connections, and left behind enduring colonial legacies. In this episode we ask: How to rethink decolonization? If empires were so powerful, military, politically, economically, why and how did they collapse? And how is colonial violence different than violence in non-imperial spaces? 

Photo: Civilian are pushing a military jeep. 1 August 1962. Wikimedia Commons.

In this episode, Anne van Mourik (NIOD) sits down with famine scholars Alex de Waal (Tufts University) and Ingrid de Zwarte (Wageningen University & Research) to discuss how hunger can be used as a political-military instrument of power—from the Dutch Hunger Winter of WWII to Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza today. 

Was starvation in the Netherlands during WWII intentional? What role did food play in Dutch colonial violence in the Indonesian War of Independence? And in the present: What are Israel’s objectives in starving Palestinians? Why is the international community failing to act—even when famine unfolds in full view of the world?

Exactly eighty years ago, in the midst of the liberation’s chaos, the NIOD (then the RIOD) was founded with a clear mission: to document Dutch experiences of the Second World War. In this special anniversary episode, Anne van Mourik speaks with Jaap Cohen, Eveline Buchheim, Uğur Üngör, and Arvid de Raaij about eighty years of collecting memories, experiences, and stories. They reflect on NIOD’s urgent beginnings, its expansion to collect information about conflicts such as Indonesia’s War of Independence and the Yugoslav wars, and the ideas and challenges of documenting more recent atrocities, from Syria’s civil war to the Yezidi genocide. Why is collecting testimonies of war and genocide so vital? Why does it still matter just as much today? And how to collect digital sources about war and violence, such as the X-posts on the Ajax-Maccabi riots in Amsterdam in 2024? 

Image: Loe de Jong, 1950 (NIOD archive) 

In the first episode of a special NIOD Rewind series called Flash, Anne van Mourik speaks with historian Dr. Anne-Lise Bobelijk (NIOD) about how president Trump and presidentPutin are exploiting World War II history to support their current political strategies. In this short 10-minute episode, we explore how the past is being reshaped to influence the present, from Trump’s comments on US-Soviet cooperation to Putin’s manipulation of history to justify his war in Ukraine.

Photo: 2nd Lt. William Robertson and Lt. Alexander Sylvashko, Red Army, shown in front of sign [East Meets West] symbolizing the historic meeting of the Soviet and American Armies, near Torgau, Germany on Elbe Day, the day Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River (April 1945). Wikimedia Commons.