Bezet, bevrijd & geplunderd. Geallieerde plunderingen in de regio Nijmegen, 1944-1945

by Paul Klinkenberg, Paul Thissen, Paul van der Heijden

191 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book sheds some much-needed light on an uncomfortable subject: good guys do bad stuff too. Allied soldiers in the Netherlands plundered their way through the liberation. Yet the book suffers a problem in its logic. The authors reason not from the actual motives of the military personnel, but merely from what was being stolen. From there they reason what there motives were, or rather could have been, but these are mostly assumptions. Also, they leave out one major assumption, namely that to make a man military and give him a weapon, causes him to feel empowered enough to take what he wants. True, it is hard to discern motives, as veterans proved ashamed and reluctant to talk about it, as the authors themselves admit towards the end of the book.