Ode to Tante Martha | It indicates that people didn't really new the ins and outs of it

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Hello Aunt Martha,

You may be surprised to receive a letter from a girl you probably barely remember. Admittedly, you were also out of my thoughts for a while, but when I got older and memories of my childhood surfaced, you were suddenly there.

Our family lived in a double upper house on Lomanstraat in Amsterdam Zuid. They were spacious houses, with a front and back room downstairs, a kitchen at the back, and a side room at the front. My friend Wieke also lived two houses away in such an upper house. You, Aunt Martha, lived in that friend's house. You were not related to Uncle Henk and Auntie Mien, my friend's parents, because you spoke with a heavy German accent. Still, you were called auntie because you lived there and because neighbours were soon called uncle and auntie in those days. Uncle Henk and Auntie Mien had first lived on the upper floor of the house, but when the people on the ground floor left, they got the whole upper house around 1959. By then, you had been living on the ground floor in the side room on the street side for about 10 years. It seems there were arrangements with the landlord that you were allowed to stay there even when new people moved in.

My brother remembers that you always wore brightly coloured suits. You probably wore them to work as a typist, because the rest of the day you walked around in a silk peignoir with a necklace with dark stones around your neck. Whenever I visited my friend's house, I would invariably see you shuffling without stockings on thin cloth slippers in the corridor between your room and the kitchen at the back of the house. There you cooked your food around noon (the family ate in the evening) and in between you did the dishes for them. ‘Mien had it easy with that,’ thinks my mother later, who doesn't know what else to say about what the family actually thought about this lodging, because ‘Mien was usually quite frank, but about Martha she never said anything.’

One day, you invited me and my friend to your room. The room, which measured no more than four by three metres, radiated yellow and gold. On one of the walls hung a large painting with a frame of gilded curved wood, which I thought represented you at a younger age, and if so, you must have been rich in the past. The bed and sink were hidden by a large room divider with a light beige covering. Under the window, which had heavy yellow curtains on both sides, was a small table with a nice set of cups and saucers. It was almost Christmas, and on that little table was also a brass stand. You lit the candles that were cased in a small holder. The air that was heated made angels with trumpets float around silently. It was all very special, especially since you never asked us in, the door of your room was always closed. After that Christmas I didn't see you again because when I was nine we moved from Amsterdam. 

As I wrote, you came back into my mind only much later. I hope you don't mind me saying so, but I found it increasingly strange then, you in that side room. It took me little effort to trace your history because, you may be surprised to know, there is a file on you in the National Archives in The Hague. Of you, but also of your husband, because you had apparently had one, although it was completely obvious to me as a child that you were alone.

I read in your file that you had been born in Karlsruhe in 1899, and that you most probably met your husband Marius van Lokhorst there, because he worked there briefly as a military instructor. He was much older, and probably appealed to you because he liked art a lot; you yourself played the piano and painted. You may also have been in a hurry, as you were now approaching your thirties.  In 1933, when you had been married for four years, Marius gave up his military career and threw himself into writing novels and travel guides. They must have been wonderful years. Together, you travelled all over Europe, living in Sicily and Rome. Then you moved into a house in The Hague.

When war broke out, your husband rejoined the National Socialist Movement, NSB. It was a German-leaning movement. Earlier, in the 1930s, he had also been a member, but had been forced to give up that membership as a civil servant. From then on, he quickly made a career in The Hague and you led a comfortable life. In February 1943, your husband became mayor of Nijmegen, an outlying city, but, I read, your husband found it attractive because it was near Germanic soil. Had you been easily accepted as a German in the German- and NSB-dominated administrative centre of The Hague, it was different in Nijmegen, where you were the German wife of an NSB mayor. It seemed best to keep yourself in the background, ‘the less you say the less people talk about you’ I read in a letter you wrote to acquaintances. In September 1944, Nijmegen was liberated by the Allies. Your husband, who had heard how NSB mayors were treated in the already liberated south of the Netherlands, took refuge in Doetinchem, and later in Groningen. You went with him. A few days after the liberation of Groningen, he was arrested, and in late 1946 he was sentenced by the Special Court of Appeal in Arnhem to 12 years' imprisonment, less pre-trial detention.

Do I mind saying that from then on your comfortable life was over? You traded a nice ground-floor flat in Groningen for a loft room and to earn money you went to work as a maid for a family for a meagre wage. Your husband was no help to you; he complained incessantly about his health and felt unjustly treated.

In 1947, you divorced him. Was the marriage really at its end or did you want to show the authorities that you wanted nothing more to do with him? Did you try to make him responsible for your life and NSB membership? It will never be entirely clear. But the fact is that you too were investigated and, according to the documentation, the investigation lasted until 1948. 

I am not going to argue with you whether you signed up to the NSB yourself or whether Marius did it. Nor do I know whether I should believe that it was true what you put forward in your defence, namely that ‘although German by birth, you were able to prove that I was anti-Nazi and that my marriage had therefore become a failure.’ There are documents to the contrary. However, I am particularly interested in the life you led afterwards because I saw how you scurried around Lomanstraat and lived in a room that was only used by my father in our house; he shaved behind the washbasin there.

Perhaps in the summer of 1949, you were 50 by then, with a move to Amsterdam, you hoped to start a new life in this big city. But soon you must have understood that with your German ancestry and your marriage to a prominent NSB member, even though you were then divorced, you would once again have to keep a low profile. The war was only four years over and was still fresh in people's minds. NSB members had also been active in Lomanstraat. They had continued to live in the street after the liberation, and sometimes they were quite nice people, but still, they had been ‘wrong’ and forever held the label ‘not to be trusted’. The woman you lived with, Auntie Mien, had had a very hard time during the war. At her house, like so many in Amsterdam, they had suffered from hunger. They had spent the last months of the war in bed during the day to stay somewhat warm. Aunt Mien's mother was also not fond of such a ‘moffin’ as Germans were called then. Uncle Henk's family also ignored you. But what exactly did they know about your background and what had you revealed? That is impossible to find out now.

I was about seven years old when television came to our house. Aunt Mien and Uncle Henk, who earned better than my father, bought their first car. I watched them drive to Zandvoort with the children in the morning with a bag full of greased sandwiches, soft drinks, and landing nets. Needless to say, you did not go with them, nor did you come to watch television in the evening. In retrospect, the question is whether you ever ate with the family. Whenever a child had a birthday, it was celebrated very festively there. I have a photo of one such birthday: the children are sitting at the table, in the middle is a cake decorated with candles, my mother and Auntie Mien are standing around it and watching. There must be many more photos like that, and on enquiry, there are, but you are not in any of them.

How happy you, not to mention the family, must have been when you finally left, because in 1967, you were already 68, you finally got a house of your own. It was a one-bedroom flat on the ground floor on Westerkade. It was more than you had had in ages: a large room with its own cooking facilities and its own toilet. Around you lived students and people living on welfare benefits. I think those asked you few questions.

Only a few people are still alive who experienced you. None of them really know anything about you. My friend from back then has already passed away, but her younger sister, who experienced you until she was 12, really only remembers that ‘there were always bottles in your room.’ I can imagine. Of course you drank a glass in the evening, because what else were you supposed to do in that room, with no TV, with maybe only a radio? There was only scarce contact with someone in the street and some family but that was limited.

‘You didn't have to pass by her room,’ argues that younger sister when I ask for an explanation for those scanty memories. Indeed: when you came upstairs you passed the kitchen right next to the stairs and then you automatically entered the suite through the back room. But because we lived in the same kind of upper house, I know that the distance between the door of the toilet and that of your side room was hardly more than two metres.

Uncle Henk's sister, elderly, says she found Aunt Martha ‘a strange bird’ (odd duck) when I spoke to her on the phone: ‘You sensed that woman had a war past. I didn't feel any need for contact. I think she was lucky, she was lucky to live in the house with my brother and his wife.’ When asked, my mother first says that when you were young, you were married to a mayor, but after some thought, she corrects herself. Things may have turned out differently: Martha had been the maintenee of some high-ranking government official for a while in her younger years, and the latter had later exchanged her for another. That would have been the explanation that you, Martha had ‘ descended’ all in all. It indicates that people didn't really know how things worked.

In hindsight, it is fairly easy to reconstruct your life history from documents. There is a map from the address system of the Amsterdam municipal archives, there are letters from your husband Marius to his sister Emmy and there are folders in the National Archives in The Hague, Special Justice section after the war. Under the direction of the Ministry of Justice, this judged people who had colluded in the war. There are in that archive two thick folders about Marius and two thinner ones about you. Those thinner folders contain letters and documentation on the progress of the investigation into you, Martha Wagner, who was indeed discharged from prosecution in 1948.

And now, in 2024, your story will be published, along with other stories about women in Amsterdam, both known and unknown. It is important that your story is also included in it. Because it gives a picture of Amsterdam in the years just after the war and how Germans and NSB members were viewed.