King Willem-Alexander has always struggled with the role of the royal family in World War II. “My great-grandmother could have played a different role in that.”
In the seventh episode of the podcast Through the eyes of the King Willem-Alexander looks back on the Remembrance Day in 2020, which took place on an empty Dam in Amsterdam due to the corona crisis.
In his speech, the king said that many citizens did not feel heard and supported during the corona crisis. He then made a comparison with the Second World War and how citizens then felt insufficiently supported by the then Queen Wilhelmina, Willem-Alexander’s great-grandmother.
During the war, Wilhelmina regularly addressed the people via Radio Oranje. She was fierce about war criminals, but hardly spoke about the victims and about what the Nazis did to Jews, for example. Many people did not know about the existence of concentration camps due to the limited means of communication. Historians believe that Wilhelmina could be of more significance here.
King ‘has been struggling for so long’ with family’s performance
“It’s something that won’t let go of me,” says the king in the podcast. “I thought, now is my chance to come out with the personal element of the family – which I’ve struggled with for so long myself – and say, that just wasn’t right. That despite people knowing what was happening, was not put forward in the speeches of Radio Oranje, that there was still silence.”
King Willem-Alexander thinks it is a bad thing that a lot was known – “certainly later in the war” – but that it was not discussed.
“Not in detail, but people knew that there were extermination camps, they knew that Jews were being murdered. And there was no warning in time. My great-grandmother could have played a different role in that. For me, that is something that I have always struggled with and at that point I could come to terms with that.”
2023-05-04 08:48:44
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