Wiking is the memoir of Dutchman Henk Kistemaker’s service in the infantry and armour elements of the Waffen SS’s 5th Division fighting on the Eastern Front during the Second World War.
Kistemaker was born in November 1922 in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. He enlisted in the SS in February 1941 for several reasons.[1] Firstly, ‘excitement and adventure’ lured him and it was ‘better than staying at home being unemployed’. Secondly, his father was ‘very pro-German and member of the pro-German political party, the NSB’.[2] The NSB was the pre-Second World war Dutch equivalent of the Nazis. Finally, his father encouraged him to enlist as his father hated communism.[3]
He served from 1941 to the end of the war in the Wiking Division, serving in the infantry from 1941 to 1943 and in the armoured division as a radio operator in Panther tanks. A variety of factors motivated Kistemaker during his service.
Small group cohesion was important in motivating him for some of the war. Kistemaker’s son Peter said that Kistemaker recalled that the ‘army was the best time of his life’. Kistemaker said that he and his mates ‘literally went through fire for each other and were prepared to die for each other. You will never find a spirit and attitude like that in civilian life’. After the war, he missed the ‘band of brothers’ feeling.[4] However, his ability to bond with his comrades declined after he lost close friend Karl Bender in battle. He ‘was completely shocked’ by Bender’s death and it ‘hit me hard, very hard, I lost a good friend. We lost comrades before, but that was different. This was a friend of mine and emotionally this hits you like a ton of bricks. Later in the war, getting more experienced, I learned that ‘making friends’ only meant I would lose them again. So to protect myself from going, time and again, through the grief of loss, I stated to adopt a more superficial approach to the new recruits. Yeah, I would talk with them and become friendly, but never wanted to go that far that they would become my friend. Before you know they were killed and you had lost a friend again.’[5]
He appears to have had a form of intrinsic motivation that kept him going a combination of faith that he could not be killed, caution and superstition. When he was ‘18 years old and very naive. I didn’t think I could be killed. I received the best training and I was in the best army in the world…Sometimes you just have ‘bad luck’. There is nothing you can do about that. But most of the times, I learned, you can influence your faith to the good. After a while I learned the sound of every grenade coming in at us…If you had time to live and learn, you grew slowly into a veteran at cheating death…I lost many good friends in those years, sometimes only by trivial unnecessary accidents, and I survived’.[6]
Kistemarker said ‘I had no political involvements, neither was I interested in the person of Hitler. We didn’t talk about him. We just did as we were ordered and a soldier never questions during wartime’.[7]
Kistemaker’s account is devoid of emotion and compassion and this was noted by the editors.[8] Kistemarker said the reason that he did not have any emotion was that he could not write about his experiences. If he did it ‘would only paralyse my memories and writing capacities…I still had to keep myself ‘switched off’ many years after the war ended.[9]
On the question of the atrocities carried out by Axis units on the Eastern Front, Kistemaker did not mention any. Dutch historian Evert-Jan van Roekel has proved that the Wiking Division was responsible for war crimes. Peter said his father ‘was not a man to plead guilty or acknowledge involvement in any off this. That was not in his character. Do I believe him? I don’t know.’[10] The only incident that Kistemarker refers to was the shooting of an armed child by one of his comrades, probably in self-defence, and he commented that ’not one of us felt ‘proud’ of killing this little boy’.[11]
This account is useful in its rarity as it is one of the only English language accounts by the estimated 25,000 Dutch volunteers to serve in the SS during the war. It is clear that the war still affected Kistemaker over 50 years after it ended and his account shows how he sought to survive by internalising his own emotions during and after the conflict.
[1] Henk Kistemaker, Wiking, A Dutch SS-soldier on the Eastern front (Just Publishers, 2019), p.22.
[2] Ibid., p.11.
[3] Ibid., p.22.
[4] Ibid., p.11.
[5] Ibid., pp.63-64.
[6] Ibid., p.49.
[7] Ibid., p.10.
[8] Ibid., p.12.
[9] Ibid., pp.139-140.
[10] Ibid., p.9.
[11] Ibid., p.33.