Louis de Jong

Louis de Jong (b. 1914) is a historian who worked in London during the Second World War for Radio Orange, which broadcast regularly to the occupied Netherlands. In 1945, he was appointed director of the newly established Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Having gained national fame with his television series ‘The Occupation’ he published the first volume of his magnum opus, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog in 1969. The last and twelfth volume appeared in 1988, later complemented by two volumes of appendices and reactions to the work.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands During the Second World War

Deel 1: Voorspel

(SDU Uitgevers, 1969, 664 pages)

No event shocked twentieth-century Dutch society so deeply as the German invasion on 10 May 1940. It put a sudden end to a long history of intransigent neutrality. The First World War had passed the Netherlands by, but the Second World War the country was entangled in until the German capitulation on 5 May 1945. The fate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945 has been recorded by Lou de Jong, for many years director of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, in a major work running to twelve volumes, which became an unprecedented bestseller.