One of the last and most precious IAV acquisitions before the beginning of the
Second World War was the archive of IAV co-founder and president Rosa Manus
herself.33 Manus was of Jewish background, and both her international family ties
and her feminist and peace activism - including efforts beginning in 1933 to help
refugees from Germany - made her deeply aware of the threat posed by the Nazis.
This political awareness also made her want to store her own papers in an allegedly
safe place. On February 2,1940, she wrote to her long-time friend Carrie Chapman
Catt: "The European situation is certainly very grave and one cannot think who will
make an end to it. I fear this desaster [sic] may last a few further years. I have started
to clear out many things, f.i. a great part of my documents and letters which I have
gathered since 30 years have gone to our International Archives; much of my library
had already gone there too. It will prove more useful in the future to have it all there
and as everything was already filed, it was quite easy to remove things".34
The IAV archival collections and policies were clearly shaped by contemporary
policies and politics, from the wish to preserve the legacy of the first wave of the
women's movement and to create a safe place for feminist materials in a Europe
engulfed by Nazism and fascism, to the initiative to collect and publish materials
that could counter government-sponsored attacks on women's hard-won rights.
World War II and the Quiet Years that Followed (1940-late 1960s)
The IAV, as it turned out, was anything but the safe place Rosa Manus and her
contemporaries had envisioned. The Germans, who occupied the Netherlands on
May 10,1940, generally kept a relatively low profile in the first year of the
occupation. However, in June 1940 they had already paid two visits to the IAV.
On July 12,1940, the Sicherheitspolizei removed the entire contents of the IAV and
subsequently transported it to Berlin.35
There seem to be two reasons why the IAV was so high on the Nazi list of unwanted/
dangerous institutions. The first, suggested by Posthumus-van der Goot, was the
word 'International' in the institute's name, which for the Nazis signified
Communism and/or Jewish connections; it was and still is a standard anti-Semitic
fallacy that 'the Jews' were/are involved in an international and/or Bolshevik
conspiracy.36 The second and related reason was Rosa Manus's political activism,
which had included the organization of a big and high-profile congress of the
International Peace Campaign heldin Brussels in 1936 that was accused by its right-
wing opponents of being a 'Communist' affair. The political tensions at the time
already ran so high that Manus was summoned for questioning by the Brussels
police and had her fingerprints taken.37 The historian Myriam Everard has found
that in 1939 Manus was on a list of alleged 'left-extremists' of the Dutch Centrale
Inlichtingen Dienst.38
After the closure and looting of the IAV in July 1940, Rosa Manus was questioned by
the Gestapo several times. She was finally arrested in August 1941 and held for some
weeks in the prison for political prisoners in Scheveningen. Thereafter, she was
transported from one prison to another in Germany for a period of seven weeks,
finally to be incarcerated in Ravensbriick, the main Nazi concentration camp
primarily intended for women prisoners. According to the Dutch Red Cross she died
on April 28,1943 in Ravensbriick - one of the camp's estimated 92,000 victims.39
Current research, however, suggests that she was murdered in the beginning of
1942.40
The post-war re-opening of the IAV took place in October 1947, with Willemijn
Posthumus-van der Goot succeeding Rosa Manus as president. The IAV Board made
many efforts to trace and retrieve the stolen IAV property. Contacts with women and
women's organizations in Germany and Eastern Europe were used to find out the
whereabouts of the books and archives, but mostly in vain. There were only two
minor successes. Thanks to Dirk Graswinckel, a member of the Dutch government
committee for the recuperation of goods from Germany, in 1947 the IAV regained a
tenth of its book collection. In 1966 Ivo Krikava, a librarian in Hradec Kralové in
Czechoslovakia, discovered four books with the stamp of the IAV in them, which he
sent back to Amsterdam. After that, decades went by without further news.41
The first twenty years or so after the war more generally were a relatively quiet period
for the IAV. As far as we know, no systematic efforts were made to actively collect
archives and other materials, either internationally or nationally. The IAV's earlier
international perspective was largely replaced by a more inward-looking and
nationalist focus, its internationalism having collapsed under the weight of the
wartime losses. The nationalist focus was visible in a reemerging interest in or
identification with the Dutch Queens, an interest that had characterized the Dutch
women's movement since the late nineteenth century, and now resurfaced as a
consequence of World War II. The most successful post-war activity of the IAV was
the publication of the book Van moeder op dochter in 1948. The title of the book
referred to Queen Wilhelmina's abdication and her daughter Juliana's accession
to the throne, as well as the broader history of Dutch women and the Dutch
ARCHIEFVORMER EN PARTICULIER ARCHIEF
33 Rosa Manus's archive (one linear meter) principally consists of her papers related to the International
Woman Suffrage Alliance (from 1926 International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship);
the International Committee for Peace and the League of Nations (Peace Committee); the Peace and
Disarmament Committee of the Women's International Organizations; the Dutch National Council of
Women; and the International Council of Women.
34 Mineke Bosch (ed.) with Annemarie Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship. Letters from the International
Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902-1942 (Columbus 1990) 257.
35 Aletta Institute, archive IAV, inv. no. 53, documents concerning the closing of the institute and the looting
of the collection by the German police.
36 "As the late Israeli historian Jacob L. Talmon noted, 'Hitler singled out the international Jewish-Marxist
revolutionary as his main target, as the prototype of Jewish evil-doer, as the microbe destructive of all Aryan
civilization' when he unleashed the Holocaust on European Jewry" (Robert Levy, Anna Pauker. The Rise and
Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley 2001).
37 Aletta Institute, archive Elly Winkel, inv. no. 1, diary of Elly Winkel, secretary of Rosa Manus during the
preparation of the congress of the Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix (RUP) in 1936.
158
FRANCISCA DE HAAN AND ANNETTE MEVIS THE MAKING OF THE COLLECTION INTERNATIONAAL ARCHIEF
VOOR DE VROUWENBEWEGING (iAV)
38 www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/RapportenCentraleInlichtingendienstl919-1940 (last accessed
July 21, 2010).
39 There is no final confirmation of her place and date of death. Although contemporaries (during and in
the early years after the war) mainly described Manus as a victim of Nazi anti-Semitism, we think she was
primarily targeted as a political opponent of the Nazis; her arrest and imprisonment preceded the
deportations and mass murder of Dutch Jewry, which began in July 1942. For more details about Rosa Manus
and her international activities, see De Haan, 'A "Truly International" Archive'. On the history of
Ravensbriick, see, among others, GermaineTillion, Ravensbriick (Paris 1973); Jack G. Morrison,
Ravensbriick. Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp, 1939-45 (Princeton 2000); Bernhard Strebel,
Das KZ Ravensbriick. Geschichte eines Lagerkomplexes (Paderborn 2003), as well as the official website
http://www.ravensbrueck.de/mgr/index.html. Thanks to the efforts of mainly Hilde Brand, Rosa Manus
was included in the exhibition on Jewish women in Ravensbriick in 2008, 'Jüdische Frauen im
Konzentrationslager Ravensbriick'
40 See further: Everard, 'Manus, Rosa'.
41 Annette Mevis, 'Women's Archives Recovered', in: The Return of Looted Collections (1946-1996).
An Unfinished Chapter (Amsterdam 1997) 115-117.
159
