Contribution of New Communist Party of the Netherlands

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the anti-fascist victory in Europe. For us, this is not just a symbolic milestone. It is a political moment — one that demands clarity, commitment, and action. As fascist and reactionary forces gain ground once more, we must remember not only who defeated fascism, but how and why. We commemorate — and above all, we continue the struggle.

Fascism in the Netherlands was not a historical accident, nor simply a byproduct of Nazi occupation. It reflected the same crisis found across Europe: a capitalist system in decline, turning to violence and repression to preserve itself. The National Socialist Movement
(NSB), founded in 1931, embodied this crisis. It defended Dutch capitalism and colonialism, and aligned ideologically and practically with Nazi Germany. Its members were not passive collaborators: they conducted surveillance, spread propaganda, and recruited for the SS.

They were agents of fascist class war.

Fascism also operated as a colonial weapon. In Indonesia, the NSB gained support among Dutch settlers who relied on fascist violence to suppress anti-colonial uprisings and defend monopoly interests. Colonial repression was not incidental, it was the logical extension of fascist imperialism, used to secure profits and suppress national liberation.

In Suriname, the NSB helped enforce racial segregation laws and supported the colonial police apparatus that suppressed Black workers and revolutionary anti-colonial militants.

NSB sympathisers occupied administrative roles and collaborated with the Dutch colonial state to surveil union organisers and enforce the hierarchical labor codes that kept Afro-Surinamese and Javanese communities in subordinate positions.Fascism here functioned as a tool of colonial domination, defending Dutch capital by criminalizing resistance and preserving the plantation economy through violent coercion.

This link between fascism and imperialism reveals the material function of fascism as a political strategy of the ruling class: used to smash the workers’ movement, stop revolution, and restore capitalist control through terror.

The working class was the first to resist. In February 1941, tram drivers, dockworkers, and other labourers in Amsterdam and beyond launched a general strike against the persecution of Jews and the Nazi occupation. Led by the Communist Party, the February Strike was the first mass protest in Nazi-occupied Europe explicitly sparked by anti-Jewish violence.

Organized in response to pogroms in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, the strike mobilized over 300,000 workers across industries. It was not spontaneous, it was the product of underground organising, political discipline, and class consciousness. Though repressed by fascist police and military force, the February Strike revealed the revolutionary potential of the organized proletariat to confront national occupation and to oppose racialized state violence as a structural expression of capitalist crisis.

We remember comrades like Hannie Schaft, Henk van Moock, Gerrit Kastein, and Anton de Kom: communist partisans who organised sabotage, gathered intelligence, and engaged in armed resistance. They were not isolated heroes, but disciplined cadres in a revolutionary movement rooted in proletarian internationalism and anti-imperialist struggle.

Internationally, we reaffirm the decisive role of the Soviet Union and the Red Army. Over 27 million Soviet lives were sacrificed in the struggle to destroy fascism at its core. This was not just a military victory, it was a defense of socialism and working-class hope. The Soviet war cemeteries (Sovjet-Erevelden) in the Netherlands remain as physical reminders of that sacrifice. Yet today, that history is distorted into a “neutral tragedy.” We reject that lie. The murder of our Soviet comrades was not a random act of violence, it was class war, aimed at destroying socialism and crushing international solidarity.

Today, the same system that gave birth to fascism is once again in crisis. In the Netherlands, refugees and migrants are scapegoated for the effects of capitalism: housing shortages, collapsing healthcare, and economic insecurity. Far-right campaigns, like those in Albergen
and Ter Apel, mobilize against asylum centers and fuel racist panic. But these campaigns are not isolated phenomena. They are legitimized by “respectable” bourgeois parties like the VVD and NSC, which use the same reactionary narratives to distract from privatisation, speculation, and capitalist class rule.

This reactionary politics is not limited to the far right. Centrist and liberal parties have passed laws restricting protest, militarised Europe’s borders, and expanded police powers. Under the guise of “public order,” they criminalise resistance and repress social movements. The Administrative Prohibition of Radicalising Organisations Act, for example, enables the banning of anti-imperialist organisations under the pretext of security. A clear tool for silencing dissent.

They vote for military expansion, enforce repression, attack workers’ rights, and impose austerity through budget cuts to housing, healthcare, and social services to preserve capital.

They give speeches of remembrance while participating in the same structures of domination that fascism once built: surveillance, exclusion, and war.

Anti-fascism today must be systemic. It must confront not just far-right parties, but the entire system that enables them: from NATO militarism and EU border violence to the criminalisation of protest and the persecution of Palestinian solidarity. Every major party in
the Netherlands, whether “right,” “centre,” or “progressive,” supports this imperialist framework. Any anti-fascism that does not confront capitalism and imperialism is no anti-fascism at all.

As communists, we understand fascism not as an aberration, but as a material response to crisis: a class weapon of the bourgeoisie. That analysis, grounded in dialectical materialism and shaped by the concrete material conditions we face, must guide our struggle.

That is why we do not stop at remembrance. Across the Netherlands, we are building local peace action committees: spaces where workers, youth, and migrants come together to expose NATO propaganda, confront racism and war, and build unity through struggle, from housing defense to anti-war resistance.

To commemorate the anti-fascist victory is not merely to look back, but to move forward.

Victory was not inevitable. It was won through sacrifice, organisation, and the political clarity of those who dared to fight. It was led by communists, workers, and oppressed peoples.

That legacy does not live in state ceremonies or polished textbooks. It lives in our struggle to build a world free from fascism, imperialism, and capitalist domination.

We remember, and we fight.