Utrecht council want streets named after Prince Bernhard to include Nazi party background

A majority of parties in the Utrecht City Council want “factual information” to be provided from June 1 about Prince Bernhard’s past along two streets named for him on the city’s northwest side. They have brought the issue forward after it was confirmed in October that Prince Bernhard was a member of the Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP, the Nazi Party.

The initiative was presented to the Utrecht City Council by a motion submitted jointly on Thursday by D66, PvdA, GroenLinks, PvdD, and EenUtrecht. These parties together hold 25 of the 45 seats in the Utrecht Council.

Some of the parties previously raised the issue in the Council last month. At the time, Utrecht Mayor Sharon Dijksma said she needed time to reflect on the matter to determine what to do with the new information about Prince Bernhard’s past. “Of course, today’s knowledge may lead to a different view of the naming of a street name,” she said.

She also emphasized that she is curious to see how other municipalities deal with the issue. “I want to be able to look at this in peace,” she said, before the coalition of mayor and aldermen “come to a decision.”

After the motion was submitted during Thursday’s Council meeting, Dijksma reiterated that she believes time to reflect is important. “Also because the archives will soon open up even further; more context can always emerge from this.” Dijksma was referring to the private archives of the Dutch Royal House. Currently, the archive’s collection from before 1934 is available to the public, but this will soon expand through September 6, 1948, the date that Queen Juliana was crowned. The additional 14 years of documentation will be accessible to the public from January 1.

The Utrecht mayor said she has thought about what such information boards about Prince Bernhard’s past could look like in practice. She said she has been considering “a QR code with a Wiki page.”

Moreover, the entire Utrecht City Council was not satisfied with the motion from the five parties, which, for example, was called “very narrow” by a CDA council member. He wondered whether D66, “just like the CDA,” wants to inform people about the past of Che Guevara, on the Utrecht street named after the revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader.

“I think we should indeed look at where else this could be done,” was the answer from D66.