Jan Van Dijk 

Chair of Victimology, Tilburg University (Netherlands)

EDITORIAL 

Kees Schuyt, emeritus professor in sociology at several Dutch universities, published a comprehensive biography of the late Willem Nagel (1910- 1983), professor of criminology at Leiden University between 1956 and 1976 ( Kees Schuyt, Het Spoor Terug, Balans, 2010). Willem Nagel, honorary member of the World Society of Victimology, is sometimes mentioned as one of the founding fathers of victimology besides Hans von Hentig and Benjamin Mendelsohn. Nagel published extensively in academic journals about the need to give more attention to victims of crime both in criminological research and in criminal justice in the 1950ties. According to Gert Kirschhoff , secretary general of the WSV, in a contribution to the Handbook of Victimology, Nagel would probably have been more generally recognized as founder if he had published his pioneering articles in English rather than Dutch (Shoham et al, 2010). In 1963 he, however, repeated this plea in a brief article in the widely read reference journal Abstract in Criminology, titled The victimological notion within criminology. In this article he argued for integration of victimological knowledge within criminology. In his view studies of crime victims should not be conducted in isolation. Victimology should always keep sight of the relationships of crime victims with their offenders before, during and after their victimization. He stressed the crucial importance for crime victims of the offender’s trial and sentencing. For Willem Nagel key victimological issues were the making of (sincere) excuses by offenders to their victims, the victim’s (sometimes disproportial ) need for retribution and the ultimate, hard-won option of forgiveness. These moral preoccupations, grounded in Nagel’s Calvinist upbringing, seem to be as fundamentally important for victimology now as fifty years ago.

In the Netherlands, Nagel has played a distinct role in the early debates on victim assistance. It is evident from my own writings that I am much indebted to Nagel, whom I am proud to call my principal teacher (I wrote my master thesis under his supervision) and whom I proudly succeeded as professor of criminology in Leiden in the 1990ties. He was one of the keynote speakers at an historical congress at the University of Nijmegen in 1973, Het Slachtoffer in de Kou (Victims Left in the Cold). This event is generally regarded as the beginning of the Dutch victims movement. It inspired me to carry out interviews with crime victims as a beginning lecturer at Nijmegen University in the early seventies. At the congress speakers argued for the establishment of a State Compensation Scheme and specialised victim support. Nagel, although generally in favour of these provisions, expressed reservations about setting up victim support schemes. He argued that victim support should not be allowed to become an alibi for the criminal justice system, in the sense that it would act as a political alternative to the much more needed recognition of the victim as stakeholder of criminal justice. With hindsight, victim support in The Netherlands has not acted as alibi for non-action. It has rather been instrumental in securing improvements in the rights of victims within criminal procedure. But it cannot be denied that the criminal justice establishment at the time regarded the funding of modest services for victims outside the legal system as an attractive alternative to victim-centred law reform. With his warnings Nagel has certainly alerted me, as the future founding president of Victim Support The Netherlands in 1984, to the dangers of such diversion of the victim to the world of therapy and care.

At a Symposium on August 26 on the occasion of the official launch of the biography in the Museum for Literature in The Hague, I noted in my speech that many of Nagel’s ideas and interests remain of topical interest. They are directly relevant for current research issues such as the impact of victim impact statements (in the Netherlands: het spreekrecht) and the role of victim advocates at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. I also elaborated on the possible relationship between Nagel’s personal history as a leader in the armed resistance against the nazi occupiers in 1940-1945 for which he was decorated by general Eisenhower after the liberation.

Although he suffered from symptoms that hint at post traumatic stress, he categorically refused treatment from prof Bastiaanse, a Dutch psychiatrist specializing in therapies for holocaust survivors and resistance heroes at Leiden University. He became in those years a public figure in the Netherlands for his fierce criticism of the lenient sentencing of war criminals and collaborators and the re-armament

of West Germany. He warned for new manifestations of fascism in the Western world. He was regarded in this capacity as the informal spokesman of the former resistance. In other words he opted for survivor activism rather than for victim therapy.

According to me, Willem Nagel would have found great satisfaction in noting that victim advocates nowadays play a prominent role in the trials before the Yugoslavia court and the ICC. He would have rejoiced in hearing that the widows of Srebrenica are preparing a lawsuit against Dutch army officers implicated in the genocide committed against their husbands by the Bosnian-Serbian army. Many of his ideas about the need to give voice to the survivors of war crimes have by now been incorporated in national and international law and are being implemented at the ICC in the Hague.

In preparation of his biography Schuyt analysed the contents of Nagels’s personal archive. For me the most remarkable discovery of Schuyt’s research are six filled- in questionnaires dating from 1937 about the perceptions and needs of crime victims in the Dutch city of Oss. Nagel had started work on a PhD dissertation on the crime problems of the city of Oss in the mid 1930-s. He had planned to collect data both on a sample of offenders and victims in Oss, in order to conduct a detailed and comprehensive study of crime in one city. Following the ideas of his supervisor, Prof Vrij, Nagel was especially interested in the moral impact of serious crimes on the broader community. This interest in the impact of crimes seems to have put him on the track of studying the responses of victims to their victimisation. Unfortunately his study material and the first drafts of his PhD have gone missing during the war. After a botched attempt to arrest ( and liquidate) him by the German police in 1944, his house was confiscated by the authorities. After the war all his personal belongings had disappeared. He reconstructed his study in Oss, using mainly data on offenders from court files, and finished his PhD in 1947 (The Criminality in Oss). Although his book was well received by the academic community, the victimological component that remained, was much more limited than originally planned.

The content of the questionnaire suggests that the original empirical study about the victims ́s side of the story would have been nothing less than revolutionary. Nagel interviewed his victims not only about their material damages and pain and suffering but specifically also about their attitudes towards the perpetrators and the outcome of the criminal trial. He asked whether they had met the perpetrators and whether these had expressed remorse. He also asked whether they had attended the trial as claimants or out of interest and whether they had found the sentence imposed satisfactory.

Unfortunately, Nagel has refrained from repeating these well- designed interviews with crime victims after the war. In fact he published extensively about the needs of crime victims but has never ever conducted any interviews
with victims again. Perhaps his own war experiences had made such direct confrontation too painful. In my mind, there can be little doubt that if this empirical victimological study would have been completed and duly published around 1939, or in 1947, Nagel would now be generally recognized as one of the founding fathers of international victimology. His empirical results on the victim as stakeholder of criminal justice would have greatly enriched both criminology and victimology. The nazi’s who failed to destroy him personally but succeeded in destroying his unique victimological data, have much to answer for.

In the Netherlands, reviews of this biography highlight that his warnings for re-emerging fascism in Western Europe seem eerily topical, now that many young Muslims in Europe are in the grips of fundamentalist ideologies and populist, anti-immigrant parties have, even in cosmopolitan The Netherlands, become fashionable again. Schuyt’s biography reminds us.