W.H.M. van den Hout (1915-1985)

Wilhelmus Henricus Maria van den Hout is generally considered as a peripheral figure in the history of Dutch literature. In the 1950s and 1960s he wrote the legendary Bob Evers series, under the pseudonym Willy van der Heide. With sales over five million copies, Bob Evers inspired multiple generations of boys to take up reading. Van den Hout's behaviour during the Second World War, however, was far less inspiring. Writing under the pseudonym Willem W. Waterman, he made propaganda for both the German occupier and for sympathetic organisations and associated media. For example, he wrote several copies of the pro-German and anti-Semitic pulp magazine De Drie-Stuivers-Roman and a series of vile anti-Semitic and anti-British articles in the daily newspaper De Residentiebode. The zenith of his propaganda activities was his contributions to De Gil, a supposedly ‘resistance magazine’ paid for by the occupying forces that was intended to sow uncertainty about the Allied advance. Both in the magazine and in the radio program of the same name that was broadcast towards the end of the war Van den Hout undeniably spread German black propaganda. Van den Hout himself, however, has always maintained that he merely undermined the level of propaganda in De Gil and was instructed to do so by both the resistance and various domestic and foreign intelligence services.

After the war, Van den Hout soon attracted the attention of institutions that prosecuted collaborators and carried out purges. The Committee for the Purification of the Press sentenced him to a publication ban of twenty years, a sentence that was reduced to ten years on appeal. The Special Judicial Service, the body responsible for prosecuting political offenders, kept Van den Hout in pre-trial detention for three years, but eventually released him without conviction in 1948. By then, the first four parts of the Bob Evers series had already been written.

Until the mid-1960s, Van den Hout was able to finance his bohemian lifestyle, usually sprinkled with copious amounts of alcohol, with the royalties from his Bob Evers books. In those years he regularly attracted attention in the bars in Amsterdam that he frequented by loudly proclaiming his fascist convictions. After a conflict with his publisher over the sale of the rights to the Bob Evers books, in 1965, Van den Hout slid further to the fringes of society. In the late 1970s, his career experienced a brief revival when he wrote two new parts of the Bob Evers franchise for another publisher and published a book of ‘true’ stories from the 1950s. Although he regularly appeared in the press again to draw attention to himself and Bob Evers, it turned out that Van den Hout was contractually bound to his old publisher, which limited his renewed involvement in the series to two titles. Van den Hout slid back into oblivion, except among loyal Bob Evers fans who regularly approached him with questions about new adventures of their heroes. Van den Hout died in 1985 at the age of sixty-nine. In addition to three wives, four children and a legendary series of boys' books, his main legacy is his reputation as a self-cultivating opportunist.

The biographical research into Van den Hout for this PhD thesis is positioned in the context of the socio-political climate of the interwar period, taking into account the economic depression, the blossoming fascism and the way in which the Netherlands struggled politically and militarily in the period prior to the Second World War with the question of whether it could remain neutral again. Additionally, it is placed in the context of the Second World War itself and the reactions to it in the arts and the media; lastly the biographical research will be positioned against the background of the supposedly bourgeois 1950s as a prelude to the more turbulent 1960s and the rise of youth culture. Researching a wide range of source materials, the following question is examined: Was Van den Hout merely an adventurer and provocateur or did he actually propagate National Socialist ideas?

The PhD research is supervised by prof.dr. Hans Renders and dr. Koen Vossen.

Kees Vroege is a historian and freelance author. He previously worked as a copywriter and screenwriter. In his master's thesis at the University of Groningen, he investigated how the Committee for the Purification of the Press and the Special Judicial Service treated W.H.M. van den Hout after the war; and the reason he was set free without conviction.

email: kees.vroege mac.com