Authority, Vigilance, Paranoia: Placing the Dutch Civil Militia in the History of the Paramilitary Radical Right, 1918–1940

The formation of the civil militias ( burgerwachten ) in 1918 across a range of Dutch cities, in response to the threat of revolution, has received extremely limited attention in both Dutch and international historiography. They have never been studied in their own right, having been considered a largely local and politically irrelevant phenomenon. In fact this large voluntary organisation existed both locally and nationally, and recruited over 100,000 men and women, and had ties to state and fringe groups abroad. Reconstructing the formation and development of the militias, and analysing its character as a paramilitary and strikebreaking organisation, this article demonstrates that the militias were an important ideological formation. The militia institutionalised anti-Bolshevism and radical right paramilitarism in the Netherlands, and as such had a role to play in the counter-revolutionary network that was developed across Europe.