Can't Beat the Dutch

Last week the wry-crossed flag of Germany floated blood-red over counting houses and office buildings where Continental Europe's No. 1 commercial nation. The Netherlands, had transacted the rich business of her vast empire. But bare as a tooth socket was many a captured vault and till. For months their contents had been quietly moving to safer places and in the few hours while her Army threw itself before the Nazi drive. Holland's great commercial machine completed the fastest and biggest business evacuation in world military history.

Driving in with the troops, Nazi finance officers found furniture, littered paper, empty safes, little more. Gone was most of Holland's gold (some $690,000,000) into hiding in the U. S. and Britain. Gone was the bulk of her vast holding of international securities ($1,076,000,000 in the U. S. alone); the last bundle of engraved paper to be rescued was lugged from Amsterdam by a British officer who pushed off from Ijmuiden to England in a commandeered motor boat after Amsterdam had fallen. Gone was her stock of diamonds: the last store, worth several million dollars, was snaked out of Amsterdam to London by a diamond merchant after the terror had struck.

For this swift and methodical evacuation, The Netherlands could thank a worldwide commercial system that for years has kept as many topflight Dutch businessmen at work across the seas as it has in the home offices behind the dikes. Typical is husky, eagle-nosed Emile Constant Zimmerman, who after 20 years in The Netherlands East Indies, went to Manhattan five years ago as Netherlands Indies Trade Commissioner. With Holland's flight, control of the Dutch business empire went to dozens of Emile Zimmermans, from London to Batavia, from Manhattan to Shanghai. This week, sleepless but hearty, Emile Zimmerman was able to give U. S. business a good, if sketchy, idea of readjustments in the empire while he drank coffee from office Gouda china in Manhattan's new Holland House.

New headquarters of most Dutch businesses are in Batavia on the Java Sea.

There, last week, by simple notification to the Government, moved four of Holland's largest banks (Javasche Bank. Neder-landsche Handel Mij., Nederlandsche In-dische Escompto Mij. and Nederlandsch Indische Handelsbank). There also have moved the headquarters of the two larg est steamship companies (Rotterdamsche Lloyd and Stoomvaart Nederland) in the Indies trade. In London, Manhattan and Batavia, operators of the Dutch fleet of 1,500 merchantmen have already set up joint offices and Dutch shipping is doing business as usual, except that Holland ports have been dropped from call, except that in war zones its ships join Allied convoys. Up to the time Germany invaded the Low Countries, Holland had lost more merchantmen to mines and torpedoes than had France.

Managing Director J. M. de Booy of big Royal Dutch Co. left Holland in a fishing trawler, turned up in London a few days after the blow. Meanwhile, a squiggle of the pen had moved Royal Dutch's headquarters to Curasao, West Indies. At week's end, sentries of the Empire like Emile Zimmerman were thankful that while Dutch office buildings were still in Holland, a vast amount of their assets was still out of Adolf Hitler's reach. And much of their salvage in cash and paper had steel-ribbed protection against finagling by Nazi financiers, Fifth Columnists, frightened Dutchmen. As he had already done in the case of Danish and Norwegian investments and cash in the U. S., President Roosevelt decreed that Dutch and Belgian holdings could not be moved without Government license.

One thing the sentries could not save: the guilder. Until last week the guilder was one of the most actively traded currencies on the New York money market; its quotations had held steady at around 53AND for over a year. Last week the guilder (like the belga) disappeared from world money markets altogether. In its place, to carry out previous commitments and to get back into what remains of world trade, the Dutch worked mightily to substitute the Java florin. For the most part independent of the guilder and backed by the favorable trade balance of the Indies, the florin has suffered little or none from Hitler's blows.

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