The Royal Family and the Dutch state have benefited financially from so-called comfort women who were forced to work in Japanese brothels in the Dutch East Indies between 1942 and 1945. That concludes research platform Follow the Money Saturday.
Japan occupied several Asian countries before and during World War II. In those areas it instituted a system of ‘comfort women’: women were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in brothels. According to journalist and author of the book Lifelong war Griselda Molemans, some 500,000 women were subjected to this practice of sexual exploitation in 23 Japanese-occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. The Japanese government still refuses to apologize for the ‘comfort women’ system.
The Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies was also occupied by Japan in 1942. Some 350,000 Japanese soldiers were stationed there until the end of World War II. A Dutch research report in the 1990s showed that at least 65 and probably 350 Dutch women became victims of the system. That conclusion, writes Follow the Money on Saturday, conceals the truth: a total of at least 70,000 women of all nationalities in the Dutch East Indies were abused in forced brothels.
War Financing
Based on a hitherto hidden report by the Dutch military intelligence service NEFIS, which existed during and after the Second World War, Follow the Money writes that Japan financed the war with money earned in the forced brothels. Part of the money earned would have been deposited in war banks and the Netherlands would also have benefited from this. When the Japanese war banks were dismantled after 1945, the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij, with the Dutch state and the Royal House as major shareholders, received a share of the proceeds.
Part of those revenues consisted of money earned in the forced brothels during the occupation period. Follow the Money estimates that only in the last three months before the Japanese capitulation, some 25.76 million guilders were deposited from the brothels into the accounts of war banks. Converted to the current time, that amount, indexed, would amount to more than 156.5 million euros.
The Ministries of Economic Affairs and Finance cannot confirm these amounts to Follow the Money. Finance: “The ministry does not have the requested information.” The ministry is said to have “failed to verify what happened to the said brothel money and who might have been aware of it.”
Also read this obituary by ‘comfort girl’ Jeanne Alida ‘Jan’ Ruff-O’Herne (1923-2019): After fifty years of silence she told her story
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