Perhaps the most famous example of Dutch hostility to their eastern neighbours concerned the royal princesses’ unfortunate habit of marrying Germans. Princess Juliana – the current King’s grandmother – married the German Prince Bernhard in 1937, overlooking the fact that he had served in the SS. As Bernhard’s official biography later put it, with some understatement: ‘the news that Princess Juliana was going to marry a German prince was not received with unmitigated joy by the Dutch people.’
