In the course of doing the research for my first novel, Obligatory Happy, Portrait of a Family, in the National Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) in Amsterdam, I stumbled across an article in German in the file on Professor Laqueur. It gave a detailed account of how the Jewish director of the hormone factory Organon was reputedly guilty of sexual attacks on the factory girls on an extensive scale. This was apparently publicly known in Oss, but because the majority of the inhabitants were dependent on the factory for employment, no one dared to intervene. The article quoted at length from several newspaper articles in De Telegraaf and Nationaal Dagblad, which recounted how not only was the director
guilty of these offences, but also that Professor Laqueur, co-owner of Organon, was aware of these assaults and hadn’t interfered. Although the tone of the article was clearly anti-Semitic, nonetheless it roused my interest and I wondered to what extent these accusations had a basis in
truth.
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