At Living History events there is always the risk that things go wrong and people get upset.
One group doesn't know what to expect from another group, someone goes too far and someone else perhaps doesn't go far enough.
Can a German soldier frisk a suspicious civilian, may an American call his German POW a 'damn kraut nazi', may a civilian sabotage a German vehicle?
Things that happened in reality may be things reenactors dont want to reenact or might even get really angry about when confronted with them in the field.
There has to be a balance, not just to try and stop reenactors from getting angry with each other but also because we have to take the public into account.

To avoid serious problems we have written these guidelines.
We are the only serious Civilian Living History group in the Netherlands and thus right in the middle of everthing.
At the events we interact with both sides, axis and allies.
We want to make sure we all know what we can expect from each other.
Groups who decide to follow these guidelines know what they can expect from each other at the next event.

Of course there are enough possibilities to work outside these guidelines, set up scenes where both sides go further to show a certain aspect of war.
These guidelines are not there to stop people from reenacting certain things, they are just there to make sure you dont reenact something with someone else who doesnt want to be part of such a scene.
You dont have to follow the guidelines, but when you do decide to do something that goes against them, at least you know you have to talk it over with your 'enemy' first.
Simply shooting someone on the spot can cause big problems if your victim has big problems with reenacting something like that or if that person is already taking part in another scenario that is now ruined because everybody has seen him or her die!

These guidelines are ment for West Front reenactors, the way people treated each other there was very different from what was common at the East front.
Not all reenactors seem to realise that you can't behave the way you did to the partisans near Stalingrad, to someone who carries a underground newspaper in the small streets of Amsterdam.

Slowely but surely German reenactment is becoming acceptable in the Netherlands.
It may be difficult to understand for foreigners, but it is still a very touchy subject.
We have to be careful about what we reenact, not just because we want to avoid upsetting people but also to avoid German reenactment becoming unacceptable at events in the Netherlands again.

There are still people between the audience that lived trough the war or that because of other reasons, dont want to see certain aspects of the war.
No matter what your personal opinion is about this, we have to respect how these people feel, we will simply never know what they went trough and why they feel the way they feel.
They lived trough it, we should respect their feelings.

These guidelines were also written because many people still have a wrong idea about how German soldiers in general behaved towards the population of occupied countries.

At the bottom of this page you willl find the seperate chapters this website has.
I can advice you to read them all and not just the rules that apply directly to you.

Finally
Al these guidelines are first and foremost based on research, historical authenticity is the most important motive behind them, not political correctness.
We discovered that most authentic behaviour actually fits in with what many people think is acceptable to reenact.
So very few consessions had to be made.

The Guidelines were written for our Dutch Civilian group, so its mostly based on the situation in the Netherlands and around how Civilians would be affected by certain actions.

If there are any remarks or if you have research information about any of the subjects, please let me know and I will involve them into the article.
I am sure there are still things that need improving, I am sure there are people out there with evidence that shows a different light on what we have written here.
So please send me your stories so we can see if we can make the guidelines even more authentic and impartial.

By using these guidelines we can hopefully get more authentic events where both Allied, Axis and civilian groups can show what some of the war looked like.

 

	Richtlijnen in het Nederlands
	Guidelines in English
	Richtlinien in Deutsch