Word: wilhelmina
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Realism. No one has given Wilhelmina more trouble in recent years than Adolf Hitler, and from no ruler has the Führer taken, at times, such straight talk. She protested in a personal letter to Herr Hitler the death sentence passed on Marinus van Der Lubbe, the Dutch Communist, for his alleged part in the famed Reichstag fire. When the Nazis confiscated the passports of German bridesmaids and guests to her daughter's wedding, she stated with quiet directness: "This is the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves, whom I have found worthy...
Rich at Home. In the course of Wilhelmina's reign The Netherlands' population has risen from 5,000,000 to 8,500,000. More important, the country has changed from a predominantly agricultural to an increasingly industrial nation. Cheese, butter and tulip bulbs are still important exports, just as windmills, wooden shoes, dikes are still a part of the Dutch landscape. But more typical of The Netherlands in the 20th Century are its huge international banks, its thriving merchants, its busy manufacturers...
...islands, home of orangutans, Komodo dragons, hornbills and headhunters, producer of pearls, spices, rare woods, stretches 1,300 miles from North to South, 3,000 from East to West and are inhabited by 60,000,000 brown-bodied souls, not counting some 1,500,000 Asiatics and Europeans. Queen Wilhelmina has never visited her Eastern Empire (although one of New Guinea's highest peaks is named for her), but she can hardly fail to appreciate what a windfall came to her little country the day in 1602 when daring adventurers of the Dutch East India...
Almost all the well-to-do families in The Netherlands have their East Indian securities, and not the least investor is the House of Orange-Nassau. Century ago King William I invested $1,600,000 in the East. Large profits accrued, the capital multiplied many times again. Wilhelmina, an astute business woman herself, is a large owner of tin mines, just as she has a moneyed finger in the pie of nearly every enterprise of magnitude in Holland. Her income was once estimated at $5,000,000 a year, making her by far the richest monarch of Europe...
...Worried. Wilhelmina therefore has every possible stake in getting her country safely through World War II. A devout Christian, she can hardly be in sympathy with the moral or spiritual aims of either Hitler or Hirohito. Orderly, she is excruciatingly shocked by the international disorders of this, her second, World War. Thrifty and patriotic, she must hang on to her and her country's fortunes to the last drop of her Dutch blood. Helpless, about all she can do is keep one face East, one face West, and hope...