Politics & Power Quote by Kurt Student

The cool, bureaucratic phrasing is the tell: this is violence narrated as procedure. Kurt Student describes an assault on The Hague as if it were a logistical memo, not a gamble that hinged on surprise, speed, and terror. That tonal flatness isn’t accidental; it’s a soldier’s way of laundering a risky, politically loaded operation into something that sounds inevitable, even reasonable.

The intent is explicit and brutally modern: decapitation. “Get a hold upon the Dutch capital” and “capture the Government offices and the Service headquarters” isn’t about winning a battlefield so much as hijacking the state’s nervous system. Take the ministries, seize the communications, paralyze command and control, and you can force surrender before conventional defenses matter. It’s the logic of shock warfare translated into administrative targets.

The subtext is faith in coercive symbolism. Occupying “Government offices” isn’t just practical; it’s theatrical. It aims to manufacture the image of sovereignty changing hands, to make resistance feel pointless and disorganized. Student’s language also reveals what airborne and commando doctrines promised in 1940: the idea that a small, audacious force could collapse a country by grabbing the right buildings, the right people, the right switchboards.

Context sharpens the irony. The Hague attack during the German invasion of the Netherlands was part of an early test of large-scale airborne operations - bold, improvisational, and far from frictionless. The quote reads like a plan written after the fact to emphasize purpose over mess, as if intention itself could stand in for results.