| Abstract | It was not until 1981 that the tenth volume of Louis de Jong's The Kingdom of the Netherlands during the Second World War appeared in which the disaster that befell the small rural town of Putten at the beginning of October 1944 is dealt with. Here, De Keizer analyzes the history of the heterogeneous collective memory of Putten, revealing the uses and means of remembering and forgetting and the strategies of historiography as a politics of memory. From the history of the postwar construction of the remembering and forgetting the events of 1/2 October 1944 one learns that any new historical investigation of Putten has to begin by casting off half a century of the politics of memory.
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