THE DUTCH POLITICAL CONFLICT

WITH THE REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA, 1945-1949

PART 2. DUTCH CIVIL ADMINISTRATORS (BESTUURSAMBTENAREN) IN THE NETHERLANDS INDIES AND NETHERLANDS NEW GUINEA,

1933-1962

Part 2.3. Papers of L.L.A. Maurenbrecher

(1934-1954) Java/Celebes/New Guinea

National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague

on microfiche

Short biography

Lucia Louis Angèle Maurenbrecher was born in Java in 1904. He attended secondary school in The Hague and then studied Indology in Leiden in preparation for a career in the colonial administration. On completion of his studies in 1930 he was sent out to the Indies as junior controller in Yogyakarta. In 1933 he was promoted to controller on the island of Banka, where he served until early 1938. He then received training as controller for “Javanese colonization”, that is, the relocation of people from overpopulated Java to remoter and less crowded parts of the archipelago. In that capacity he served in South-Celebes (Sulawesi) from mid-1938 until the Japanese invasion in 1942. During the occupation he was interned at Makassar and other places on Celebes, recording his experiences in a diary, micropublished in this collection. Following a short stay in the Netherlands after the war’s end, he was appointed assistant-resident in the Mandar district of Celebes, where he resumed the work of “colonizing” Javanese. In January 1948 he became assistant-resident in the greater Batavia area (ommelanden van Batavia), but was later transferred to Purwakarta in the Krawang residency of Java to restore trade, the administration of justice and public health, which had been disrupted by the second “Police action” (December 1948). He remained in that post until after the transfer of sovereignty to the Republic at the end of 1949. From 1950 until 1954 he was assistant-resident in Sorong, West-New-Guinea, over which the Dutch had retained sovereignty.

The papers

His papers are particularly important

• for the efforts to relocate Javanese to Celebes before the war and the attempt to restart this activity after the war
• for details of the Japanese occupation and internment camps
• the political situation in Java in 1948-1949, including relations between the Dutch civil and military authorities
• and plans to colonize New Guinea with Dutch settlers after the loss of Indonesia.