[1] Mussert's image as a reliable politician and his pragmatism allowed him to unite the different types of fascism and contributed to the party's success.

Soon after the Dutch defeat on 14 May 1940, the imprisoned European NSB members in the Netherlands were set free by German troops.

In June 1940, Mussert delivered a speech in Lunteren in which he called for the Netherlands to embrace the Germans and renounce the Dutch Monarchy, which had fled to London.

On the national level, Mussert had expected he would be made leader of an independent Dutch state allied to Germany; in reality, however, the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart was in charge of an occupation government.

He chose to work with the remaining establishment as he realised that the NSB lacked popular support and talented candidates for more important functions.

Although Seyss-Inquart had proposed that Mussert should be made Prime Minister of the Netherlands, he was only given the honorary title 'Leader of the Dutch People', and he was allowed to build a marginal State Secretariat, but he was given little or no actual power.

Unlike Mussert, Rost van Tonningen was in favour of incorporation of the Netherlands into a Greater Germanic Reich.

Beginning in the summer of 1943, many male members of the NSB were organized in the Landwacht, which helped the government control the population.

On 5 September, most of the NSB's leadership and many members fled to Germany and the party's organization fell apart, on what is known as Dolle Dinsdag (Mad Tuesday).

In these final months of the war the movement fractured further and further, and Mussert ordered measures against leaders who behaved 'dishonorably' in September 1944.

[4] Practical demands of the NSB were: abolition of individual voting rights, corporatism, a duty to work and serve in the army, limits on the freedom of the press, laws against strikes.

It also began using titles like Leider for Mussert (Leader; similar to Duce or Führer), Kameraad for men (comrade) and Kameraadske ('comradess', a neologism) for women.

A blue wolfsangel (a hooked symbol of a wolf trap) on a white disc was set against an orange field.

Most of these people were not part of the strong pillarized organisations surrounding the socialist unions, and the Protestant and Catholic churches.

[10] The Catholic Church warned against the party's ideology in 1936 and banned support for the NSB in 1936 on pain of exclusion from the sacraments.

The party also had a branch in the East Indies, which enjoyed some modest popularity among the mixed Dutch-Indonesian Indo population, but began to rapidly decline after the NSB started to adopt more racialist and blut und boden views, and was banned on 10 May 1940, in reaction to the European NSB entering into collaboration.

A grim joke after World War II, made by Dutch Resistance fighters, is that former NSB members insisted that their acronym actually stood for "Niet So [zo] Bedoeld" or "I didn't mean it like that" as they attempted to downplay their treachery.

Before the war the socialist Social Democratic Workers' Party and Nederlands Verbond van Vakverenigingen (Dutch Association of Trade Unions) coordinated counter-demonstrations and propaganda with a separate organization 'Freedom, Labour and Bread'.

Although the Germans had no problem with banning the socialists, communists and Christian-democrats, it was considerably harder for the NSB to convince them to get rid of their fascist rivals.

The most important rival for the NSB was the Nederlandsche Unie, an organisation founded in 1940, which wanted to rebuild Dutch society within the cadre of the changed balance of power.