LIBERATED FREE NETHERLANDS
Prof. Dr. Loe de Jong,
Winston Addresses Students..
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In April 1945 it was clear that from the beginning of May there would be almost nothing left to eat for the three and a half million city dwellers in the west. And the worrying question was: can all those people be saved in time? They succeeded.
At the beginning of February, when the Russians already had bridgeheads over the Oder, the Americans attacked in the direction of Cologne and Düsseldorf and the English and Canadians pushed southwards into the Rhineland. The Germans were pushed back in hard fighting. They surrendered Roermond and Venlo. In the first week of March the bridge at Remagen fell into American hands, in the latter the Rhine was crossed in the Rhineland (between Rees and Wesel) by the Canadians and English.
The Americans crossed the river south of Wesel. Shortly afterwards the Americans were across the Rhine in five more places, namely at Mainz, Worms, Mannheim, Spier and Karlsruhe. Seven Allied divisions launched the liberation of eastern and northern Netherlands. Canadians and English forces penetrated the Achterhoek. The Dutch Home Forces, the BS, offered help to the liberators in every possible way. It was difficult to capture the IJssel cities of Doesburg, Zutphen and Deventer from the Germans. Enschede and the rest of Twente were liberated by an English tank division.
On it went, northwards. In Groningen, the Germans held out for a few days. More than a hundred civilians were killed in Groningen. In Friesland in particular, the BS'ers provided important support to the Canadians. They were received with cheers in Leeuwarden, as elsewhere. It was fitting that the Germans from Arnhem, where the English had carried out the airborne landing seven months earlier that had led to a fierce, sustained, futile battle, were now driven out by an English division.
North of Arnhem, it was the Canadians who crossed the IJssel. After entering Apeldoorn, they moved on. A few Germans had managed to escape from Harderwijk. It was a party for the youth, an immense relief, especially for the people in hiding. Two and a half years earlier, one of them had met a Jewish economist on the street in Amsterdam.
PROF. DR. J. PRESSER
He laughed! I said: 'Well, sir, eh' (I won't mention Bernhard's name) 'why are you laughing? There's not really much to laugh about.' Then he said: 'Mr. Presser, believe me, it's over, in a month it'll be over, in a month they'll have capitulated! I must have asked something like: 'How did you come to that conclusion, how did you know that?' He knew: in a month it would be over.
In April 1945, Presser was hiding in a house in Barneveld. He slept there with six other people in hiding in a shelter under the roof.
PROF.DR. J. PRESSER
We saw nothing, we actually knew nothing of our own perception, but it became so quiet, it was as if everyone was whispering and, yes, that evening, the 16th of April, we went upstairs to our shelter, but of course we couldn't sleep because of the tension and at a quarter past two, I remember it exactly, I got up, I went to that little window, looked outside, but I saw nothing, I heard nothing but yes, there was a strange smell. Cigarettes! Other cigarettes! The Canadians are here!
While the Netherlands, except for the west, was being liberated, the Russians launched their offensive towards Vienna and Berlin. The Americans and English surrounded the Ruhr area, where more than three hundred thousand German soldiers surrendered, and penetrated deeper into Germany. Buchenwald became the first concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies. Many prisoners were on the verge of death, others had been murdered by the SS at the last minute.
Eisenhower was deeply upset. It was the reports of their own journalists, photographers and filmmakers that made the people in the Allied countries realize for the first time how much had been suffered in the SS concentration camps. In chapter twelve I tried (no more: tried) to give you a picture of that suffering - a picture of the transports of the prisoners, the humiliating arrival in the camps, the endless roll calls, the exhausting work, the fight for food, the terror of most of the Kapos and the suicides. I told you then that by the end of 1944, of the more than one and a half million prisoners of all nationalities who had been registered in the camps (not counting the millions who had been selected and gassed upon arrival, as it was called) eight hundred thousand had succumbed. For the seven hundred and fifty thousand who were still alive, the most difficult period of all began.
In January 1945 Auschwitz was evacuated. Gigantic transports took place to other camps such as Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Mauthausen. Usually they were first transported on foot, with anyone who could not join them being shot, then by train, often in overcrowded open coal wagons in which the prisoners were dragged along for two weeks, initially in thirty degrees of frost, with virtually no food or drink. In the Auschwitz complex, when the Russians arrived at the end of January, there were still a few present, mainly sick people, but also children who had been used for medical experiments.
Among those saved were more than two hundred deportees from our country. In the remaining months of the war, devastating epidemics broke out in all camps where these prisoners evacuated from the east, if still alive, arrived. A large part of the German railway network was bombed to pieces, so that less and less food entered the camps.
The Reichsführer-SS, Himmler, who had devised the entire camp system, tried at that time to be accepted by the Allies as the new ruler of what was left of Germany - in vain of course. As a result of that effort, he gave permission to evacuate groups of prisoners, mainly women, from some camps to Sweden and Switzerland. But when Himmler heard that prisoners liberated from Buch en wald had taken revenge on Germans, he gave the order that no prisoner was to fall into the hands of the liberators alive. Here and there that order was carried out.
For example, more than a thousand prisoners driven from Nordhausen were driven into a large barn that was set on fire. Twenty prisoners survived. But nowhere did the liberators find more dead than in Bergen-Belsen, where sick and weak prisoners from other camps had simply been dumped for months.
Nowhere else did people suffer so much hunger and thirst. Nowhere else did the epidemics claim so many victims. Nearly forty thousand prisoners had already died when the English reached Bergen-Belsen in mid-April. Fifty thousand people were liberated, but in the days and weeks that followed, eighteen thousand of them, for whom medical help came too late, succumbed.
Of the war images that people had been confronted with in six years, these most strongly convinced the people in the Allied countries of the criminal nature of the National Socialist power. In the days when these images were shown in England and America and in the liberated countries of Europe, that power still had the starving west of our country firmly in its grip. Not only because in North Holland, South Holland and Utrecht the disciplined German units numbered more than a hundred thousand (120,000) soldiers, but especially because the Germans had made an Allied attack considerably more difficult with their inundations.
From the south, there was almost no possibility of advancing. Large inundated areas were part of the Grebbe Line, and further west there were two almost continuous inundation zones. Other zones made the advance from the coast more difficult. The lifting installations of the large locks at Kornwerderzand had been destroyed by the Germans in closed positions, and they kept the large locks at Den Oever closed. The IJsselmeer was so high that new inundations were possible at many points. Worse still: at IJmuiden and Katwijk the Germans could open the sea locks at high tide, which would lead to new inundations.
Breaking through Schielands Hoge Zeedijk would have the same effect. With this water, which could make the west of the country uninhabitable for years, the German Wehrmacht had a terrible weapon in its hands and the Dutch Resistance were not remotely capable of preventing the use of this weapon. Opposing the Wehrmacht was a minority of seventeen thousand BS'ers and of this minority only half had a sten gun. There were also a few light machine guns, sten guns. It was impossible for the BS'ers to undertake anything of significance against the Wehrmacht on their own. At most, they could, as they had done in the east and north, provide assistance to an Allied offensive.
The emergency in the famine provinces was fully known in London and Washington and partly at the insistence of the Gerbrandy cabinet, the board that determined the entire Allied strategy, the
Combined Chiefs of Staff, had ordered General Eisenhower from Washington in March to liberate the western Netherlands by means of a separate offensive. Eisenhower had passed that order on to Montgomery, but neither he nor the English field marshal felt inclined to carry it out. It was to be feared that every attempt to break through the Grebbe Line would lead to new major inundations with catastrophic consequences for the civilian population.
The entire course of the Battle of Arnhem had led Montgomery in particular to the clear conclusion that the western part of the Netherlands was far too vulnerable to carry out major military operations. When he also learned that there was a chance that the Germans in the western part of the Netherlands might be prepared to capitulate separately and in any case to make an arrangement that would make large-scale food aid possible, he gave the order on 12 April to halt at the Grebbe Line. A week later, Eisenhower determined that the three airborne divisions that were in reserve should not be dropped in the western part of the Netherlands but in northern Germany.
These decisions by the Allied commanders were unknown to the people in the famine provinces. They did not understand the situation at all. They knew, most of them from the illegal newspapers that were distributed in large numbers day in, day out, that the entire east and north had been liberated and that the Allies were already on the Veluwe. Why did they not advance further? I already said why: there seemed to be a chance that the Germans in the west were prepared to allow food, perhaps even to a separate capitulation.
Of course, realizing this required contacts with those Germans and it was those contacts that led to a conflict of unprecedented ferocity in resistance circles in Amsterdam and The Hague (because that was where the case was played). This conflict was connected to contradictions in those resistance circles that had already occurred much earlier, actually as early as 1941.
Those contradictions revolved around this question of who would have authority immediately after the liberation. Of course, authority would ultimately rest with Queen Wilhelmina and her ministers, but it was assumed at the time that it could take days, if not weeks, before they would be back in The Hague. So there could be a transition period and the question was who would be in charge then. In November 1918 (then, but more than twenty years ago) the socialist leader Pieter Jelles Troelstra had threatened a left-wing revolution.
No action had been taken in response to this threat, but the memory of it had lingered. This had contributed to the fact that an illegal organisation consisting mainly of officers, the OD, the Order Service, which had suffered heavy losses partly due to its espionage work, was systematically prepared by a new leader, Jonkheer Six, reserve captain of the hussars, to exercise its own military authority in a rather authoritarian manner immediately after the liberation.
This became known to the editors of the two largest left-wing illegal newspapers, Het Parool and Vrij Nederland. They were very concerned about this at the end of 1943, at the time when this was happening, because they knew that there was a chance that Hitler would be overthrown by German officers. One of these officers, namely, Colonel Stähle, son of a Dutch mother (he was hanged after the failed attack on Hitler in July 1944), had contacted two prominent illegal workers, Van Heuven Goedhart, editor-in-chief of the illegal Parool, and Mr. Cramer, an important figure in the Vrij Nederland group. These two had a secret meeting with Stähle in Coevorden. They said that if Hitler were indeed overthrown, the new German government had to immediately remove the entire apparatus of the Reichskommissariat and the Wehrmacht from our country. They also had to ensure that all Dutch people who had to work in Germany and all those who were imprisoned there could return.
MR. J. CRAMER
Stähle agreed with both of these as a matter of course. In our conversation, one episode made a deep impression on me. At one point I remarked to Stähle that the Dutch who would return from the concentration camps would of course also include the Jewish Dutch. Stähle pretended not to hear this and continued the conversation with Van Heuven Goedhart. And when I had repeated this emphatically several times, Stähle turned to me nervously and tensely and said only: 'They are no longer there.' Er hat es gewusst, and as a German he was deeply ashamed of his people who had plunged into such an abyss of degeneration and barbarism.
The message about this conspiracy against Hitler was sent to London via the Swiss route, but neither the Dutch government nor Churchill believed it. The government did do three things. The first was to inform Six that there should be no question of the illegal organisations exercising their own authority. The second was to request the illegal organisations to enter into a form of coordination. To this end, representatives of more than twenty groups met secretly in Amsterdam at the beginning of July 1944. Their conclusion was that they had to arrive at a classification of the illegality.
DRS. J. MEIJER
Initially, a classification into three groups according to the technique of the resistance was considered. For example: assistance to people in hiding, illegal press, armed resistance. But that did not work very well, because in the end the only correct classification turned out to be a classification according to the motives of the various groups, the motives that had led to the resistance attitude. And that meant, to use the word, that a certain political division was established, a left sector, a middle sector, a right sector. These sectors were formed during that meeting - in three corners of the room the groups that wanted to form themselves to the left, to the middle or to the right gathered.
The representatives of these three sectors, together with a representative of the OD and with the socialist leader Drees, who maintained contacts with the other leaders of the political parties, would form the Contact Committee. It had to determine the policy of the illegality and issue advice to London. Drees became chairman of this committee. But Drees was also included in the College of Confidential Men that was formed (that was the third that was done by London) to take all kinds of preparatory measures in the administrative field.
DR. W. DREES
It seemed to us first of all important and in accordance with what the government had indicated, to ensure that at the moment of liberation there would be an orderly administration and that we therefore had to be certain how the top positions would be filled. In consultation with the government in London we discussed as much as possible and determined who would be there: the secretaries-general of the departments, who would be commissioners of the queen of the provinces, who would be mayors of the large cities, while the persons requested for that in turn sought employees, the commissioner of the province, the mayors also for the other than the largest cities.
The College of Confidential Men, unlike the Contact Commission, therefore had no function in the illegal struggle. It was seen by the illegal workers as a college of magistrates who, during the hunger winter under great difficulties (there was hardly any traffic, you had to be inside by eight o'clock in the evening), prepared all kinds of administrative measures for after the liberation. It clearly showed a spirit of resistance, but was not part of the organised resistance. And it was precisely that college that was informed about the German willingness to make a separate arrangement for the occupied West of the Netherlands.
In March, Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart had a meeting in Germany with Speer, the German minister for armaments. Both knew that they had lost the war. Hitler had ordered that every bridge, every factory, every other installation in Germany from which the Allies could derive any advantage, be destroyed in time, but Speer had decided not to carry out this order. He told this to
Seyss-Inquart, who returned to The Hague with the intention of preventing, if at all possible, new destruction in the West of the Netherlands as well. But he knew that if the Allies attacked there, the Wehrmacht would call in the water. On the other hand, it was clear that if the Allies did not do this, further destruction would be avoided and an arrangement for food aid could be made.
This was what the Reichskommissar said at the beginning of April to Hirschfeld, the Secretary-General for Economic Affairs, to whose policy the illegal movement had developed great objections. Hirschfeld ensured that Seyss-Inquart's statement came to the attention of the Confidential Men. They decided not to inform or consult the illegal movement, that is to say the Contact Commission. They understood that Seyss-Inquart ran a certain risk by deviating from Hitler's order to cause maximum destruction everywhere. They also understood that the illegal movement would object most strongly to making any arrangement whatsoever with a figure such as the Reichskommissar. An arrangement
presupposes good faith on both sides, but how could one be sure of the good faith of the man who in 1938 had helped to hand his own fatherland Austria into the hands of Hitler and who had brought the greatest disaster to the Netherlands since his installation in May 1940?
The Trustees also had doubts. On the other hand, they knew that the famine would later claim hundreds of thousands of victims and that the west of the country was extremely vulnerable. This was made clear to them by Colonel Koot, commander of the BS, by Six, who had become one of Koot's closest associates, and by an engineer officer, Major Kok, who had led the OD's espionage work and who was in regular contact with engineers from water magement.
The Trustees decided to pass on Seyss-Inquart's offer to the government. They did so. The ministers had the same doubts as the Trustees. This doubt also existed with Churchill, who also felt strongly that, if an arrangement were to be made, one would have to deviate from the demand for unconditional surrender. But he too saw no way out.
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On 16 April he signalled to Eden, the British Foreign Minister, who was in Washington to discuss the matter with the Americans. Churchill added: 'It is a terrible thing to have an old nation like the Dutch wiped out.'
One day later, 17 April, the Wehrmacht, which wanted to keep the locks at Den Oever firmly in its hands and which feared Allied airborne landings in the Wieringermeer, decided to flood the entire polder. The Wehrmacht could have done that in moderation, but no: the dikes were blown up in several places and the polder filled up. On the day the Wieringermeer began to fill up, that happened to Hannie Schaft, who was twenty-three when the bullets hit her in the dunes near Bloemendaal. The illegal movement was deeply indignant because (that was the bottom line) they did not want to negotiate with the enemy but to fight.
The dutch newspaper t' Parool wrote: 'One does not talk to Germans, one shoots at them until they are dead or surrender.' A second paper, Je Maintiendrai: 'All of you who have taken this path, what do you have against people like Hirschfeld and his henchmen?' Vrij Nederland wrote that Eisenhower had 'had to beg to drop a few divisions of paratroopers and to advance as quickly as possible to Utrecht and Amsterdam'. Fierce protest telegrams were sent to Eisenhower and the cabinet in London on behalf of all the illegal groups.
The cabinet was also shocked by the flooding of the Wieringermeer. Gerbrandy informed Churchill that they now preferred the liberation of the whole of the western Netherlands within two weeks. Answer from
CHURCHILL
'I do not think there is any chance that the purification of the western Netherlands will be completed in any connection with the date you mention, namely 30 April. In any case it would be characterised by fighting and inundations and the destruction of the life of the western Netherlands.' However understandable the reactions of the resistance were, they had given too little weight to the hard fact of the vulnerability of the western Netherlands. It was this hard fact that determined Allied policy.
The first thing that was now arranged in all sorts of telegrams by Eisenhower with the occupying forces was that immediate aid would be given to the population of the cities in the west. Aid came in the form of dropping food, first at the three airfields Waalhaven, Ypenburg and Valkenburg, and at the Duindigt racecourse.
But more needs to be arranged. Thirty thousand tons of food are ready in North Brabant. This needs to be transported to the famine provinces by barge and military trucks. Precise arrangements need to be made for this. This is done in a primary school in Achterveld, close to the front. Seyss-Inquart would come with seven Dutch experts for the food aid. His chief of staff, General 'Bedell Smith, would act for Eisenhower, and as commander of the Dutch Armed Forces, Bernhard himself was also present.
PRINCE BERNHARD
So we arrived there on that thirtieth of April and this was the first time since 1936 that I forgot my wife's birthday, because we were so busy with what we had to do that neither my officers nor I thought about it that day. We were waiting there, I had come with a Mercedes, which the BS had discovered in the north, that was the RK-1, Mr. Seyss-Inquart's Mercedes, which he no longer needed, and leaning against this car I was waiting and then saw him arrive there for the first time, fortunately accompanied by a large number of good Dutch experts, who accompanied him, experts in the field of transport, food supply and such to be able to make those arrangements, and we greeted the Dutch very warmly and we had brought cigarettes for them, Canadian cigarettes I remember, and were able to give them something to eat for the first time in a long time. The Germans got nothing.
When everything had been arranged for the food aid, 'Bedell Smith wanted to persuade Seyss-Inquart to surrender completely.
BERNHARD
He introduced this very politely and actually gave him to understand that he would be very wise to stop now, then we could make all further arrangements much more easily, but Mr Seyss-Inquart was of the opinion that history would then give him a bad image - to I don't know who - but he could not be persuaded by a word to want to talk seriously now, whereupon at a certain moment General 'Begg Smith lost his patience a little and said: 'I don't understand you, nor your reasoning nor why you don't want to give in, because you will be hanged anyway.' And Seyss-Inquart who said: 'That leaves me cold', whereupon 'Begg Smith looked at him very coldly and said: 'That will be it then.
According to the arrangement made in Achterveld, the dropping of food began on Monday 2 May at six new points, Schiphol, Haarlem, Alkmaar, het Gooi, Gouda and Utrecht. In total almost three thousand tons were dropped. In the fields where this happened, hundreds went to work. Then the supplies were transported to points in the cities where they were sorted and transferred in fixed quantities to the same stores that had been used for the distribution of food aid from Sweden and Switzerland. This took several days.
In the meantime, transport from the large depots in North Brabant had also started. The trucks that were loaded there drove to Rhenen, where Dutch civilian drivers replaced the Allied military drivers. The Dutch drivers delivered their cargo to storage facilities near the large cities. These transports along the road (soon supplemented by transports to the port of Rotterdam) started on the same day that the number of dropping fields was expanded: on Wednesday 2 May. Two days later, Friday 4 May (Hitler had committed suicide in the meantime), Field Marshal Montgomery accepted the capitulation of all German armies in north-west Europe somewhere in northern Germany.
The news of this capitulation was broadcast in the evening (but people in the west still had to be inside by eight o'clock) by the BBC and the channel 'Herrijzend Nederland'.
MILANSTADT
I still remember jumping out of the cupboard where the radio was and suddenly jumping around the room like a madman. A little later I dragged my wife out into the street, because I thought: nobody has a radio and we have to tell our friends anyway. You never thought for a moment that it might be dangerous to go into town at that moment, at a forbidden hour, while there were rancorous Germans all around. But you went, because you lived in that war very intensely. Your sorrow was more intense. Your hatred was fiercer. Your joy was greater. There was a lot of laughter during the war, strange as that may sound, precisely because of the tension in which we lived. Friendships were also closer during the war.
And perhaps that was why we felt the need to be with friends that evening. Some had saved a bottle of wine for that occasion that we had waited so long for, and so we drank a glass here and a glass there, something we had completely lost the habit of doing, so that we soon began to stagger a little. In the twilight we walked home, on not very steady legs, and we heard some shooting on the way, but we paid no attention to it.
Until at one point on the Beekstraat in Arnhem a car drove up with Grüne Polizei, guns at the ready, and our first impulse was: run away quickly. But immediately afterwards: no, pretend nothing is wrong and calmly continue walking. The car drove past, turned onto the St. Eusebius square and less than thirty seconds later suddenly shots were fired, close by. There were victims in Arnhem that evening. This madness that people had endured miserable war years only to lose their lives on the evening of the German capitulation - I have never really been able to process that. Bread in the shop, place of delivery, dropped off by the Red Cross.
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Their graves and memorials can be found throughout our country. It happened in the May days of the year 1940. German soldiers, overwhelming in armament and numbers, overwhelmed the Netherlands. In the occupied country, the laws were dismantled, the churches threatened, the press muzzled and the free practice of science and art forbidden. More than a hundred thousand Dutchmen of Jewish blood were hunted to death, hundreds of thousands of men were imprisoned for forced labor.
Then men and women stood up in the midst of the people. Peaceful citizens became arsonists, saboteurs and spies. They guarded the freedom of speech in illegal writings. In Amsterdam, there was a run on the Groene Amsterdammer and the daily newspaper Trouw also mentioned the names of the victims and helped the persecuted. Many died in captivity or before the firing squad. Remember that what was threatened yesterday can be in danger again today and tomorrow. Protect it and be vigilant.
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