SD COME ALONG
Prof. Dr. Loe de Jong,
The German army or the Dutch authorities
The consequences of the SD, Are YOU coming along!!
The German army or the Dutch authorities The management of Medisch Contact gave advice that was followed by almost all Dutch doctors. The regulation with which the occupier had established the Chamber of Doctors bluntly stated that every doctor was a member.
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Every doctor received a registration form in 1942. Almost all doctors refused to fill it out and, as a result, refused to pay the prescribed contribution. A few of them were then fined a thousand guilders (comparable to ten thousand guilders today) in early 1943. A clever lawyer then found a way out for all the other doctors. The regulation concerning the Chamber of Physicians stated that a doctor could declare that he or she was renouncing the practice of medicine. Almost all doctors then wrote a letter to the president of the Chamber of Physicians, a member of the NSB, in which they informed him that they were renouncing their profession (which automatically meant that they were no longer members).
That is why that designation suddenly disappeared on that Thursday morning. But all those doctors continued to practice their function, because they were authorized to do so. The news of the action spread like lightning. The support of public opinion is so great that a few doctors who did not want to participate in the action are simply forced by their patients and the neighborhood to change their attitude. While here and there NSB members in their anger still scribble that established designation on the walls of the doctors, a compromise is reached. According to a demand of the Reichskommissar, all the pastings are undone after a week, but pressure to behave as a member of the Chamber of Physicians is no longer exerted. Seyss-Inquart more or less abandons the Chamber of Physicians.
On the Saturday evening following this Thursday of the doctors' action, a spectacular attack takes place in Amsterdam on one of the buildings of Artis, where the municipal population register is located. Almost half a year earlier, the sculptor Gerrit van der Veen, the writers Willem Arondeus and Johan Brouwer and the curator of the Amsterdam municipal museums Willem Sandberg had noted that this population register forms the basis for the cooperation that the government in Amsterdam provides to all kinds of coercive measures by the occupier.
It must therefore be destroyed. The preparation takes months, also because the building is under police guard, but on that Saturday evening at the end of March 1943, Van der Veen and Arondeus enter the building with seven helpers, including three students, using a trick. They eliminate the police officers outside and the other guards inside, take the personal cards from the steel drawer cabinets in a frenzy, throw them into piles, set the piles on fire, also place some explosive charges and disappear. Here and there in the building, whose windows have been blown out by the explosion and the fire, a tremendous havoc is created. However, the explosions and the fire do not destroy the filing cabinets and only fifteen percent of the personal cards go up in flames.
A few dozen people knew about this attack in advance. The story of one got through to an NSB member. He got the SD involved and received a reward of thirty-five hundred guilders for his betrayal. The result was that the SD captured all those who had entered the building and a number of the most important helpers, except for Gerrit van der Veen. Thirteen men, including Arondeus and Brouwer, were sentenced to death and executed a few months later.
Two weeks after this attack, which all of Amsterdam, indeed the entire country, knew about, the students gave a new impetus to the spirit of resistance. The occupier consulted with the pro-German Secretary-General of Education, Professor Van Dam, appointed by the Reichskommissar in the autumn of 1940 and previously a professor at the Municipal University of Amsterdam, at the end of 1942 whether a large number of students should not be sent to Germany as workers. This leaked out and the result was a huge commotion among the students. Even greater commotion occurs when, after the attack on General Seyffardt in early February, as mentioned, six hundred students are locked up in the Vught concentration camp.
All universities and colleges come to a standstill. The occupier and Van Dam want to get them going again. Most of the six hundred arrested are released, but the occupier now demands guarantees from all students. In mid-March, a decision by Van Dam appears in the Ordinance Gazette which includes the requirement that every student must sign a declaration every year, for the first time after a month, on 10 April, that he 'will comply with the laws, regulations and other provisions applicable in the occupied Dutch territory in good faith and will refrain from any action directed against the German Reich, the German armed forces or the Dutch authorities, as well as from actions and behaviour which endanger public order at the institutions of higher education, given the prevailing circumstances.
Moreover, Van Dam's decision is a consequence of a decree of the Reichskommissar which states, among other things, that 'in order to guarantee the total commitment to the European struggle against Bolshevism' every student can be called up for work deployment after completing his studies.
After the closure of Leiden University, there are still nine universities or colleges in eight municipalities. The college of student representatives formed in the course of 1942 that leads the student resistance therefore calls itself the Council of Nine. This Council will make an effort, firstly, to persuade the Senate of professors at every university or college to prevent the signing of that declaration of loyalty and, secondly, to persuade the students to refuse to sign that declaration.
A.J. VAN DER LEEUW
Because education was at a standstill, no one had anything else to do but talk about that statement all day long. And sometimes the mood in those discussions threatened to change in the direction of: well, let's sign after all. With our local contact group we tried to prevent that as best we could. At night we stenciled pamphlets and typed hundreds of envelopes for them, and if we noticed that there was a weak spot somewhere, we sent a 'talk-squad' to it. Others, we specifically selected the board members of the associations, had the task of convincing the professors that the contact group was not a bunch of hotheads.
The board and Senate of the Catholic University of Nijmegen go the furthest. Chaired by Archbishop De Jong, the board decides on Wednesday 7 April that the university will close.
PROF. MR. B. D. H. HERMESDORF
On Friday the Senate met. That meeting lasted only a few minutes. I asked whether the decision of 7 April could be approved and with one exception (that was a German professor, L. de J.) all twenty professors present attached their support to the decision. Monsignor De Jong, as chairman of the board, had personally urged me to make the decision known to the students. That happened: on Saturday 10 April the decision was hanging in the main building, with the important message for students that there would be no opportunity to sign the declaration in Nijmegen. At my home, on the Groesbeekseweg, some travel gear was ready, because I and my family expected that the occupier would soon show me another place to stay. That the latter did not happen remains a mystery to this day.
Nijmegen is the only institution of higher education where the declarations of loyalty cannot even be signed. Conversely, the Technical University in Delft is the only one where the Senate of professors decides by a majority of votes to advise the students to sign the declaration. As a result, the resistance group of the Delft students has to make an extra effort.
IR. B. SUURENBROEK
The Delft Student Contact Group produced a stencil on a particularly rickety stencil machine, owned by the college, which was sent to all students just in time. Students were visited and edited throughout the country. There are usually few students on Saturdays and those who came here on April 10 to draw were received at the station, at the tram stops, and here at the main building. Unfortunately, we had to conclude that an exceptionally large number did draw.
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A quarter of the Delft students sign. Nationally, only one seventh does so. Eighty-six percent of all students (at that time there were almost fifteen thousand in the whole country) refuse to sign the declaration of loyalty. It is a slap in the face for Van Dam and for the occupier. The aligned press is silent about it, but everyone who is in contact with the student world hears about it and rejoices. A much more general measure is being prepared on the German side, which was an idea of the Reichsführer-ss, Heinrich Himmler.
All Dutch conscripts who were prisoners of war in our country after the German invasion and some of whom were granted leave to return to the Netherlands shortly afterwards (conscripts who had all been released from captivity by Hitler) are called up to be transported as prisoners of war to German country where they will be put to work. Of course, not all three hundred thousand men have to be transported at the same time; it must be done successively in groups, per regiment, All those who work in agriculture or at companies that work for the Wehrmacht will be allowed to stay in the Netherlands.
Himmler made the proposal to Hitler at the beginning of March and he approved it. But neither the gradualism nor the exemptions are mentioned in the Announcement by Christiansen that appears in the press on Thursday evening, April 29. The Wehrmachtbefehlshaber in den Niederlanden orders that the members ('the', all of them, L. de J.) of the former Dutch army are immediately (no gradualism, L. de J.) taken away again as prisoners of war.
It is this Announcement that leads to an explosion of anger. After everything that has happened or has had to endure in the invaded and occupied country since May 1940, after all the attempts to impose a foreign ideology on that country, after all the forms of coercion, injustice and robbery that have been witnessed, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
The text of Christiansen's proclamation appears on the ANP telex network in the morning for publication in the evening papers. A newspaper in Hengelo immediately passes the message on to some of the largest factories. Three thousand workers work at the Stork machine factory.
TJ. ROORDA
On the afternoon in question I was here in the big factory and heard the rumour of the proclamation. I then went to the head porter to inquire whether this was correct. It turned out to be correct. Then I immediately went into the workshop, in the England department, the big milling shop, where I spoke to the boss and several other people and they knew immediately what they had to do. From there I went to the foundry. There too I spoke to several people and I had to egg them on a little bit, but still it went quite quickly and then I went back to my own department and there too the matter was actually already rolling. I then looked around Hengelo for a while and could see that the other factories were also following Stork's example and that within an hour practically the whole of Hengelo was at a standstill. That was the strike, the strike that we had actually always hoped for and that had now suddenly, in one moment, become a reality.
From Hengelo, a Stork operator calls a factory in Almelo to say that they are striking, and she tells them why. That factory in Almelo is going to strike and other factories there are doing the same. It is no different in the largest industrial city in Twente, Enschede.
G.J. ASSINK
I was working as an apprentice typesetter at the daily newspaper Tubantia, the Van der Loeff company. That Thursday afternoon we received the message that there was a strike. For us the problem was: how do we spread this? We thought: the telephone, that is the solution. We called about thirty companies in Enschede. And we said: 'Guys, throw it in!
Bakers gather in Vriezenveen That happens. Workers leave all the big companies in Twente. Construction workers, painters, window cleaners join in. A school empties. Shops close and strikes are held elsewhere. In Zwolle, the telex message arrives at a local newspaper. Here, the management only has to give a sign and the entire company goes on strike. Strikes break out in Vaassen on the Veluwe that Thursday afternoon.
At Philips in Eindhoven, sit-down strikes occur in several departments. In Heerlen, the Staatsmijn. Maurits, with its ten thousand employees, provides a quarter of the entire coal production. In the evening, the newspaper reads that Christiansens are coming to work on the night shift, but they refuse to go down into the mine. How does the occupier react? In The Hague, Rauter is warned in the afternoon by the SD from Arnhem that there are strikes in Hengelo. He immediately orders the Waffen-SS battalion stationed in Arnhem to be sent to Hengelo. It arrives that Thursday evening, but that fact does not prevent the strike movement from spreading on Friday morning.
In Almelo, all schools go on strike. In Vriezenveen, the bakers meet to consider whether they should perhaps stop baking bread. Intercity bus transport in Twente comes to a standstill. Most farmers refuse to give their milk cans to the milk drivers who have to take them to the dairies and one sees all over Twente that the milk drivers return home with empty carts. Of the twenty-four Twente dairies, thirteen go on strike. In Leeuwarden it is market day that Friday. Three factories and all municipal companies go on strike and the market visitors return home with the news that Leeuwarden is on strike.
Fierce strikes continue to break out in the Kop van Overijssel, in Groningen, on the Veluwezoom, in Arnhem, in Eindhoven, where all of Philips and the entire municipal staff go on strike. In South Limburg, nine out of ten miners stay home. In the west of the country, strikes are taking place in many places, least of all in Amsterdam, where people remember the German terror from the days of the February strike. That worker from Stork-Hengelo had already noticed this on Thursday.
TJ. ROORDA
When I got home in the afternoon and told my wife what was going on, she said resolutely: 'That has to be carried further.' 'I agree with you, I'm going to Amsterdam. Whether I can get there by tram, I don't know, but I will get there.' I came by railway, unfortunately, they were still running. In Almelo I did notice that the strike was already going on there too, but the further west I went, the less I saw of it. In Amsterdam there was no sign of it at all.
There were strikes in Amsterdam on Friday, in two companies. But you could say that on that day, April 30, 1943, with the exception of parts of North and South Holland and Utrecht and the largest part of the rather isolated province of Zeeland, the entire country was on strike. And the occupier feared that it could spread to occupied Belgium and occupied France.
On Friday morning he announces the so-called SS police summary justice for the four provinces of Overijssel, Gelderland, Limburg and North Holland. One reads on posters and also in the newspaper that evening; 'The SS and police units will shoot without delay and without warning when gatherings of any kind take place.' And Rauter orders that the shots must be fired. SS summary justice courts are set up in five cities. They must immediately sentence strikers to death.
The youth feast on the milk that has not been delivered to the dairies Saturday 1 May (Saturday was still a normal working day at the time) the decree of Seyss-Inquart 'concerning the announcement of police summary justice for the occupied Dutch territory' is posted everywhere. So it now applies to all provinces. But the strike continues.
Duitse patrouilles rijden rond en schieten raak. Van de directies van de bedrijven eist de bezetter lijsten met de namen en adressen van stakers. De inlevering van zulke lijsten wordt door nagenoeg alle Twentse fabrikanten geweigerd. In Friesland sluiten alle scholen, bruggen worden er opengedraaid, melkpramen tot zinken gebracht en op verscheidene plaatsen doet de jeugd zich tegoed aan wat niet bij de zuivelfabrieken wordt afgeleverd. In Nieuwe Pekela, Groningen, komt het tot een incident.
P.J. STAVAST
The NSB mayor allowed the civil servants to continue working. The strikers would not accept that. There was a large crowd here and when work was still going on at eleven o'clock, the town hall was stormed. The mayor was dragged outside after the portrait of Mussert on his head had been smashed. He was then thrown into the canal by a number of citizens. He was standing in the water up to his chest, the NSB pin still sticking out above it and only after he had thrown this pin away and shouted 'Oranje Boven' was he allowed to climb the bank. A whole procession accompanied him to his home, where he was called out: 'Greetings to his wife, and must mår snel 'n dreu unterbroek aan hou.
In Nieuw-Buinen, Drenthe, people go to a place on Saturday evening where, they know, a young farmer will address them, Bé Trip.
MEVROUW TIESING-BOES
He told us that we had to stop mu bók in Nieuw-Buinen. We were not allowed to wait any longer, we were not allowed to watch the people being taken away. He said: 'We have to join in now.' We were so impressed by what he had said, we were so convinced: we have to join in, so no one would go to work anymore. 'We will meet here again on Monday morning', said Bé, 'and then we will check whether everything is going well.' On Sunday morning, after church, they took him from his house nearby: two Germans and two NSB members. (So he had been betrayed, L. de J.) They put him in a car and took him to Groningen, to the Scholtenshuis. (That's where the SD was during the occupation, L. de J.) They interrogated him there and he very clearly took the blame. He said: 'I'm not married, so let them take me, because there is no family behind it. I take full responsibility for everything I said, because I believe what I said is convincing.' And on that basis they found him guilty and shot him in the Appèlbergen.
Berend wurde zum SS-Hauptquartier in Groningen gebracht, wo er während des Verhörs die volle Verantwortung übernahm. Alle anderen Gefangenen aus Nieuw-Buinen wurden kurze Zeit später erfolgreich freigelassen, Berend selbst wurde jedoch zum Tode verurteilt.
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Berend Trip was twenty-five when he was shot dead. On the Sunday he was arrested, the SD sent spies to all the churches. Hardly any preacher mentioned the strike. On Monday 3 May, in a mood of bitterness, work was resumed in many places, but here and there in the south and in the northern provinces, people continued to strike. This strike would even last a week in Friesland. People died on that Monday in particular.
Three battalions of the Ordnungspolizei and four of the Waffen-ss drove around everywhere and shot. In Marum, in Groningen, a tree had been placed across the road. The farmer of the nearest farm was arrested with three of his sons and six others who happened to be on his property. These ten were shot dead together with six other random detainees, among them a thirteen-year-old boy who tried to run away. Continue the strike!
MEVROUW SJ. HOEKSTRA VAN DER VLUGT
We had just finished eating in the afternoon and the youngest boy, the youngest son Arend, was standing outside and there he shouts: 'Mem, nou sjitte se se allegarre deal' Oh, I say, boy, you're lying! I walk outside, still with a dishcloth in my hand, and there I stood with him and it was indeed true. They were all shot dead.
I saw the last two teams myself, and also the little boy of thirteen, who always sat next to our son in the classroom. He was also shot dead. In Werkendam, South Holland, where the strike continues, the names of ten hostages who will most likely be shot, must be named by the mayor J. de Bruyne on Monday. He names four: his own and, with their approval, the three local preachers. But the occupier limits himself to a warning here. He has noticed that, if he is called upon here and there not to go back to work, his terror is already having an effect.
The SS summary courts work quickly. The first death sentences have already been passed on Saturday and Sunday, in many cases on completely random strikers who have been seized. Rauter wants examples to be set. These death sentences are being posted everywhere. Every Dutchman must feel personally threatened by the SS summary court. The more names one reads, the more fear will be instilled. The occupier arrested thousands of strikers. Nine hundred were locked up in the Vught concentration camp, most of them for a month.
Eighty strikers are sentenced to death and executed. Almost a hundred people are fatally hit in the streets by bullets from the Ordnungspolizei and the Waffen-ss, more than four hundred are seriously injured. Under the pressure of the summary justice that is maintained for another two weeks, the occupier announces a series of new measures. The nine thousand male students who refused to sign the declaration of loyalty are called upon by Rauter to report immediately for transfer to Germany. Almost four thousand do so, more than five thousand go into hiding.
The two thousand female students have to report to the regional employment offices. A few hundred do so and many of the others go on to support the illegal movement. Then all Dutch people, except those who are 'wrong', have to hand in their radios. Of the eight hundred thousand sets that are handed in, almost half are unusable. Four hundred thousand radios are retained. Furthermore, the first groups of conscripts are called up to be transferred to prisoner-of-war camps in Germany. When the first train passes Arnhem, a crowd gathers to throw bread to the deported.
There had been three hundred thousand conscripts, but now the opposition from the business community and the regional employment agencies had become so great that the occupier could finally only transport eleven thousand. Looking back on those mass strikes, one of the illegal newspapers, Het Parool, observed: 'These were moments in which we breathed more deeply and freely than we had done in years; for a few moments the psychosis of fear was broken and we did not feel like subjects of a reign of terror, but courageous, liberated people, suddenly propelled by an invisible mutual bond.' There were two more of those general strikes in occupied Europe: one in 1942 in Luxembourg and one, later in 1943, in Denmark. But neither of them was as general as the Dutch one, nor was it suppressed as bloodily. It is a remarkable difference between the February Strike of 1941 and these April-May Strikes of 1943 that the February Strike has become a concept, but that no monument has been erected for the April-May Strikes anywhere, not even in the resilient Twente where it started.
This difference is all the more remarkable because the February Strike, as mentioned in Chapter 4, provoked a resistance impulse among those who were inclined to do so. This was a limitation, while one can say of the April-May Strikes that, because strikes were held almost everywhere and victims were almost everywhere, they noticeably changed the mood throughout the country. Afterwards, the police became less cooperative with the occupier, and the business community was less willing to work for him. In the government personnel in general, nuclei are now forming everywhere that are going to offer support to the illegality.
The countryside, where one had previously often not seen a German in uniform, has now also become ripe to receive several hundred thousand people in hiding. It was not the February strike that was a watershed in the eventful history of five years of occupation, but the April-May strikes. Partly because of the sacrifices made by, according to Het Parool, 'brave, liberated people, suddenly propelled by an invisible mutual connection', they were a watershed, a historical turning point. Obedient Netherlands became a recalcitrant Netherlands.
— HOME Prof. Dr. Loe de Jong— OCCUPATION AFTER 50 YEARS
SD COME ALONG
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