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The Invasion Of Holland
 In the second week of May 1940 the Germans invaded Holland. A few hours later the German ambassador, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, in presented a formal declaration of war to the Dutch government. In the declaration of war the German government maintained that its troops had been obliged to enter Holland because of an imminent attack on the Ruhr valley by Allied forces. This was, of course, a total fabrication, the Dutch Army was barely equipped to defend more than a few cities withn Holland let alone fight an expeditionary war. The Dutch were urged by the Germans to offer no resistance, but to place itself under the “protection” of the Reich. Were the Dutch to do that, and only if they were to do that, Germany would guarantee the Dutch their independence and their monarchy. In Berlin the German government further accused the Dutch of numerous breaches of neutrality, all of these accusation were pure fabrications and were rejected.
The Dutch people would not place themselves under the “protection” of the Reich and they most certainly would fight the Germans. An appeal was made to the Allies for military support, unfortunately the decades of self declared neutrality meant that no plan or facility existed for support to be provided. Queen Wilhelmina issued a proclamation in which she declared the German invasion to be a flagrant violation of international law and decency and she urged the entire population to do their duty to defend the motherland.
On that first day of the German invasion the German Luftwaffe destroyed most of the small Dutch Air Force, though the few modern machines made good conduct of themselves. Germans took control of airfields around Rotterdam and The Hague into which they had parachuted troops. Other parachutists were dropped into The Hague (Den Haag) itself; the Germans hoped to take capture of Queen Wilhelmina and her family, but these troops were almost entirely wiped out by vigorous Dutch defense. Elsewhere Germans were gaining ground, penetrating ‘Fortress Holland’ with the use of airborne troops. German land armies were finding pockets of strong resistance in the areas along the Big Rivers, but much of southern Holland was fell in the face of overwhelming forces.
By Sunday, May 12th the Cabinet advised Queen Wilhelmina to have the royal family evacuated. On May, 13th the Crown Princess Juliana, her daughters, and husband, Bernard fled to England on a British destroyer. Prince Bernard would return almost immediately to help Dutch forces fighting in Zealand, the southwest province of Holland. On Monday, May 14th, General Winkelman, Supreme Commander of the Dutch Armed Forces, informed the Queen he could no longer ensure her personal safety. Thus, she left too for England followed by the senior ministers of the Dutch government. Queen Wilhelmina declared that to the best of ability she would fight the Germans until they were driven out of Holland. She proclaimed London to be now the country’s capital; this assured Holland’s legal existance and its being able to fight in the in the war on the side of the Allies
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The Germans had thought that conquering of Holland would take just one day, such is the size of the country, however the operation was stretching into five days, and the German high command wanted it finished. On Tuesday the Germans made it known that if the Dutch didn’t immediately surrender they would begin to systematically bomb the country’s cities. General began to immediately set up negotiations with the Germans, however through a variety of circumstances, which remain still not entirely clear 55 years later, the bombing of Rotterdam went ahead. This in spite of the fact that the Dutch were in the process of surrendering. German planes suddenly appeared over the skies of Rotterdam. The people of Rotterdam didn’t pay any particular attention to the appearance of the German planes believing that threat to their city had passed. Within a few short moments much of the civic center had been leveled; ensuing fires intensified the damage causing over 78000 casualties. After the attack on Rotterdam General Winkelman ordered all Dutch soldiers to put down their arms. With the Germans now threatening to bomb Utrecht, General Winkelman at 16:50 issued the following order to his commanding officers.
"Germany has bombed Rotterdam today, and Utrecht is threatened with destruction. To save the civilian population and prevent further bloodshed, I believe to be justified to order the troops under your command to stop fighting.”
The formal surrender was signed the following morning. Before capitulating some 2100 Dutch soldiers had been killed, some 2700 wounded. Dutch civilian deaths were similar.
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The Early Occupation Of Holland
Hitler decided that Holland would be placed under a civilian administration with a fanatical Austrian Nazi (Arthur Seyss-Inquart) as its head. The eventual plan was once Germany had won the war Holland would be formally annexed and made a part of Germany itself. The idea was to make Germany the master of the Germanic speaking peoples, of which Holland was viewed as being a part, displaying just how ignorant the Germans were of the Dutch mentality. Much of Holland's appeal to the racially obsessed German Nazis was what they considered to be the "superior" racial composition of the Dutch people, certifiably 100% Aryan (many blonde, blue eyed people). German interbreeding with the Dutch could in fact improve the racial purity of the new German super-nation.
On May 26, 1940 Hitler issued a decree establishing a German civil government in Holland. Directly responsible to Hitler was Seyss-Inquart, who became der Reichkomissionar für die besetzten niederländischen Gebiete. On the 29th May the newly appointed Reichskommisionar made a formal speech to the Dutch people, in this address Seyss-Inquart announced that Germany did not want to annex Holland or to force its Nazi ideology upon the Dutch. Seyss-Inquart assumed all the civilian functions and powers that formally belonged to the Crown and Government. With the exception of the German Armed forces, all German and Dutch agencies would be under his supervision. Dutch laws would remain in force until further notice, though Syss-Inquart had the right to issue laws by degree and to overrule ordinances and rules issued by subordinate agencies. During the first two years he issued a vast amount of degrees but they trickled off as the occupation drew towards an end. Seyss-Inquart eesentially implemented policies dictated from Berlin, most notably the economic exploitation of the Netherlands and the labor draft (slave labor), and the persecution of Jews. Seyss-Inquart's initial strategy was to use as much as possible the existing Dutch government structure to implement his policies--from mayors in the smallest villages up to the Secretaries-Generals, the highest functionaries within the Dutch civil service. Despite the stated policy of not forcing Nazi ideology on the Dutch efforts were being undertaken to transform Holland into a totalitarian state along the lines of Nazi Germany. The Germans immediately abolished the Communist and Socialist parties sending members to the death camps and took full control of the media.
However, by and large the German Wermacht (the regular German Army) in Holland were well behaved. There was no looting, no rape or even burning down of synagogues. The German soldiers were polite and even proved to be good customers at Dutch stores and cafes. Under the rules of war, the Germans could have held all Dutch soldiers as prisoners of war but the Germans released them and allowed the men to return to their homes and families. It was initial German thinking that the Dutch should be treated with care, at least initally. The Germans were convinced that with some care it would be only a matter of time before the Dutch would accept the New Order and embrace Nazism as the Germans themselves had but as the war turned against the Germans so the Germans increasingly turned against the people of Holland.
Until the very end of the Second World War most of Holland,with the exception of Holland south of Eindhoven, remained captives of the Germans. The Dutch experience was perhaps the worst of most of the remaining occupied countries. Between November 1944 and May 1945, some 4.5 million people lived not merely on the brink of starvation, but in the midst of its fatal consequences. In Holland during those month, the mortality rate of small children doubled, that of babies trebled. In addition to the death from exposure and hungar 23,000 died as a consequence of allied air raids on German V1 and V2 rocket sites. In prisons and prisons camps in Holland the German murdered, 5,000 –not counting Jewish deaths. Of the substantial proportion of the Dutch population shipped to Germany as slave labour 30,090 never returned, dying in the German factories. For all the fame of Anne Frank’s tong concealment from the Nazis, the wider reality was that almost all Holland’s Jews were identified, deported and killed. Of 117,000 shipped east, 5,500 returned. Just 20,000 Dutch Jews survived the war. Why was loss of life so high in the Netherlands? Were the Dutch particularly anti-Semitic or callous? The answer to both is "no". More Dutch have been honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, as "righteous gentiles" than from any other country. However, several factors, some of which made escape during those five days impossible, are responsible for this tragic loss of life , primarily, the Netherland's unique geographic and cultural features.
We Dutch suffered an abrupt descent into misery after the swift military collapse and the decision of the Netherlands Royal Family and government to choose exile. There had been little anti German sentiment in Holland before 1939. Most of the country’s bureaucracies and institutions accepted Nazi authority, but we all detested the proconsul whom Hitler appointed to rule the lands, the Austrian Arthur Seyss. There was a small Resistaiovement, whose courageous members ran an escape line for allied airmen. But the flat, open terrain of a small country did not lend itself to guerrilla war. German intelligence penetrated the Dutch networks of Britain’s Special Operations Executive with deadly consequences. People soon realized that resistance was very, very dangerous, men preferred to try and flee the country.’
Holland could be a bewildering place, full of contradictions. On the one hand, some Dutch people behaved with extraordinary courage in assisting allied forces and fugitives, on the other, some inhabitants living near the German border were more sympathetic to the Wehrmacht than to their either their own countrymen or allied liberators. Until the winter of 1944, when liberation seemed so close, many Dutch people unwillingly accepted their lot, we had little power to do otherwise. The Netherlands was and still is perhaps the most instinctively ordered middle-class society in Europe. There were undoubtedly some nice German officers and soldiers, some even helped Dutch people and treated them with courtesy and some respect, but by and large the Dutch were careful to avoid trouble with the occupiers. The 8 p.m. curfew was an inconvenience, and we found it was not always enforced locally by the German troops. Those who resisted the occupiers suffered badly, for much of the war Germans treated those who obeyed them with civility.
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The Late War Occupation Of Holland
 From the summer of 1944 the Germans started to systematically strip the country. German troops started entering private houses and stripping them of cooking pots, blankets, cutlery, crockery, clothing, entire cookers, and heating fires. Radios had long since been seized. On the farms food was taken, even animal feed for the winter resulting later in the starvation of the few remaining animals during the winter. Trucks, horses and carts. Each visit by Germans resulted in your house becoming increasingly denuded of possessions. While this robbery took place at a personal level the Germans also proceeded with larceny on a much grander scale. It started river barges, railway rolling stock and locomotives and graduated to entire railway workshops, then engineering workshops, hospital equipment, research laboratory equipment. Later entire factories were stripped bare, including power generating stations, and flour mills. The Dutch were being denied the basic infrastructure required to survive as a nation in any sense of the word.
 It would be wrong to confuse the Dutch acquiescence with enthusiasm for the occupiers. Many of us would not allow our children to go to the cinema because we did not wish them to be exposed to German propaganda. The first film I saw was in 1945 after liberation. In the course of the war, some 7,000 young Dutchmen sought to join the allied forces by the long perilous routes across the North Sea or the Pyrenees barely 2,000 actually made it alive. Ted Van Meurs, a medical student, escaped repeatedly from German camps on his way to labour service. lie was badly injured jumping from a train. After being patched up, he was sent to a labour camp near Lake Constance. Van Meurs swam the lake to Switzerland, amid the icy cold and the German searchlights, and eventually became a medical officer with the Free Dutch forces. When the German authorities in Holland demanded that every university student sign a pledge of loyalty to the Nazi regime, only a small minority acceded. The remainder were forced to abandon their studies, including myself. While I started university in 1938 I did not finish it until ten years later.
Most of the Dutch people exulted as readily as the rest of Europe when deliverance from their oppressors seemed at hand. Rashly, even irresponsibly, Eisenhower declared in a broadcast to the Dutch people on 3 September 1944: ‘The hour of your liberation is now very near.’ To encourage open rejoicing, let alone active resistance, in a country as ill suited to guerrilla warfare as Holland was reckless. During the first six days of September, the Germans executed 133 prisoners. On 17 September, the day of the Anthem drop, 28,000 of Holland’s 30,000 railwaymen downed tools in a national strike. As millions of people all over the country heard the allied guns thundering closer each day, Orange flags and badges blossomed. The nation prepared to celebrate. Yet with the failure of Arnhem and the stagnation of the allied line, the Germans acted ruthlessly to tighten their grip. Leaders of the rail strike were imprisoned, and many died, murdered by the nazis. Six thousand Germans began conducting demolitions in Rotterdam, completely destroying the port. Any resistance was met with summary, and indiscriminate executions. After Dutch insurgents in Putten wounded ten Germans, ten percent of the town’s 600 houses were burned, occupants and all. Everywhere there were white flags and sheets, as if the village was surrendering after a hopeless struggle, smoking ruins and a deadly silence.
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The Hunger Winter In Holland
 As the Germans cut off all food and fuel imports into Holland the privations of the Dutch people worsened swiftly as winter approached. In Amsterdam there was gas for only ninety minutes a day, no trains nor phones nor electricity. Children played football in the streets, empty of all vehicles save those of the German army. Sixty-six thousand of Holland’s 100,000 cars and 3,800 of the country’s 4,500 buses, together with half of its four million bicycles, bad been removed to Germany. There was no fuel for those motor vehicles which remained. People queued ceaselessly for the smallest trifles. In the Hague, communal kitchens were feeding 350,000 people a day with such provisions as were available. People in the capital were ordered to surrender any remaining blankets and clothing to the Germans. All Netherlanders became reluctant to walk far, became walking wore down shoes, and these were almost unobtainable.
There was no legitimate source of fuel to heat our offices, schools and homes. During the icy winter, trees were felled, fencing torn down. Even the wooden sets in the roads were torn up. In the manic quest for fuel, graveyards were ransacked not to rob the dead but to seize their coffins for firewood. The Germans needed more slaves, both in Holland and in the Reich. When they demanded labour to dig defences at Venlo, no one reported. In consequence twenty local hostages were shot, the same happened in Apeldoorn. These examples produced a reluctant triclde of workers. Vastly more men were required, however, for industrial labour. Fifty thousand Rotterdammers were rounded up and shipped to Germany. Women offered buffer, chocolate, brandy, even their own bodies, to their rulers, if their men could be spared. Families slept in tenor of the tramp of German boots on cobbles in the night, and the cry of ‘Aufmachen! Aufnmchen!’ — ‘Open up! Open up!’ — which signalled the seizure of husbands and sons. In total some 500,000, ten percent of the Dutch population at the time were seized for slave labour. Some managed to escape back to Holland where officially — and for ration purposes — they did not exist and had to spent months in hiding, unable to anything but read the same few books over and over again.
By November, the weekly ration for Dutch people had fallen to 300 grams of potatoes, 200 grams of bread — five slices — 28 grams of pulses, 5 grams each of meat and cheese. In total, this was about a quarter of normal human food intake. ‘Too much to die on, but too little to live by,’ the Dutch observed bleakly. The ration allocation provided just 900 calories, against the 2,500 of the British people, who were suffering hardship enough. People ate nettle soup, chaff and rye bread. Willem van den Broek’s mother, who was pregnant, ate the starch she used for ironing in a desperate attempt to strengthen her body. Dogs and cats disappeared, as they were eaten by their owners or anyone capable of capturing them. I remember my mother was crying all the time, she couldn’t bring herself to eat even when there was food. All our energies were devoted to survival. Bleeding and tortured Holland was falling apart while being tormented by the Germans.
 The Dutch prime minister in exile pleaded with Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, for the liberation of his country by 1 December, before the worst of winter came. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, son-in-law of the Dutch queen and leader of the Free Dutch forces, appealed in passionate terms to the allies to hasten liberation. Eisenhower responded coolly that ‘military factors, and not political considerations’, must determine allied strategy. InHolland, allied policy caused special pain and resentment, because the voices of denial came from the armies of the democracies. Among young Dutchmen, from September onwards there was a modest upsurge in recruitment to the Resistance, matching experience in France after D-Day. That winter, Holland harboured 5,000 fighters and 4,000 intelligence-gatherers, together with some 25,000 people engaged in secret publishing or working for escape networks. Between September 1944 and April 1945, American and British aircraft parachuted 20,000 weapons into Holland. The courage of the Resisters was extraordinary. One day in January, a Jewish mother and her two sons, desperate for food, went foraging from the house in Zeist where they had lived in precarious obscurity. They were detained by Germans who thought they appeared Jewish, and locked up in the Local police station along with seven other Jews, until the SS could remove them. The father of the family sought the aid of the Resistance. Local fighters decided that a rescue attempt could be made, but that it must be carried out by men unknown by sight to the local police. A former policeman named Henny ldenburg enlisted the aid, willing or otherwise, of a Luftwaffe deserter whom the Resistance was hiding. A local garage owner agreed to turn a blind eye while a German truck he was repairing was ‘borrowed’ for an hour. On 23 January, the Luftwaffe corporal in his uniform accompanied Idenburg, in his old Dutch police uniform, to Zeist police station. They produced a forged demand for the prisoners, who were duly handed over and herded out to the truck amid appropriate shouts and abuse. When the truck halted in a forest near Driebergen, the traumatized Jewish prisoners were convinced that they were to be executed. Instead, they found themselves taken into hiding in a church until they could be removed to safe houses. They survived.
To the very end, the Germans mercilessly executed anyone suspected of assisting the Resistance, together with countless hostages. All that winter, in squares and on Street corners, the public murder of Dutch people, often several hundred at a time, continued, to discourage their compatriots from armed opposition. When a prominent Nazi official was shot by the Resistance in March, Bimmler demanded reprisal killings of 500 people. The Germans were in a chronically tense, dangerous mood. For years, the Dutch had grown accustomed to Wehrmacht units singing marching songs as they swaggered through the streets but in the winter of 1944 all singing stopped.
On February 13th 1945 the Dutch resistance signalled “‘We call out to the free world; An old, civilized nation is threatened with destruction by the German barbarians. Let the free world raise its voice . . . We shall hold out.”
Allied leaders were convinced that to be deflected from their central purpose to succour any special group of Nazi victims would assist only the cause of Hitler. The allies were probably right. But it was very hard for people dying by inches to acknowledge it. The liberators seemed so tantalizingly dose. We hear guns could be heard month after month, firing from positions only a few miles distant from the towns and villages in which many Dutch people lived under savage oppression. Almost daily, British fighter-bombers strafed Dutch trains and roads. Whatever the shortcomings of allied bombing policy and its cost in Dutch lives, it is hard to exaggerate the surge of hope and excitement which every passage of the Mosquitos, Typhoons and Lancasters gave to us beneath their wings. Often we saw aircraft and told ourselves ‘They come! They come!’. We stood on their roofs waving, and often thinking enviously of the allied pilots flying home to lunch in freedom. In those days, Holland was an intensely monarchist country. Fierce argument persisted about whether their queen should have chosen exile in 1940 or should have remained to share the sufferings of her people. But Netherlanders were much moved when allied planes dropped leaflets showing pictures of their little princesses, living in exile with the rest of the royal family. On Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday, some people set out their washing in Dutch national colours, provoking German soldiers to clatter angrily through the streets, tearing it down.
Local Dutch people gathering food from the RAF air drops. Photo right: digging up wooden road cobbles to burn as fuel in the coldest winter for 100 years after the nazis cut off fuel supplies.
Transcending everything, there was hunger, the hunger of a nation. In every community in Holland, everyone knew the collaborators and black- marketeers, for these were the only people who were not starving. The German commandant of the concentration camp at Amersfoort celebrated Christmas Day 1944 by cancelling all food for the inmates, and holding a parade lasting from 7 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. amid the snow of the frozen parade ground. The guards’ Christmas geese were hung upon the wire to mock the captives, until they disappeared into the German kitchens. Some food supplies were dispatched to Holland by the International Red Cross, but the Nazi authorities proved obstructive about distribution. Dutch people recalled that in 1918, when German and Austria were starving after their defeat, German and Austrian children were sent to Holland to be fed and cared for. Perhaps some of those young fugitives, they thought, had grown up into their persecutors and tormentors of 1945. Stealing cabbages and carrots from gardens, seeking to deceive a shopkeeper into supposing that he had already been given your ration coupon. City families waited weeks for their turn to hire a small handcart and then they walked kilometers into the countryside on Hongertochten (hunger treks) to find farmers with whom to barter furniture, sheets, clothing for food. Some country people found the opportunities for exploitation irresistible accepting a gold ring for a handful of potatoes.
By January 1945, the daily ration had fallen to 460 calories. In a starving country you notice that when you are hungry you shout, but those who are starving keep deadly still. A profound silence had fallen over Holland, as people huddled in their houses, avoiding the smallest unnecessary activity to conserve energy. Schools were closed by lack of heating, and anyway the children were to weak to walk to school. Any remaining Industrial and commercial activity was at a standstill. Only Germans, and their Dutch collaborators continued to use the few un commandeered vehicles. Rubbish piled in the streets which were crawling with rats, because there were no means of collecting it, no fuel for trucks, and any horse appearing on the streets was likely to be a stripped carcass very soon after. When we had exhausted supplies of pulped sugar beet, they began to eat tulip bulbs with 140 million were consumed that winter. Recipes appeared on how to best cook them ! I can assure you that the outcome was repulsive, but possessed some vestiges of nutritional value.
Photos above: RAF Lancaster bombers using their vast bomb bays to drop food to the starving people.
Children aged between ten and fourteen suffered most from hunger. The average Dutch fourteen-year-old boy weighed forty-two kilos in 1940, but only thirty-eightn kilos in 1945, and had become two centimetres shorter. Girls of the same age were a frightening seven kilos lighter and six centimetres shorter. Typhoid and diphtheria epidemics had broken out. Women stopped menstruating, not that it mattered much as the men became temporarily impotent. Corpses lay in churches awaiting burial. The death rate of the elderly nearly trebled. In almost any cemetery you could see the shrunken bodies lying next to each other. No flesh on thighs or calves. Most had bent arms and legs, the hands clenched as if the poor devil was still asking for food. On 17 March, a Dutch leader sent a new appeal to London for aid: He said “The expression “starved to death” has been used so often in a figurative sense that it is difficult to realise that people are dying in the street . . . And when the question arises: “But how can people stand it?”, my answer is: “Those people cannot stand it they are really going completely to pieces.”
All these miseries were compounded by allied bombing as the Germans were launching V2 rockets against Britain from Holland. They had deliberately located launch and storage sites near to civilian built-up areas. V2s killed 2,724 British people in the last months of the war. The allied air forces strove to frustrate them, and killed far more people doing so than did the V2s. Churchill was infuriated when allied aircraft killed the civilians in Holland; ‘this slaughter of the Dutch’ he called it. Misdirected allied bombs caused the deaths of substantially more people in the nations of occupied Europe than the Luftwaffe killed in its blitz on Britain. One member of my family was bombed out three times during the war, the first occasion by the Germans, the second and third occasions by the Americans. The third occasion was notable in that at the time he was located 70kilometers inside the British zone in liberated Holland. We had a saying; “ When the Germans bomb the allies British and Americans duck, when the British bomb the Germans Duck, but when the Americans bomb EVERYONE ducks !”, sad but true.
 Dutch bitterness towards the allies, as well as against the Germans, had become very great. A friend of mine at the time suffered no subsequent trauma about the months of starvation, but retained terrifying memories of her experience as a passenger on a train strafed by British fighter-bombers, when a girl sitting behind her was killed and another was drenched in the blood of a wounded woman. We constantly asked each other: ‘Why don’t they come? Will it be a couple of days? Or a week?” Churchill spoke to the House of Commons on 14 March about the plight of Holland, but as late as the 27th Eisenhower asserted in response to questions from Washington that the best way to assist the Dutch people remained the defeat of Germany, yet those ‘main operations’ seemed interminable, amid the inexorable decline of Holland into ruin and of its people into shadows of humanity. Through the very last days before freedom belatedly came to Holland, the Germans continued to kill. Hitler’s Servants seemed eager to drag with them into the grave of the Third Reich every innocent who fell into their clutches. On 8 March, 263 Resistance members were executed in reprisal for an attack on General Rauter, a senior SS officer in Holland. On 1 April, Canadians freed the big eastern Netherlands town of Enschede. The night before they arrived, the Gestapo executed ten people, together with two more just an hour before Canadian tanks appeared. When the liberators entered Zutphen on 6 April, they found the bodies of ten freshly executed civilians, some of whom had been tortured. As late as 7 April von Blaskowitz, commanding the 120,000 German troops remaining in Holland, was still frenziedly preparing demolitions and giving orders for a last stand in the area of Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Utrecht which had been designated Fortress Holland. On 15 April, thirty-four people were executed in Amsterdam. Two days later, the Germans blew up the huge dyke guarding the Wieringer flatlands, flooding 50,000 acres, the granary of western Holland, to add to the 230,000 hectares of the country already under water. A. C. de Graaf, deputy leader of the local Resistance, emerged from hiding to save his wife and children from the inundations. He was caught and shot.
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Liberation Of Holland
 The agony of Holland was assuaged by the surrender of von Blaskowitz’s forces on 5 May 1945, yet it became the work of months to claw back the nation from the abyss of starvation, aided by enormous allied air drops of food — Operation Manna. Incredibly, the occupiers continued to murder Dutchmen not only after Hitler’s death, but in their rage and bitterness after the official end of the wat, VE-Day. Germans indulged an orgy of looting and killing before the Canadian liberation forces arrived. On 8 May, twenty-year-old Elsa Caspers remonstrated with an SS man standing over three bodies, which he said were those of ‘terrorists’. Elsa, a Resistance courier, said: ‘Surely you must know the war is over?’ The German sneered: ‘We did it just for fun.’ Many of us retain bitterness towards the Germans because they took away what should have been the best years of our lives, and they gave us that awful last winter. My fiancé spent four years as a prisoner of war, my younger brother and two cousins died in of their camps, three other relatives were taken as slave labour – and vanished forever. If the law had been enforced against all Germans who committed crimes against humanity in the countries occupied by Hitler, post-war executions on a scale carried out by the Germans would have been necessary. The Dutch experience of war in the winter of 1944—5 was as terrible as that of any nation in western Europe. To the very end, the Germans showed no hint of mercy what so ever, in fact they stood by and robbed us of what little remaining means we had for survival.
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