Armageddon (84 page)

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 Bernhardt of the Netherlands, son 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. The echoes of Warsaw were unmistakable. In Holland, Allied policy caused special pain and resentment, because the voices of denial came from the armies of the democracies, not the implacable Soviets.

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 an estimated 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. It remains hard to balance the benefits to the self-respect of the Dutch people against the military futility and tragic sacrifice of the arming of civilians. 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 continued, to discourage their compatriots from armed opposition. In Rotterdam 100 hostages were shot, in Amsterdam 200. When a prominent Nazi official was shot by the Resistance in March, Himmler demanded reprisal killings of 500 people. He eventually accepted the corpses of 250, of whom twenty-six were young men shot on a rubbish dump in the centre of Amsterdam. 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. There was no more singing in the winter of 1944.

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 Idenburg 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.

“We call out to the free world,” the Resistance signalled to London on 13 February. “An old, civilized nation is threatened with destruction by the German barbarians. Let the free world raise its voice . . . We shall hold out.” Yet with so many peoples across Europe crying out for salvation, just as the Allies were reluctant to acknowledge the unique plight of the Jews, so also they paid scant heed to that of the Dutch. Everything, argued Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, must hinge upon the defeat of Germany, the fount of all these evils. 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 close. Their 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 Fortresses, Liberators and Lancasters gave to the occupied nations beneath their wings. Theodore Wempe thrilled each time he saw aircraft and told himself rapturously: “They come! They come!” People 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.

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 an
Appel
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.

Petty deceit became a way of life—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. Then they walked miles into the countryside on
Hongertrochten
—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. The city-dwellers of Holland harboured lasting resentment against farmers who enriched themselves amid their nation’s agonizing privations.

By January, the daily ration had fallen to 460 calories. “Those who are hungry shout,” observed a Dutch newspaper bitterly on 30 January, “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. Industrial and commercial activity was at a standstill. Only Germans, and their Dutch creatures, continued to use vehicles. Garbage piled in the streets, swarming with rats, because there were no means of collecting it. When civilians had exhausted supplies of pulped sugar beet, they began to eat tulip bulbs—140 million were consumed that winter. “Take a litre of water,” suggested a local recipe, “one onion, 4–6 bulbs, seasoning and salt, a teaspoon of oil and some curry substitute. Brown the onion with oil and curry, add water, bring to the boil, and grate the cleaned bulbs into the boiling liquid.” The outcome was repulsive, but possessed some vestiges of nutritional value. Jan de Boer, one of nine children of an academic living in the Hague, saw an ill-nourished horse defecate in the snow outside his home one morning. He was astonished to behold a passer-by descend from his bicycle and poke through the steaming dung, searching for undigested morsels of corn, which he ate as he crouched. A Dutchman said he learned that winter that human beings “only consisted of a stomach and certain instincts.” Twelve-year-old Willem van den Broek dreamed not of exotic adventures nor even of luxuries, but about bread, meat, cheese, sweets.

Medical research suggested that children aged between ten and fourteen suffered most from hunger. The average Dutch fourteen-year-old boy weighed forty-one kilos in 1940, but only thirty-seven 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. Men became temporarily impotent. Corpses lay in churches awaiting burial. An Amsterdam old people’s home reported that its death rate had doubled. A visitor to a cemetery wrote: “the shrunken bodies were 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: “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. Bertha Schonfeld felt irrationally safe at home, and simply buried her head in her hands as bombs fell close at hand. Rather than go down to a shelter, she and her mother protected themselves by putting saucepans on their heads. Once, a neighbour found a spent cannon shell in her bed. The Germans were launching V2 rockets against Britain from Holland. They had deliberately located launch and storage sites near to built-up areas. All the windows in the Schonfelds’ apartment were broken by the premature explosion of some of the forty-five-foot monsters. 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. On Saturday 3 March, fifty-seven Boston and Mitchell bombers of the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force, aiming at launch sites on the Haagsche Bosch near the Hague, instead plastered a residential area. The Germans refused to allow the fire brigade to enter the stricken streets, asserting that “the stupid Dutch have to learn what it is like.” The raid killed 511 people and destroyed 3,250 houses, one of them the home of the local Resistance leader Henri Koot, who lost everything he owned. Twelve thousand desperately cold and hungry people now also found themselves without shelter. Churchill was infuriated by “this slaughter of the Dutch.” The British Foreign Office told the Dutch ambassador that the responsible officer had been court-martialled, for confusing the vertical and horizontal co-ordinates of the target. In fact, there is no evidence that anyone was disciplined for the tragedy, but rumour within the RAF suggested that there had been a disastrous bomb-aiming error. Other raids involved less dramatic blunders, but inflicted a steady stream of civilian casualties. 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.

Dutch bitterness towards the Allies, as well as against the Germans, had become very great. Antoinette Hamminga, a teenager living near the Hague, 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. “People got very angry,” said Theodore Wempe. “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 rapid completion of our main operations.” 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 east 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.

One of the most extraordinary episodes of the war, still scarcely known in the West, began on 4 April 1945 on the Dutch offshore island of Texel. Its garrison, the 882nd Battalion of the Wehrmacht, comprised some 550 Georgians captured on the Eastern Front. They mutinied and ran amok, killing every German they encountered. A local Resistance leader consulted with the Georgians, and set off with three of them in the local lifeboat to seek aid from the British across the North Sea. They landed at Cromer in Norfolk on 6 April. The British, however, received them without enthusiasm. They were subjected to six days of interrogation, at the end of which the Georgians were dispatched to a PoW camp. No action was taken to assist the Texel mutineers, or the local Dutch people.