One cannot say that this behaviour was spontaneous. It was a merciless and bloody revenge, practised on defenceless people. The ‘crime’ of these people was having been a member of the NSB, or a German sympathiser. In a free thinking society they were now criminals. They were penalised with methods that surpassed the ecclesiastical torture methods of the Inquisition of 1232, in particular on women (page 22 of Dr. van der Vaart Smit’s book). On the next page one can read of other atrocities. The female jailers of those women were no better, maybe even worse than their male counterparts, for all were jail-bait for them. They beat up the prisoners at will, reverting to medieval methods, or locked them for days in cages in which they could only stand. When one of the jailers lit a cigarette, it was used as a method of torture, one of the ‘harmless’ sort (page 33).
On page 34, there is a report on the transport of amputees and the behaviour of guards upon reaching an internment camp. The guards threw the amputees from the vehicle like a load of ballast. One was an eighteen year old who had lost both his legs, and was severely injured. An accompanying nurse lost her temper. She received a bull et in her thigh. Many of those prisoners were psychological wrecks after such experiences and were sent to the Institution for Psychiatry in Franaker. They were treated as demented, not “demented patients”, but to quote one of the treating doctors, as “demented criminals”.
The jailers were members of the shooting clubs. It was “Schützenfest time” and lasted from July to November of 1945, until Canadian troops stopped the massacre of prisoners. Prisoners were murdered at will, or badly injured and then the necessary medical help was withheld. Even stretcher-bearers when help was available were fired upon. Notorious for its system of torture, was the internment camp in Scheveningen. A total of 45,000 Dutch citizens were accused of collaboration, 170,000 of them being interned. Holland had a population of 8.2 million inhabitants at that time.
One could ask, “Are we talking about the same peace-loving Holland that fiercely clung to and defended its neutrality among the nations, but that was more than ready to wage war in this fashion on their own people?” Thousands of individual fates are not known, have never been recorded. Women and girls stayed silent, in fear of reprisals when the sexual crimes against them became known.
When parents were ‘classified’, their children were torn away from them to be put into homes, and they were interned. Visits to their children were forbidden and their contact completely severed. The children of political prisoners were very badly treated in those homes, where they vegetated. As many as 300,000 children were suddenly without parents, and were continually brainwashed that they were the children of criminals. It should be of no surprise that eventually many were ashamed of their own parents. Psycho logical pressure and ill-treatment of those children resulted in many of them becoming ill and sustaining psychological problems.
For the last fifteen years, an association called the “Herkenning Work-group” has existed in Holland, to help children with this dark chapter of their lives. They were the persecuted political sacrifices of discrimination. It remains in existence today. The association had to fight very strong resistance from the administrative authorities. It is only in the last few years that they have become known as a ‘charitable association’, and deemed worthy of support.
When their own people were subjected to this wave of revenge, then how did the German citizen on Dutch soil fair? In the preoccupation of hunting the ‘fou’ and the ‘volunteers’, from the German citizens still to be found in Holland after 1945, 203 were sentenced. Eighteen were sentenced to death, six were executed, six were sentenced to life imprisonment, others received sentences of between three months and twenty years, but none served more than 13 years of their sentences. The forthcoming economic boom, to be found in Germany, played a very large role in this, for Holland was very much dependent on their neighbour. There was an economic boom to be seen on the horizon, and the legendary business-sense of the Dutch soon came to the fore.
It was in Detmold that I heard from Evert of the martyrdom of my family. It probably would have never happened, nor been so tragic, had they stayed in Germany, to where they had fled in the last few months of the war. They were evacuated, with the wives and children of NSB men or German sympathisers, or as the families of ‘volunteers’. Those measures followed after the French practised the same lynch-law on their own people, after the retreat of the German Wehrmacht in 1944, and as the Armed Forces from northern France neared the Dutch borders. As the Allies marched through France, an aftermath of executions, without a process of law, surged through the countryside. It happened in Belgium too. The Belgians, wanting to see blood, killed around 1,000 of their pro-German people.
The 5 September was a Tuesday in 1944 and three months after ‘D-Day’. “Radio Orange” broadcast from London, that Breda would be the first Dutch city to be liberated by the Allies. It was to be a day of significance for the annals of history and known as ‘Wild Tuesday’, not from the uncountable arrests but from the very loose bullets from the guns of the OD.
In the same month, 65,000 Dutch Nationals, including my parents, in danger of the waves of terror, left Holland for exile in chartered railway wagons. Not all arrived in Germany in one piece. More than once the passengers had to alight from the trains and take cover under the wagons, or find any other sort of shelter. There were low flying aircraft attacks by the Allies, al though it was not military transport. Most of the refugees settled in Lüneburg.
The Verton family however, in Hildesheim, in a former one monastery, joined my sister, who was married to a Dutch ‘volunteer’, an education officer in the SS division ‘Wiking’. I had already visited my sister there, and on that occasion had met British ‘volunteers’ of the Waffen SS. Yes, they were members of the ‘British Freikorps. They had been former members of the bomber-crews, had found themselves in German prison camps, but had declared themselves as ‘volunteers’ to fight against Communism. My family enjoyed the next seven months in Hildesheim, a city of 80,000 inhabitants, until 22 March 1945, a lovely spring day. It was chosen for a bombing raid by 200 four-engined Lancaster Bombers. They destroyed this jewel of a city, with its half-timbered houses, which had been spared up to that time. A 5,000 metre high mushroom of smoke, from fire and high-explosive bombs, could be seen from 300 kilometres away. The city and the monastery were left in ruins. The need for a roof over their heads, and the longing to see their own home again, sent them once more back to Holland, to agony and suffering. There was no military or strategic reason for the bombing of Hildesheim.
Upon their arrival in Holland, all were promptly arrested by the OD. They were responsible for law and order, and wore orange arm-bands. My one year old nephew was torn away from my sister and taken to a special home for NSB children. A notice was at tached to the children’s beds, “Child of the SS” or “Child of the NSB”. They were ‘orphans’, but not orphans. Much later, after my sister was released from internment camp she recorded a tape saying that she had managed to sneak secretly into the home and was devastated at her son’s apathetic and neglected condition.
After two years of internment, she was one of the lucky ones for she could claim her son once more. At three years old she found that he could not walk. Her son was also deaf in one ear. One can assume that he had had painful inflammation of the middle-ear which had not been treated. My sister was lucky that she could collect her son from the home, for many had been adopted. Many of the children were presented for adoption.