Through this sad and sickening time, a thin thread of decency showed itself, from one of the brave. He was one of those brave enough to criticise, to rise above his own experiences of war and take up the sword of decent social behaviour. One such was the Dutch journalist W.L. Brugsma, who had been a resistance fighter and one who had served a spell in a German prison. He criticised the inhumane treatment of these children, and asked, “how clean are those responsible for the Ethnic-Cleansing?” The articles from this man are still suppressed. They belong together with the very sparse literature to be found on this chapter of Dutch history.
On top of the suffering of my family in the internment camps, news reached them of the death of my brother Jan. There are to this day unanswered questions concerning his death. He died on his way to work. He went to work on his motorbike every day, to the German aerodrome where he worked as an electrician. Assassination from the resistance was rife at that time, practised especially on those working for the Germans. It would not have been difficult to acquaint oneself with Jan’s daily routine. In our opinion, he was either the victim of an air raid, from low-flying planes, or the subject of an assassination, from a sniper, just like the father of my friend Robert Reilingh.
For my mother it was a sudden shock. To hear of his death in the circumstances that she was in, was very hard. She was at that time 55 years old. She had fought tooth and nail for the liberation of her family, until she played on the nerves of the camp directors. They then put her into a psychiatric institution in Assen. The Russians too did this with their dissidents. Locked in with the mentally ill, my mother soon became ill, both physically and mentally, as a result of her surroundings, as well as from the separation from her husband and children. She suffered from harassment and very bad nourishment, eating mostly mouldy bread and cooked potato peelings. She had just got to grips with the death of her beloved eldest son, when she then received the news of the death of our father.
My father had had a hernia operation, which was not post-operatively treated during his internment. Instead he was put to work. He had by that time written many letters, optimistic letters, with plans for the future, for when they were released. Some weeks later an obituary circulated amongst the prisoners. It was of my father, an obituary of 59 lines describing his heart felt longing to be re-united with his dear wife and children. His funeral could not have been simpler. We were thankful that one member of the family was present, Evert. An exception was made and Evert, under armed guard, attended the funeral of our father.
Evert had been captured in the area of Arnhem, by the Canadians. They then delivered him to the Dutch, who delivered him into the notorious Harskamp prison. Before he could be sentenced he was put to work in the coal mine. With his escape he avoided the torture that was on the daily agenda. Allied war correspondents took many photos of the war. They took one of Evert, marching at the front of his men as company-leader, upright and marching into the POW camp.
My family were finally released, one after the other in 1947, after two years of internment. Nothing but skin and bone, covered in lice, and careworn, my mother was also released from the Institution in the same year. She spoke unwillingly of her time there. She had a very strong, iron will and this helped her recover, helped her on to her feet and back to her place as head of the family. The youngest of my brothers who was just twelve at this time had spent the two years in different homes, not knowing where any of his family were. He had no news and no visits, which were forbidden. One is duty-bound to mention those who kept to good social behaviour during this misery. One was a doctor who secretly helped my mother. Another was a Jewish jailer, who was sympathetic to one of my brothers and was humane in his behaviour towards him.
Robbed of house, home and possessions, the family found a new abode in Woudenberg, in the province of Utrecht. In the countryside, they were surrounded by straightforward and helpful people. They had a very friendly farmer as a next-door neighbour, who even hid my letters to my family. Gradually the family almost returned to normal. Very soon the local police started to pay visits. They wanted to catch either Evert or me on our visits, particularly on public holidays, when they were sure that we would be foolish enough to return. One official would simply have loved to catch us. He accused the family of spying, having found a photo of our model aerodrome that we had built as children in the garden, complete with model planes. We were supposed to be spying on military establishments!
The pressure on the civilian population gradually decreased which cannot be said for the ‘volunteers’. A further 5,000 were arrested and interned, without ‘due process’, for all the difference that would have made. Five years later, in 1950, Dutch soldiers who returned to Holland, having been released from Russian POW camps were immediately arrested and sentenced! The final insult came for those men, when they were visited in their cells by officers collecting information and experiences of the Russian-front soldiers, because of the ‘Cold War’ with the Communists. An anachronism of history? Upon being released from prison, those men lost their nationality. Holland made displaced persons out of their own countrymen.
It was no better in other countries. The Norwegians too sentenced 7,000 of their ‘volunteers’ with a sentence of up to four years’ imprisonment. In Denmark it was more, with 7,717 men sentenced. The Belgians sentenced 3,193 ‘colt aborators’ to death. Even when the death sentences were not carried out, for the ‘volunteers’ it meant years of imprisonment. Switzerland was no better, with 1,300 men brought before courts martial. The sentences were harder than for the fighters in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
As late as 1952, 2,400 French ‘volunteers’ were interned for their part in fighting Bolshevism, which they could avoid by then fighting in Indochina, or serving in the French Foreign Legion. From the ‘volunteers’ from the Balkans and the Soviet Union 11,000 Slovenian ‘volunteers’ were liquidated by Tito’s partisans in May of 1945. Then a further 90,000 Croatian soldiers of the Ustascha Army were sentenced. The British delivered 35,000 Cossacks, without consideration of asylum, or of international laws, to the Russians. They were either shot on sight, sent to forced-labour camps, or into mines. The same applied to neutral Sweden that had profited so much from German trade. They gave their German prisoners, and those from the Baltic divisions, to the Russians.
The hate-laden atmosphere of this European ethnic-cleansing did not allow for objective argument or explanation of motives. Only years later were approaches made to repair the association, without condemnation, between the Russian front-fighters and their accusers.
Hans Werner Neulen, in his book An Deutscher Seite, asked the question, “Were they the best that prevailed at that time, or captive slaves in Prussian straight-jackets? When, between the Communists with their universal aims of remedial teaching, and the National Socialists with their expectations of Germanic control, the ideals of liberation did not materialise, then the foreign ‘volunteers’ chose the side of the German Reich”.
Till today in the Netherlands, no one will accept that there were far more ‘volunteers’ wearing field-grey than those of the Allies wearing khaki.