Armageddon (83 page)

On Semenyak’s barge were 600 men, crammed into the hold and on the decks. They were terrified of capsizing. Those on deck crowded into the hold as the swell rose. They began to die. The corpses were merely thrown overboard. They had no food, and some started drinking sea-water. It seemed unlikely that they would be allowed to live. The Germans had taken immense pains to evacuate Stutthof and keep its inmates out of Soviet hands, “because they feared that we would tell the story of what had been done to us.” Day after day the barges wallowed uncertainly across the sea, with the trail of corpses on the swell lengthening relentlessly. “Despair? We were always in despair. Somehow, each of us persuaded himself that he would be the one to survive. But the barges were the worst thing that ever happened to me.” On their tenth evening at sea, they ran aground on a sandbank. The tug abandoned its search for a landfall, cast off all its charges and steamed away into the darkness. At 6 a.m. next morning, they were sighted by a German naval ship, which put off lifeboats.

Pitying German sailors took the survivors on board and landed them on an island close by. Of several thousand prisoners who had been embarked, just 400 remained. The war was at its last gasp. So also were millions of captives like the stricken survivors of Stutthof.

STARVATION OF A NATION

U
NTIL THE VERY
end of the Second World War, several nations in their entirety, together with some large communities, remained captives of the Germans: Norway, Denmark, northern Italy, northern Yugoslavia, much of Czechoslovakia, the Channel Islands and most of the population of Holland. The Dutch experience was perhaps the worst. 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 months, the mortality rate of small children doubled, that of babies trebled. Twelve thousand people died outright of hunger, a further 23,000 as a consequence of Allied air raids on German rocket sites, 5,000 in German captivity and 30,000 as forced labourers. Of the 2,800 Dutch people executed in cold blood by the Germans, 1,560 met their ends in the winter of 1944–45.

The Dutch suffered an abrupt descent into misery. In 1939, as in 1914, Holland sought to escape conflict with its mighty neighbour through a declaration of neutrality. Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940 snuffed out that aspiration. Yet, after the swift military collapse and the decision of the Netherlands royal family and government to choose exile, many Dutch people resumed a remarkably humdrum existence. There had been little anti-German sentiment in Holland before 1939. Now, most of the country’s bureaucracies and institutions accepted Nazi authority, much as they detested the proconsul whom Hitler appointed to rule the Netherlands, the Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart. There was a small Resistance movement, 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,” said twenty-two-year-old Ted Van Meurs, who suffered severely in German hands before escaping to freedom. “Adventurous young men preferred to try and flee the country.”

For all the fame of Anne Frank’s long 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. “At first when they took Jews, people said: ‘It’s impossible, they can’t do that,’ ” observed a young Dutchman. “But after a time such things become normal.” Hans Cramer, the twenty-two-year-old son of a German Jewish father living in the Hague, said: “For most of the population life went on in an incredibly normal way. Okay, there was no coffee or tea, and a few people were in great danger, but lots of others still seemed to be playing tennis. Some of us were surprised by the willingness of the Dutch authorities to work with the Germans.” More Dutchmen carried arms for Hitler—some 25,000, of whom 10,000 were killed—than wore the khaki of the Free Netherlands forces.

Both rival armies found Holland 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—especially those living near the German border—seemed more sympathetic to the Wehrmacht than to their Allied liberators. Fritz Hauff, an officer with 712th Fusilier Battalion, recorded in his diary on 21 October a conversation with a Dutch civilian: “His attitude is typical. He does not care who wins the war, as long as it is over soon.” This view was echoed by George Turner-Cain, writing of his own experiences as colonel of a British battalion billeted among Dutch civilians in the winter of 1944: “There is considerable indifference to our presence, and some are downright unfriendly.” War Office reports from the liberated area of Holland stated that “security doubts on the reliability of elements of the Dutch population” caused some houses and villages to be compulsorily evacuated; and “The discovery that liberation was going to increase the hardships and difficulties of living was a big disappointment to labour, and has tended to produce discontent.”

Until the winter of 1944, when liberation seemed so close, most Dutch people unwillingly accepted their lot. The Netherlands was perhaps the most instinctively ordered middle-class society in Europe. “There were some nice German officers and soldiers,” said Cas Tromp, twelve-year-old son of an Amsterdam court official. Once when his brother was hit on the head by a stone, a German hospital patched him up and a German soldier drove the boy home. Tromp’s father was careful to avoid trouble with the occupiers: “He was a law-abiding man. He had three children to feed.” Bert Egbertus’s father, an Amsterdam house decorator, was able to slip back home from forced labour in Germany. “It was not so bad for Dutch people—nothing like as bad as for Poles and Russians. Though there was a war, for a long time it was not so terrible for us.” The 8 p.m. curfew was an inconvenience, nothing worse. While those who resisted the occupiers suffered badly, for much of the war Germans treated those who obeyed them with civility. Bertha Schonfeld, a twenty-seven-year-old living in the Hague, was deeply irked when she tripped in the street and two German soldiers helped her up. She had an argument on a train with a uniformed Dutch Nazi who offered her his seat, which she refused.

Yet it would be wrong to confuse Dutch acquiescence with enthusiasm for the occupiers. Fritz van den Broek, a Dordrecht doctor, would not allow his children to go to the cinema, because he did not wish them to be exposed to German propaganda. The only film his twelve-year-old son had thus ever seen was
Snow White
, a few weeks before the 1940 occupation began. 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. Just 1,700 succeeded. Ted Van Meurs, a medical student, escaped repeatedly from German camps on his way to labour service. He 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.

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 Arnhem 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 some died. Six thousand Germans began conducting demolitions in Rotterdam. Resistance activity was met with summary executions. After Dutch insurgents in Putten wounded ten Germans, eighty-seven of the town’s 600 houses were burned. “Not a person was to be seen in the houses,” wrote a young Dutchman who went to Putten to look for his parents on 4 October. “Everywhere there were white flags and sheets, as if the village was surrendering after a hopeless struggle, smoking ruins and a deadly silence.” Three Dutchmen were shot in Rotterdam on 6 October, four more on the 24th. After a senior German intelligence officer was killed on 23 October in Amsterdam, twenty-nine hostages were killed. On 4 November the Germans blew up the Gothic town hall of Heusden, killing 134 refugees inside.

It was characteristic of the contradictions in the Germans’ behaviour, a belief in their own honour and rectitude even as they enslaved an entire population, that the Nazi leadership clung to figleaves of respectability. On 30 September in Haarlem, a German staff car swerved around a corner, forcing a Dutch cyclist to leap on to the pavement. The Dutchman shouted angrily at the German driver. The officer in the car responded by tossing a grenade, which missed the cyclist but badly injured a bystander and a thirteen-year-old girl. The German C-in-C of the Netherlands, von Blaskowitz, issued a stern rebuke, cautioning all ranks to observe traffic regulations: “It is unacceptable that bad behaviour by German forces should unnecessarily provoke the civilian population.”

The privations of the Dutch people, cut off from imports of food, worsened swiftly as winter approached. In Amsterdam there was gas for only ninety minutes a day, no trams 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, had 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 blankets and clothing to the Germans. All Netherlanders became reluctant to walk far, because walking wore down shoes, and these were almost unobtainable. Eight-year-old Roelof Olderman rejoiced when he was given some beautiful new black shoes. Then it rained. He found that the soles were made of cardboard, which fell to pieces beneath his small feet. There was no legitimate source of fuel to heat Holland’s offices, schools and homes. During the icy winter, trees were felled, fencing torn down. Even the wooden wedges between the idle tram rails were stolen. In the manic quest for fuel, graveyards were ransacked not to rob the dead but to seize their coffins for firewood. Cas Tromp was sent almost daily to search for wood around Schiphol airfield, near his home. Once, instead, he found an unexploded bomb. He danced along the casing, even jumped on it, because like most children he had no sense of peril.

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, likewise ten in Apeldoorn. These examples produced a reluctant trickle of workers. Vastly more men were required, however, for industrial labour. Fifty thousand Rotterdammers were rounded up and shipped to Germany. Women offered butter, chocolate, brandy, even their own bodies, to their rulers, if their men could be spared. Families slept in terror of the tramp of German boots on cobbles in the night, and the cry of “
Aufmachen! Aufmachen!
”—“Open up! Open up!”—which signalled the seizure of husbands and sons. In all, some 300,000 Dutch people were deported.

One day, Bert Egbertus’s mother was detained in a German round-up and held for ten hours. She came home at last at 2 a.m. The boy had lain alone in his bed, sick with fear, since 8 p.m. In the absence of light and heat, there was nowhere else. His father already lived in terror of discovery, after returning illegally from German labour service. Like some 300,000 other Dutch people, Egbertus was a “diver.” Officially—and for ration purposes—he did not exist. So too were Jan and Tom Wempe, sons of a government official living in Apeldoorn. The Germans hounded their father when they failed to report for labour duty. Instead, the boys began months in hiding behind a false wall in the loft. “Don’t worry. We’ll pray, and it will be all right,” said their father. So it was. The Wempes were fortunate enough to remain undiscovered. Many others were found, and suffered. Even for divers, the excruciating boredom of confinement seemed pain enough. The Wempe sons, twenty and twenty-four, read the same handful of books again and again and again. Their brother Theodore thought himself fortunate to have work for the Resistance. “The strain of such a life was very bad for family relationships,” he said. “To have two people sleeping in the same bed, to conceal their presence in the house, is not nice.”

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. “My mother was crying all the time,” said Hans Cramer. “She couldn’t bring herself to eat even when there was food. All our energies were devoted to survival.” “The drapes have been torn aside,” proclaimed Radio Oranje, broadcast station of the Free Netherlands, on 7 October, “bleeding and tortured Holland is exposed to the gaze of the world.”