One hostage who did not exude confidence was Robert Baelde of Rotterdam, another attorney who was also secretary of the Dutch Union, a political movement that sought to improve relations between Holland and Germany to better the lives of the Dutch people. Baelde revealed to his fellow prisoners that he had “a feeling” all would not be well.
The days passed too quickly heading to 14 August, deadline day. It was rumored that seven additional hand-chosen hostages had arrived and were being kept in the front building.
On 12 August all visits by loved ones were canceled. More troubling still, each prisoner was required to turn in his Ausweis—the identity card all carried with photo and fingerprints. In addition, twenty-five hostages were taken aside and photographed. With the exception of one, all were from Rotterdam. Robert Baelde, the man with “the feeling,” was included. The one not from Rotterdam was Otto.
There occurred another disquieting sign: The barracks chiefs were ordered to make a strict accounting of which hostage slept in which bunk, top or bottom, in which room. Whatever was going on, it seemed that it might be more than a bluff.
On Friday, 14 August, with the midnight deadline looming, rumors spread through the seminary that the saboteurs had been caught. Spirits among the hostages lifted. Otto played several hands of bridge with his usual partner, Constant, in the afternoon, and then at dinner he sat with his new friend Peereboom, talking about his career in the justice system and offering theories about rehabilitation. Peereboom observed that Otto showed no fear at all; he was his usual friendly, upbeat self.
“After the war,” said Otto, “I’ll get promoted and move away from this work. It’s for young men who want to gain experience. I think I can do more good in a higher position.”
They remained in such deep conversation that all at once, it seemed, they were the last two in the dining hall. They hurried out to attend a football match with the rest of the hostages and then, in the long Dutch summer evening, Otto sat with his diary and wrote, “I stayed to write a letter to M. and to make notes. Lovely weather, a little wind and some sunlight now and then and soft air.” Here his diary ended.
Sometime in the blackness of night, after one o’clock, Otto heard heavy boots on the plank floor outside his room. The door flew open and flashlights blinded him. He was ordered to dress and pack up all his belongings. Then two guards led him up the long corridors and stairways to a room in the front building, near the entryway.
It was the middle of the night. The sounds of shoes and boots on the floor of the seminary made an enormous and echoing noise. Every door that opened and closed had the effect of thunder.
He stood in a room that the clergy had used for consultations. He was handed a sheet of paper and a pencil and informed that he may write a final letter. He sat and wrote to Meisje as instructed. Otto still believed the actions of his captors to be a bluff, because when Constant was brought to see his brother, he found Otto to be “perfectly calm.”
Otto smiled on sight of his brother. “Sit down and have a cigarette,” he told Constant. “I’m busy with my letter.”
With his brother’s appearance, Otto must have begun to suspect that this wasn’t an effort to frighten an admission out of the Rotterdam hostages. It was something more. An officer indicated it was time for Constant to go. The brothers embraced and the younger was led away.
Otto stood there in perfect stillness for a moment, with the only thing he now knew for certain: Whatever the future held, God would be with him.
After a time, he heard again the clomp of German boots approaching as another man from Beekvliet was led in to stand with Otto. Who was this unlucky soul?
Ah, but of course. It was his friend Robert Baelde, the man with “the feeling.” Baelde always had such a healthy-looking face, but not now. He was pale and solemn as he stood there, hat and suitcase in hand. Outside a truck pulled up and two other civilians, obviously hostages, shuffled in the front door. Baelde recognized one of them immediately and introduced Otto to Christoffel Bennekers, superintendent of Rotterdam police. He was a bit older, perhaps fifty, his face drained of color with the weight of the moment. He seemed to be having trouble walking due to nerves. Baelde also recognized the other man to enter—Willem Ruys, director of the Dutch shipping company Rotterdamsche Lloyd.
The men took note that three of them were Rotterdam natives; only Otto wasn’t. More heavy footsteps echoed in the cavernous hallways. Another gray face appeared. A young face and the last in the world that Otto expected to see.
It was young Alexander, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. No, the Germans could not do this; they could not take vengeance on two members of the van Limburg Stirum family. Constant’s wife was the sister of Schimmelpenninck’s wife, making it a small world of hostages who knew each other from family gatherings. But there was another connection. Alex’s father had been married to Meisje and Ella’s aunt—Audrey’s great-aunt—Cornelia Elisabeth, Baroness van Heemstra, who had borne him three children before dying of tuberculosis in 1901 at age thirty-four. The baron had then remarried, and thus Alex and three siblings were born. Otto knew now that if the Germans did indeed carry out their threat, this night was going to be very hard on the van Heemstra family. And Schimmelpenninck was not yet thirty years old, and dear God, his twenty-year-old wife, Catharina, was with child.
Otto introduced Schimmelpenninck as a member of his wife’s family, the van Heemstras. The men shook hands.
Events unfolded quickly now. The five were given a meal—if one could call bread and soup—bad soup—a meal. No one had an appetite. Then Green Police came in and pushed the men out the front door and down the long concrete stairway. If other hostages were to be included in this event, whatever the event amounted to, they must be coming from elsewhere.
The hostages were directed into the back of a truck, and Otto, lugging his effects as he was, could scarcely see to stumble his way up and inside. There was a plank bench on each long side of the truck bed, and the five found seats. More Green Police occupied the other seats and leaned on their rifles.
Doors slammed in an accompanying vehicle, presumably an officers’ car. Engines started and the vehicles set out to the clatter of spraying gravel. After a couple turns, a left and then a sharp right, the truck droned on in the night, and the men held their places against the rocking, to and fro.
It was the break of dawn when the truck and car pulled to a stop in woodlands. Birds sang merry songs about the emerging morning. The air was clear with the promise of a beautiful day. The men were ordered out of the truck and jumped down on stiff legs.
The trunk of the staff car was opened and shovels and pick axes were withdrawn and tossed beside the rutted dirt path on which the vehicles had parked. The five were ordered to each take a shovel and pick axe, and they were led on at rifle point through a young forest. They saw that there was another truck full of Green Police waiting, and the total number of men with rifles was about fifty.
They picked their way through the woodland bottom over sandy ground spritzed with morning dew. The stunted height of the pine, birch, and oak trees and the abundant scrub hinted that this forest had been burned out ten or twenty years earlier.
They reached a well-secluded spot and were ordered to dig. It was a time-honored German tradition: execution victims told to open their own graves. The five stripped off their jackets and did as instructed. To resist could bring retribution down onto wives and children. Better it ended here.
It took a long while to dig the graves because even though the earth was soft and sandy, there was a great deal of it to be displaced. And the laborers had to face one more intellectual challenge: How much care does a man invest in digging his own grave? Does he want it deep? Does he want it free of rocks and roots?
Five man-sized poles were produced and set into place at intervals of ten feet near the far side of the burial pit dug by the condemned. At length, the officer in charge proclaimed that the work of the men was sufficient. He ordered them
to stack their shovels and pick axes. Each was pulled or pushed to one of the five stakes and tied to it, hands behind the back. Heartbeats raced. Then blindfolds appeared, and it was almost a relief to have them fitted in place because it blotted out the sight of the hateful faces of green soldiers staring at them in the morning sun. The five could hear the Green Police being arranged into firing-squad sections, ten rifles pointed at each target. Above, the birds of morning sang on, songs about summer and sun and bugs to be eaten.
All grew still again, with the five in darkness.
“Do you have any final words?” asked the officer in charge.
There was silence a moment and a voice said, “I hope and trust that my death may yield fruit to the cause of our homeland. This is a fair thing, and for this I am willing to die.” It was Schimmelpenninck.
The officer called, “Attention! Ready!” Rifle bolts clicked. “Aim!”
“Long live the Queen!” shouted a hostage.
“Long live Oranje!” yelled another.
“Shoot!”
The fusillade sent birds to flight in the forest. The hostages hung there; none showed a sign of life. The officer moved forward and checked each man. Then he motioned for his soldiers to untie the bodies, which fell to the earth. They were kicked and nudged into the pit with minimal arrangement. The poles were uprooted and tossed onto the bodies. Men produced bags of lime and dumped the white powder on each body to hasten decomposition. Green-clad soldiers tossed the sacks in last and shoveled earth at a rapid pace to get this morning over with. The officer ordered the soldiers to tramp down the earth and kick leaves and vegetation onto it. In a little while, no evidence remained of the execution; the last thing the Germans wanted was to create a place here for Dutch martyrs.
The officer complimented his men on a job well done. As they hopped in the truck to depart, one man began to sing and then all joined in, and as they drove away from the spot, the sounds of their voices became ever more distant. By now the birds had come back and it was their sweet summer lament, not the guttural tune of the murderers, that restored peace to a blood-spattered little corner of Dutch forest in Goirle.
11
Paranoid
Otto’s diary, scribbled in Dutch, recorded daily life at Sint-Michielsgestel. Below the last entry, in which he had described a beautiful sunset, the last he would experience, was written in English by one of his fellow gijzelaars quoting Shelley on the death of Keats:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken’d from the dream of life.
The private person who became movie star Audrey Hepburn would never think of discussing the death of Uncle Otto in a publicity piece related to a play or movie. In a 1992 interview for UNICEF, she would allow that Otto “had been shot by the Germans because he was a judge [sic]. They had taken him as a hostage and he was shot as an example.”
During the war and even after it, the van Heemstras couldn’t make sense of such an unspeakable horror that had taken away dear Otto and sought to bend the will of the family and nation—the losses of Count van Limburg Stirum, Alexander, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, and their three brave companions—which makes the back story important, not only to van Heemstra descendants but to the history of the Netherlands.
For Seyss-Inquart, Nazi ruler of the Netherlands, the last week of Otto’s life had been a long, hard one. The failed bomb attack against German assets on Rotterdam’s railroad had infuriated the ruling German administration. Soon after the railroad bombing, the SS and the Dutch Nazi secret police, the SD, had won out in arguments to take a harder line and execute fifty Rotterdam natives among the hostages being held since May. The SD ordered that even more death candidates—all prominent men—be gathered from Rotterdam and shipped south to the seminaries. The SD had made their choices for the fifty condemned and forwarded files to Hanns Albin Rauter, head of the SS in the Netherlands. At the same time, Seyss-Inquart became aware that Queen Wilhelmina was visiting the United States and had addressed the Congress in Washington. In that speech she had spoken horrible slanders about the Third Reich.
Seyss-Inquart’s inner circle wondered if any of the death candidates at Sint-Michielsgestel or Haaren might be “special” to the queen. A review of the hostage lists turned up the name Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, who had defied NSB’s Schrieke the previous year. Limburg Stirum had done work for the Dutch royal court and was married to a member of the Frisian noble family van Heemstra—another that was connected to the Oranje court, as Marianne, Baroness van Heemstra, Otto’s sister-in-law, was now attending Princess Juliana in Ottawa, Canada.
More importantly, Seyss-Inquart knew his history and realized the importance to the Dutch royal family of the name Limburg Stirum. Leopold van Limburg Stirum had been one-third of the “Driemanschap of 1813” along with Frans Adam van der Duyn van Maasdam and Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp—these three men were the founding fathers of the modern nation of the Netherlands. They had formed a triumvirate in November 1813 to hold the country together when Napoleon’s occupying forces withdrew following the battle of Leipzig. To keep order, the Driemanschap had invited Willem Frederick, Prince of Oranje-Nassau, to come to power, creating a Dutch monarchy that would endure. The Oranje royal line that began with King Willem I in 1813 was unbroken to Queen Wilhelmina, and so yes, thought Seyss-Inquart with glee: The death of Count van Limburg Stirum would teach the irritating old woman that perhaps it was wiser to keep her mouth shut.
Meanwhile, Protestant churches in Rotterdam tried to stop the execution of any hostages by releasing a statement that multiple congregations “strongly condemn the act of sabotage on Friday, 7 August, which puts the lives of both German and Dutch nationals at the utmost danger.” They were admitting to the Germans that the resistance action committed by their countrymen was wrong.
Next, the churches sent an urgent telegram to Seyss-Inquart, which he read in his office to Rauter and Schrieke for their amusement. A representative of the church was summoned to a conference with the three leaders.
The churchman said that such an action “will lead to an uprising of the Dutch people.” Several rounds of negotiations followed until the number to be executed had been reduced to five.
“There are still five too many,” said the church official. “I ask for the release of all.” He was sent away.
On Friday, 14 August, it seemed likely that a spy had infiltrated the Dutch Resistance in Rotterdam and might soon identify the saboteurs, which could mean the passing of the deadline without the need to carry out any executions. At nine that evening an officer telephoned Rauter and said, “Gruppenführer, I call you because … the shooting of hostages is no longer necessary.” He explained the situation about the infiltrator, and Rauter asked how soon the guilty parties might be arrested. The officer said it might take a few days. Rauter conveyed the message to Seyss-Inquart, but by this time the final list of names had been decided upon: Limburg Stirum, and four from Rotterdam—Ruys, Bennekers, Baelde, and one other.
But reaching back into Dutch history to spite the queen had uncovered a more significant name at the last instant. That name was Schimmelpenninck, another tied not only to Holland but to Germany’s blood enemies, the French. Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck was a Dutch businessman and politician who became a favorite of Napoleon and was made a baron of the French empire in 1807. After the defeat of Bonaparte’s armies, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck became part of the founding government of the Netherlands, and this name too would be important to the queen. So Rauter’s SD set out to find and arrest Alexander, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. They succeeded on the third try on the afternoon of Friday, 14 August, wresting him away from his pregnant wife and driving him to Sint-Michielsgestel.
The fourth Rotterdammer was spared and Schimmelpenninck was added to the list. Only three of those to be executed had come from Rotterdam when the original intent was to make death candidates of a particular place pay for attacks by the Res
istance. The other two hostages marked for death were victims of power politics. Their fates were sealed.
After a phone call confirming that the executions had taken place, Rauter ordered SS officers to call the citizenry together in Dutch cities at noon on 15 August so a proclamation could be read: “In view of the fact that despite the extremely urgent invitation by Wehrmacht General der Flieger Friedrich Christiansen, the perpetrators of the dynamiting in Rotterdam have been too cowardly to give themselves up. As a result, the following five were executed this morning: Willem Ruys, Director General of Rotterdam; the Count van Limburg Stirum of Arnhem; Robert Baelde of Rotterdam; Christophel Bennekers, former police inspector of Rotterdam; and Alexander, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye of Schouwen.”
Back in Velp at Villa Beukenhof, the baron, Ella, and Audrey reacted in utter shock to the news. And it wasn’t only Otto but Alex Schimmelpenninck as well! With Meisje still in the south near the seminary and Alex’s wife in Schouwen, there was nothing to do but sit and wait.
Audrey had missed her Tante Meisje, who had lived in Brabant for the better part of two months, and now the new widow rushed back to the Beukenhof to be with her family. It was clear that the love between Otto and Meisje was real and deep, and Audrey had so felt the loss of her wonderful uncle since he had been taken on her birthday. Now he wasn’t coming back at all, and for what? He had done nothing! He was in captivity when the bomb had exploded in Rotterdam! He didn’t know the saboteurs; he didn’t take part in their decisions.
Meisje’s first act after her return to Velp was to call the Arnhemsche Courant and purchase ad space. She ordered a black-boxed ad with the words: “Today died, to my unspeakable sadness, my dearly beloved husband, Mr. Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, Substitute Officer of Justice at the District Court of Arnhem. W.C. Countess van Limburg Stirum, Baroness van Heemstra, Beukenhof, Velp. 15 August 1942.”
It was a risky move to publicly acknowledge her reaction to Otto’s death and to list as current his former title, considering that he had been dismissed by the Germans. But Meisje simply didn’t care. As a van Heemstra and a titled person, she knew it was her duty to be seen as a leader in spite of her grief. The actions of the family were so important now; now especially. They must do honor to Otto and to Friesland. The people must have an example of grace under these impossible circumstances as she endured profound grief. Later she occupied her mind by writing a letter to the hostages left behind at the seminary:
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