by Mark Zuehlke
Such operations were the domain of the Central Government Fighting Group (KP), which organized in local cells that operated independently of any national centralized direction. Its fighters destroyed railway tracks, telegraph and telephone lines, and German supply points. Assassinations of German soldiers and officials and Dutch collaborators were occasionally carried out, but retaliatory measures were so brutal that the resistance and government-in-exile largely discouraged these. The Order of Service (OD), meanwhile, represented former Dutch military officers and administrators who had been supplanted by Nazi sympathizers. Its efforts were focused on setting up a covert administration that could maintain civil order and administrative services once the Allies liberated the country.
To provide a layer of coordination to the underground movement, the government appointed a core group of resistance leaders to the College van Vertrouwensmannen (College of Trusted Men). Their primary role was to be ready to fill any power vacuum that might occur when the country was liberated and until the government-in-exile could re-establish its authority.
Several other resistance organizations existed that had no affiliation with the government-in-exile or were even hostile to it. The largest of these was the Communist Party, which carried out active resistance and fomented strikes. It was particularly strong in Amsterdam and the northeastern part of Groningen province, including the port city of Delfzijl.10
With the Allied invasion in June 1944 and subsequent breakout from Normandy, the prospect of liberation spurred the government-in-exile and resistance organizations to increase their activities, which the Germans responded to with escalated repression. Deportation of Jews accelerated, as did impressment of Dutch to work in Germany. Dutch soldiers, released from prisoner-of-war camps in 1940, were again ordered imprisoned—prompting another wave of onderduikers.
Anticipation of imminent liberation grew to fever pitch in September 1944, when the Allies took Antwerp and launched Market Garden. When British troops reached Antwerp on September 4, Radio Oranje trumpeted the news. Throughout the country, the occupation forces seemed to be panicking and preparing to flee. Seyss-Inquart ordered all German civilians to move east to where they could easily escape into Germany. A car carried his wife across the border to safety. Hundreds of Dutch collaborationists, peddling dilapidated bikes, jockeyed for space on roads clogged with German troops streaming east.11 To the Dutch, “almost as satisfying as the Allied advance is this spectacle of fear striking into the hearts of the Dutch Nazis and their masters,” a Canadian intelligence report observed. “The climax [was] reached on Tuesday the 5th of September. All roads leading to the east of the country are jammed with German military cars loaded down with hastily packed luggage and pilfered goods. Holland is convinced that liberation is only a matter of days.”
Many radio news reports of cities being liberated on what would be remembered as Mad Tuesday proved false, but the rumour mill continued to churn. Hearing that Breda had been freed and mistaking the Dutch city in Brabant province for a nearby hamlet just outside of Amsterdam, thousands stood at the city’s southern entrance “with bunches of flower hidden under their coats, waiting for the liberators to arrive. Night passes. In the sober light of morning it is only too apparent that wishful thinking has had its fling. Holland is not yet free from the Germans.”12
The German panic had, in fact, quickly subsided, Seyss-Inquart and the military commanders imposing order on their forces and reasserting authority over the Dutch. A hardening resolve had not been foreseen by Allied intelligence, which had assumed a “complete German withdrawal from the Netherlands by 1 October, 1944.”13 This conclusion had circulated to the Dutch government-in-exile, which, along with Allied intelligence agencies, had passed the message to resistance groups in the Netherlands.
Instead of fleeing, the Germans appeared ready to implement a “scorched-earth policy,” using water rather than fire. Between 500,000 and 800,000 acres of polders were deliberately inundated, taking about 10 per cent of the country’s farmland out of production and reducing total food production by 15 to 20 per cent.14 In Rotterdam and Amsterdam, a police cordon surrounded the harbours and huge explosions rocked the cities. “Cranes tumble into the water like drunken men. Elevators and docks are smashed. The Germans plunder the great warehouses until they stand empty. Train loads of machinery are taken away. Factories and wharves are reduced to heaps of ruins. At each explosion a pain goes through the hearts of the people of both cities. Everyone realizes that this means that ten thousand hands who once manned this proud port are now rendered idle by one destructive gesture, that liberation is going to mean that Holland will be a land of destroyed harbours and widespread poverty.”15
With the failure of Market Garden and the realization that they were not to be cut off from their homeland, the Germans in Holland decreed a “reign of terror.” Anyone acting against the occupation forces, Seyss-Inquart proclaimed, would be executed. For every German soldier killed by the resistance, at least three Dutchmen would die, Higher SS and Police Leader Hans Albin Rauter promised.16
Hoping to weaken the German ability to move troops and war matériel throughout the Netherlands, the Dutch government in London called for a national railway strike. “The children of Versteeg should go to bed,” Dr. Wilhelm Hupkes, deputy-president of the nationally owned Netherlands Railway Company, was informed by clandestine radio on September 17, 1944.17 Versteeg was his code name and the children were his workers. Hupkes had previously resisted such calls and agreed to carry out German transportation orders to avoid the company being either taken over directly by the Germans or placed under Dutch-Nazi management. This proved a controversial accommodation, for during the occupation years, Netherlands Railway transported more than 500,000 Dutch forced labourers to Germany, 120,000 Jews to the border for transshipment to extermination camps, and tens of thousands of political prisoners and prisoners of war out of the country. Hupkes’s decision was not made independently—the Dutch government-in-exile was complicit in keeping the railways running. Any time the government called for a strike, Hupkes had promised to comply.
Now the order had come directly from Prime Minister Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy in England, who still believed the German occupation was on the verge of collapse. Issuing the call on a Monday, Gerbrandy told Radio Oranje’s Louis de Jong: “Don’t worry. On Saturday we shall be in Amsterdam.”18
While Hupkes spread the word quietly through official company channels, Radio Oranje pre-empted him. “On account of a request received from Holland, and after consultation with Supreme Command . . . the Government is of the opinion that the time has come to give instructions for a railway strike, in order to hinder enemy transport and troop concentrations,” the announcer read. Implicit and accepted was the fact that while hampering German movement, the strike would also stop food and coal from reaching the major cities.19
Before the day was out, the railway was crippled, about 28,000 of the thirty thousand workers vanishing to become onderduikers. The following day, Seyss-Inquart requested that the newspapers run an appeal to the strikers to cease their “serious and dangerous game,” which could only cause crippling food shortages. To his surprise, the normally compliant publishers refused. On September 22, he tried again with a warning that if the railway workers did not return, many thousands of Dutch would starve to death. Again most papers refused to print his message.20
Although the railway was an important carrier of food and coal, at least as much of these staples were shipped via the country’s complex system of rivers and canals. Seyss-Inquart ordered these barges and ships halted. Bringing in German railway workers enabled him to get the trains back on line, and he limited them to carrying only supplies for occupation forces. Worsening the situation, prowling Allied aircraft strafed any trucks, boats, barges, or trains encountered. What food reached the cities was usually confiscated by the Germans or NSB police.
As 1944 drew grimly to conclusion, the three southern provinces of Zeeland, Braba
nt, and Limburg stood liberated by Allied forces—the first two largely by First Canadian Army—but the rest of the country descended into the “Hunger Winter.” In October, most towns’ gas and electrical systems failed, leaving everyone reliant on coal or wood for fuel. Candles and oil lamps provided the only illumination. “Holland now lives in chilly rooms, without light,” one analysis reported. “Fumes from improvised coal stoves hang in the air already redolent of not too tasty potato soup. Streetcars don’t run any longer. Some of them have even been dismantled and shipped to Germany. Telephones are out of use. Worst of all, the secret radio receivers are now silent because of the lack of electric power . . . In the towns, prices rise to fantastic heights. Potatoes once 10 cents a kilogram are now 800 cents. Butter rises in price from 1 to 100 guilders a pound.”21
Until September, rationing had managed to provide an average of seventeen hundred calories per person per day. Although little more than half the pre-war average of three thousand calories, this was sufficient for sustenance and in line with Allied policy that civilians in recently liberated countries should receive a minimum of two thousand calories.22 With the strike and Seyss-Inquart’s resulting food shipment ban, daily caloric intake plummeted. Seyss-Inquart also made it clear that the Dutch should not look for help as long as the strike continued. Indeed, he warned that the Germans would hinder food supply efforts by the Dutch authorities “as much as possible.” 23 By mid-December, the American Operation of Strategic Services reported that daily rations in cities of western Holland had declined to 630 calories, the black market had practically no food for sale, and reserves were sufficient for only ten more days. Thereafter, the rationing system ceased to operate, and the people of the big cities were reduced to scavenging.24
During the first weeks of 1945, the crisis mounted alarmingly. In January, between 16 and 20 per cent of Dutch civilian deaths were due to starvation. With each passing week the percentage increased; by the week of April 9-14, malnutrition was responsible for 54 per cent of all fatalities. That same month an estimated 3.6 million people in the western provinces were reported by Allied intelligence as “living on the brink of death by starvation.”25
THE ALLIES HAD been aware of the impending food crisis before it became fact and had recognized that relief would be necessary to “maintain the health and working capacity of the population and to preserve order.” Until October 1944, however, they had assumed that the Germans would abandon Holland without a fight. Once this illusion was shattered, SHAEF ordered a new “supply plan for the entire Netherlands with special consideration of the western regions.” Completed on October 16, the plan divided Holland into three areas. Area A was the already liberated region south of the Waal River. Few problems were foreseen here, as the area was agriculturally self-supporting. Area B was the region west of the IJssel River, and Area C included everything east of the IJssel. Because Area B encompassed two greatly different regions, it was subdivided into two sectors along a line running from Hilversum through Utrecht to Tiel. B-1, which stretched from this line east to the IJssel, was largely self-sufficient.
It was area B-2—which included all the largest Dutch cities—that posed the “biggest problem yet found in the Theatre” in terms of providing relief to civilian populations. Supplies here would have to come “entirely from imported stocks with no existing stocks or transport facilities.” Providing even one pound of food a day to each citizen would “require the daily importation of some 2,026 gross tons.”
The problem went far beyond providing food. Coal, liquid fuel, clothing, medical supplies, soap, and water-supply equipment were all needed. Arranging road transport and other transportation was so mired in difficulty that the planners decided B-2 would have to be treated “as an entirely different operation” from all other relief projects in Holland. The report recommended that Twenty-First Army Group establish a special staff, with representatives from SHAEF’s Mission to the Netherlands and Dutch authorities attached. This working group would devise a plan for creating a fourteen-day stockpile of food and other supplies that could quickly be dispersed into western Holland the moment it was liberated.26
Already a Dutch stopgap proposal had been advanced by the government-in-exile to lift the Allies’ strict blockade of German-occupied Europe and permit two Swedish freighters to deliver food to Delfzijl for transshipment into B-2. The International Red Cross added its weight to the appeal in November 1944 by seeking safe passage for a ship carrying supplies from Switzerland to sail from Lisbon to Delfzijl. Both proposals were approved by the Allies and Germans. The two Swedish ships carrying a 3,200-ton cargo reached Delfzijl on January 28, but it took two weeks for German and Dutch authorities to move these supplies to Amsterdam. Although the IRC ship had departed Lisbon on December 15 with the Swiss supplies, various problems slowed its progress so that it only reached Delfzijl on March 8. It carried approximately 1,600 tons of flour, rice, lentils, and oat flakes, which were distributed under strict control of Dutch government representatives and overseen by IRC officials. About 3.2 million people received two weekly bread rations from this ship’s supplies. The Red Cross also oversaw the distribution of 2,657 tons of rye that the Germans agreed to supply the Dutch from stockpiles in Germany.27
One IRC official reported: “The physical situation of the western provinces having reduced the inhabitants almost to a primitive state, they are obliged, in the struggle for existence, to engage in the black market, in usury and even in theft; men eat flower bulbs. The bombed houses are pillaged and looted of all combustible material. The trees in the gardens are cut and carried away by night. Horses killed in bombardments are immediately cut up by passers-by. The bread wagons in the cities can only circulate at 4:00 o’clock in the morning because if they go about in broad daylight crowds threaten to attack and plunder them.”28
SHAEF planners continued developing their massive relief initiative to be implemented the moment B-2 was liberated. In addition to the fourteen-day stockpile to be delivered by Twenty-First Army Group ground transport, it was decided that “extensive use of airplanes for flying in food [should] also be considered.” Prime Minister Gerbrandy pressed the point politely in a November 15 letter to General Eisenhower. “In view of the conditions which are expected to prevail immediately after departure of the enemy from the area, I believe that a delay of one or two weeks before supplies will begin to arrive would have most unfortunate circumstances . . . Transport by air of substantial quantities” was the only remedy. Within the week, Eisenhower assured him that plans were underway for a large supply of goods by “such air transport as is not urgently required for military operations.”
The Dutch government still believed that the evolving plans would “fail to provide, in practice, anything approaching the relief required” and that without a concrete supply plan, the gap between the liberation and the arrival of supplies might result in a catastrophe within “a fortnight to a month.”29
By January, the Dutch in London were frantic, and Queen Wilhelmina issued a personal plea to King George, Prime Minister Churchill, and President Roosevelt. The people in B-2, she said, face “hunger, cold, darkness, dirt, disease, and floods” as well as “physical destruction.” She urged that the Allied military be ordered to immediately liberate western Holland. Failing that, the Allies should arrange “immediate relief in the form either of mass evacuation or [provision] of food, clothing, and medical supplies.”30
THE DUTCH WERE under no illusion that the Allies would suddenly shift the mission of its armies, now massing on Germany’s border for a spring invasion, to the liberation of western Holland. But Wilhelmina’s plea was the first step in a rapidly evolving and breathtakingly daring Dutch initiative to negotiate a ceasefire in the region, under which the Germans would permit Allied relief to proceed even as the war continued elsewhere. However, rather than advance the proposal immediately to the Allies, it was decided to first test the waters with Seyss-Inquart. If he showed interest, the Dutch would choose the
moment to raise the idea with the Allies.
Dr. H.M. “Max” Hirschfeld, a government deputy secretary who remained in the Netherlands after the conquest, was asked to open the remarkable discussion that ran counter to every Allied agreement—particularly the sacrosanct requirement that there would be no cessation of hostilities anywhere prior to a full German unconditional surrender. As secretary-general of the Departments of Agriculture and Fisheries, and Commerce, Industry and Shipping, Hirschfeld was the most influential Dutch bureaucrat working inside Seyss-Inquart’s administration. His opposition to violent resistance or strikes had earned him a reputation within the underground and even the Dutch government in London as a collaborationist. But Hirschfeld believed the retribution visited on the Dutch populace by open defiance exceeded any value gained.
Having maintained clandestine contact with the government-in-exile, Hirschfeld now raised the idea of relief negotiations with Seyss-Inquart on December 14 during a three-hour meeting. Because of the sensitivity of the issue—Seyss-Inquart warily considering a course Hitler would deem treasonous and the Dutch coyly extending an offer to end hostilities that violated Allied resolutions—no transcript was kept. In general terms the two men discussed the growing crisis in western Holland and possible solutions. At an equally secret meeting in January, they looked more specifically at the possibility of the Germans allowing the Allies to provide relief directly.