by Mark Zuehlke
Whenever Hirschfeld proposed open negotiations, however, Seyss-Inquart shied away from what he described as treason. The Dutch equally realized they walked a fine line and that the Allied governments and SHAEF were unlikely to approve direct talks.31
In February, Seyss-Inquart met Hitler in Germany and was so inspired by the Führer’s optimism that he pulled back from further discussion.32 His spirits soon fell, however, when the Allies bridged the Rhine in late March and First Canadian Army started advancing into eastern Holland. Seyss-Inquart realized the end of the war was near and that Germany was doomed to defeat. When Hitler ordered destruction of key dykes and pumping stations that would inundate much of the Netherlands, Seyss-Inquart ignored him.33 Instead, he summoned Hirschfeld.34 This time, Jacob van der Gaag, a secret representative of the commander of the Dutch Forces of the Interior and also a member of the College of Trusted Men, attended. In January 1945, van der Gaag had slipped through the German lines to the Allied side to establish direct contact between the resistance movement and the government-in-exile. He then infiltrated back into occupied Holland with the mission to find “a basis of agreement between the German forces and the Allies so that a ‘status quo’ could be applied.”35
Following this meeting, Seyss-Inquart visited Reichminister Albert Speer in Oldenburg, Germany, on April 1. Much like Seyss-Inquart, Speer had been ordered to carry out a scorched-earth policy but on German soil. When Seyss-Inquart confessed that he “did not want to inflict any more damage on Holland,” Speer smiled. He admitted to ignoring his own order and also stated his belief that the war would end in three months at the outside because arms production was no longer able to meet demand. Returning from Germany, Seyss-Inquart met Hirschfeld the next evening.36
While on the surface these talks were still entirely initiated by the Dutch, Allied high command was privy to them and quietly supportive. Select officers within First Canadian Army and Twenty-First Army Group were kept apprised of their progress, even as they remained one of the war’s most closely guarded secrets. Anyone made aware was formally warned that the “negotiations [between] Dutch Forces of Interior and [Seyss-Inquart] will be treated as more, repeat more, secret than BIGOT, and handled by selected [officers] whose names will be recorded.”37 When the stamp bearing the letters BIGOT appeared on Allied military documents, it meant that only personnel possessing the highest security clearance were to have access. Such personnel could attest to their being “bigoted.” The highly secret plans and maps setting out Operation Overlord, for example, had born the BIGOT stamp. There had previously been no higher secrecy classification than BIGOT.
Hirschfeld and Van der Gaag had made it clear to Seyss-Inquart that these negotiations assumed an eventual German unconditional surrender. Seyss-Inquart responded that “he had been ordered to hold out under all circumstances, and to carry out the necessary demolitions and inundations for that purpose.” However, he acknowledged that such “drastic measures” would “prove catastrophic for western Holland” and suggested that “until Germany ceases to resist—at which date they [the German forces in western Holland] would also surrender unconditionally—the Allied troops [should] not advance beyond the Grebbe Line.” This would allow the German forces to continue to hold North Holland, South Holland, and Utrecht. Within these provinces, the Gestapo would cease executions, political prisoners would be decently housed and properly looked after, and the culprits who carried out new attacks on German personnel would be tried by a civilian court and spared the death sentence. There would be no further inundations. The Germans would also help facilitate the opening of Rotterdam’s port to barges bearing food and coal from the south.
Seyss-Inquart emphasized that there would be no official surrender and the occupation would be maintained. It was imperative that his proposal be a closely guarded secret. Outwardly, the Canadian forces closing on the Grebbe Line “would just stop . . . and not attack any further.”
If the Allies agreed, Seyss-Inquart said the Germans would abide by the unofficial terms. But if his proposal was rejected, the Germans “would be obliged, and they were still under Hitler’s orders, to carry out the demolitions and inundations, in order to stop the Allied advance.” Both parties, he added, knew there was only sufficient food in western Holland to last, at most, three more weeks, and a catastrophe was inevitable after that. Millions would certainly perish—either by drowning, starvation, or disease—if the proposal was not carried out.
When Lieutenant Colonel M.L. DeRome—one of the approved officers at First Canadian Army headquarters—read the report of this meeting, he drafted a memorandum favouring acceptance of Seyss-Inquart’s terms. Bearing in mind “that we only have a small number of troops available for clearing this part of Holland,” he wrote, agreement “that there will be no more large scale shooting” once the Grebbe Line was gained offered “the only possible way of saving these three provinces from complete destruction. Unconditional surrender will still take place, though at a later date.”38
On April 3, Hirschfeld and four members of the College of Trusted Men met to discuss Seyss-Inquart’s proposal. The college members urged him to pass the proposal directly to the government in London. Hirschfeld’s message suggested that the Germans in western Holland were willing to disobey orders and cease hostilities once driven back to the Grebbe Line. In exchange, the Allies would halt there and then isolate Fortress Holland—as western Netherlands had been declared by Hitler—by advancing to the north and northeast to cut lines of communication from western Netherlands to other parts of the country and Germany beyond.39 It was now up to the Allies to either agree to Seyss-Inquart’s proposals or risk his carrying out Hitler’s orders.
[13]
Crazy Young Devils
THE PROSPECT OF a ceasefire between Twenty-Fifth Army and First Canadian Army did nothing to lessen the intensity of fighting in early April. The German army was unable to present a unified defence, yet ad-hoc battle groups resisted fiercely wherever terrain or fortifications offered advantage. This continued resistance baffled the western Allies but accorded with Hitler’s pronouncement that if “the war is lost, the German nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no need to take into consideration the basic requirements of the people for continuing even a primitive existence . . . Those who will remain after the battle are those who are inferior; for the good will have fallen.”1
While some German soldiers embraced Hitler’s call to die fighting, others continued to resist out of the naive belief that the longer they resisted, the more likely the western Allies were to agree to a separate peace that excluded the Soviet Union. This scenario reached its ultimate delusory form when Germans imagined the western powers joining with them to destroy the Soviets. Whatever the motivation, the German army fought on with a fatalistic determination.
Where the Twente Canal joined the IJssel River at Zutphen, 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s 9th Brigade met precisely this kind of “fanatical resistance put up by teenaged youngsters” of the 361st Infantry Division and 3rd Parachute Training Regiment, “who all seemed to be armed with automatic weapons and had a fair amount of [artillery] at their command.”2 Major General Holly Keefler had expected the city to fall quickly to this advance from the south on April 4. Instead, he was forced to commit his entire division to battle.
That evening, Keefler trucked 7th Brigade through the night to the Twente bridge crossing at Laren, about five miles east of the city, so it could advance a battalion along either bank of the canal. Once 7 CIB closed on Zutphen, Keefler would pass his 8th Brigade through it. The 9th Brigade, meanwhile, would continue advancing on the city from the south.
The Regina Rifles crossed the bridge and moved along the northern bank, while the Royal Winnipeg Rifles paralleled their course on the opposite shore. Keefler thought the Germans defending Zutphen were too weak to be able to meet both this attack and 9 CIB’s. As 7 CIB threatened to trap them in Zutphen, he expected the Germans to withdraw rather than be
surrounded.
The Reginas’ Lieutenant Walter Keith had slept through the entire truck ride. “Sleep served to drown the worrisome thoughts of what was to come at the end of the ride. I had experienced by now the awful mental let down between battles, which was far worse mentally than the battle itself. Thoughts of what had happened and dread of what was to come were not good.”3
At 0540 hours, the Reginas had clambered out of the trucks, and ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies advanced with the other two rifle companies in trail. Leading ‘D’ Company’s No. 16 Platoon, Keith walked through light drizzle across the flat fields bordered by the canal and raised railway embankment to the battalion’s right. Sporadic mortar and artillery fire dogged their steps, but no casualties resulted.
To protect the infantry’s exposed right flank, ‘C’ Squadron of the 17th Duke of York’s Royal Canadian Hussars had been ordered to clear the railway embankment. The Hussars were wary, having recently encountered groups of Hitler Youth “armed with machine guns and Panzerfausts.” Repeatedly the “armoured cars would suddenly be confronted by one of these boy-soldiers, who, standing in the middle of the road a few yards away would open up with a Schmeisser and . . . the gunner-operator, feeling anger, hate and pity all at the same time would take careful aim and ‘let go’ with a burst of blazing Besa [machine-gun fire]. Had these lads been properly schooled in war-waging, their ‘do-or-die’ tactics might have done. As it was they died.”4
When the Reginas gained Eefde—a small suburban village—at about 0830 hours, Major Gordon Brown ordered Keith’s platoon to cross over the railway and clear a small cluster of houses to the north. Imagining the Germans hunkered behind the embankment, Keith reluctantly ordered Corporal Chris Vogt to lead the way with his section. “As they went up the incline to the tracks I felt really bad waiting for German machine guns to open on them when they reached the top and wished I had led them up. Chris led them up with no hesitation. Fortunately there were no Germans in the area.” The platoon quickly searched the houses and was just about to return when the section on the left spotted some Germans coming in to surrender. As Keith and Corporal Homer Adams hurried over, the lieutenant spotted about a dozen enemy troops between the railway embankment and a house. “They were being harangued by an NCO and seemed reluctant to come any further. We rapidly saw that, rather than coming in to surrender, they were counter attacking us. The NCO was carrying a machine pistol. Adams, fearless and reckless 21-year-old kid that he was, ran up to the NCO hollering, ‘Put it down.’ Instead, the German swung the muzzle to fire at Adams, who snapped off a single shot from the hip that dropped the man. Adams ran back toward Keith shouting, ‘Get shooting!’
“‘I can’t,’ Keith yelled back, ‘you’re in the road.’” By the time Adams cleared Keith’s field of fire, the Germans had dashed behind some houses. The two Reginas dodged into a house as well and took up position on the second storey, where a bedroom window faced the Germans. They were soon joined by a couple of men from the battalion’s anti-tank platoon who had a Bren gun. Keith saw that the enemy had gone to ground inside a bunker between two of the houses “and one idiot repeatedly stood up and fired his sub-machine gun in our direction. Each time we opened up with rifles and the anti-tank crew’s Bren. We finally winged the German and soon white flags were raised.” After rounding up the prisoners and delivering them to company headquarters, Keith and Adams walked back to check the dead NCO. “He was an old gray head, probably a WWI veteran. Adams’ un-aimed shot had got him right through the heart. We were increasingly running into very old and very young Germans.”5
While the Reginas had tightened their hold on Eefde, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles had marched unopposed along the Twente’s southern bank. The two battalions’ clearing of the canal to a point immediately east of Zutphen enabled 6th Canadian Field Company engineers to start erecting a seventy-foot Bailey bridge at 1500 hours. A smoke-generator team concealed the bridge site to good effect until the last bolts were being tightened at 1730 hours. Just then, a sniper in the city outskirts “opened up on the bridge with a Schmeisser and although his aim was bad, it was most unpleasant,” one after-action report mildly stated. Thirty minutes later, the bridge was ready for traffic.6
With a bridge of his own, Major General Keefler tightened the vice on Zutphen, ordering 8 CIB to renew the advance from the east, while 9 CIB continued its operations to the south. Having managed to drive the Germans back from Leesten on the morning of April 5, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders provided a firm base for 9 CIB’s Highland Light Infantry to execute a leftward hook directed at gaining the village of Baronsbergen and the banks of the IJssel immediately beyond. The North Nova Scotia Highlanders, meanwhile, passed through Leesten to drive north into the suburb community of Warnsveld directly southeast of Zutphen.
On paper, Brigadier Rocky Rockingham’s plan seemed to say that the three battalions would be engaged in a coordinated push, but in fact the “numerous streams and rivulets . . . made any large organized advance dangerously impractical.” Rockingham soon realized he “could do little else besides harass the enemy’s southern outpost defences, leaving the reduction of the canal-bound fortress” of Zutphen to 8 CIB.
Even this limited aim proved costly. Zutphen was ringed by old Dutch fortifications in which the Germans were able to establish “supporting strong points” that had each to be taken in turn.7 Although the three battalions made steady gains, the HLI reported “heavy going” with the “fanatical young Nazis from [paratroop] training battalions” fighting well and led “by well qualified NCOs.” No sooner did the battalion root out the defenders at one resistance point than another was encountered. As April 5 drew to a close, the HLI was still unable to wipe out one group of Germans holding a pocket between them and the Glens on their right.8 Rockingham ordered the Glens “to ensure” that this pocket was cleared in the morning, but it took until 1427 hours on April 6 for ‘D’ Company to do so.9
The North Novas, meanwhile, had slugged it out with sixteen-year-olds, “who were fighting fanatically and surprisingly well with very little support outside of machine guns and bazookas [Panzerfausts].” From hides inside the many small and dense woods, the Germans launched repeated ambushes. A profusion of narrow roads cutting this way and that through the trees left the company commanders confused as to their whereabouts. Around every corner, more paratroops seemed always to lie in ambush or be ready to defend a roadblock of interlaced fallen trees.
Leading ‘B’ Company through one wood, Major J.S. Wright was raked by a burst of machine-gun fire that severely wounded him in both legs, and Lieutenant James Gordon Murray was mortally struck. Captain Jack Fairweather rushed forward to take command, and with support from a troop of Crocodile flame-thrower tanks, the North Novas burned their way through the resistance.10
While pushing into one wood, ‘A’ Company became entangled in a bizarre fight for control of a mental asylum. Although it was clearly marked with red crosses, paratroops were inside and determined to defend it. To one side of the main building stood a small bungalow, and as the Bren gunner leading one section approached it, he called back that there were people in beds inside. When the section leader called for them to come out, there was no response. Kicking in the door, the Bren gunner yanked the bedding off the first bed and stared down at a corpse. The bungalow was the asylum’s morgue and each bed held a body, recently washed and readied for burial.
Inside the main building, “Germans ran through the wards and fired from the windows, while the violent patients, fastened to their beds, were laughing and crying and singing and shouting. Every care had to be taken not to wound any of the inmates.” Gradually the asylum was cleared. A thorough search of the facility turned up eight paratroops hiding under laundry and in closets.11
From the asylum the North Novas advanced into Warnsveld, where snipers and machine-gun crews roamed independently among the buildings. One North Nova was killed and several others wounded before the town was cleared at nightfa
ll. April 5 had cost the battalion two officers killed, another two wounded, and twenty-nine other-rank casualties, of which four were fatal.
The average age of the Germans encountered, the war diarist added, was sixteen or seventeen. “Fanatic, when interviewed they still thought Germany would win and their belief in Hitler and Nazism was still unshaken. However, there were cases among the prisoners of just badly scared boys . . . Most . . . had only been in battle a week and the average had only been in the army three months.”12 Warnsveld was as far as the North Novas had to go towards Zutphen, Keefler having decided that the city could now be cleared from the east by 8 CIB.
BECAUSE BRIGADIER JIM Roberts was in England on leave, the Queen’s Own Rifles’ Lieutenant Colonel S.M. “Steve” Lett temporarily commanded 8 CIB. Lett’s plan called for the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment to drive through the northern portion of Zutphen parallel to the railway track, while Le Régiment de la Chaudière worked its way into the southern part. The Sherbrooke Fusiliers’ ‘B’ Squadron would support both battalions.13
Lett had just two battalions because his own QOR had been detached on April 5 to clear a portion of the IJssel River around the hamlet of Rha, well south of Zutphen. The operation was expected to be simple, the battalion enveloping the hamlet from the east and then advancing a short distance beyond to gain the riverbank. Support was provided by the Duke of York’s ‘B’ Squadron and four Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa heavy machine-gun platoons. Three infantry companies advanced as one, ‘D’ passing Rha to the north, ‘B’ to the south, and ‘A’ moving directly through it.14 Major Elliott Dalton—just returned after recovering from wounds suffered in the Juno bridgehead the previous June—commanded.