Armageddon - Max Hastings [302]
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