Armageddon - Max Hastings [304]
Among young Dutchmen, from September onwards there was a modest upsurge in recruitment to the Resistance, matching experience in France after D-Day. That winter, Holland harboured an estimated 5,000 fighters and 4,000 intelligence-gatherers, together with some 25,000 people engaged in secret publishing or working for escape networks. Between September 1944 and April 1945, American and British aircraft parachuted 20,000 weapons into Holland. It remains hard to balance the benefits to the self-respect of the Dutch people against the military futility and tragic sacrifice of the arming of civilians. To the very end, the Germans mercilessly executed anyone suspected of assisting the Resistance, together with countless hostages. All that winter, in squares and on street corners, the public murder of Dutch people continued, to discourage their compatriots from armed opposition. In Rotterdam 100 hostages were shot, in Amsterdam 200. When a prominent Nazi official was shot by the Resistance in March, Himmler demanded reprisal killings of 500 people. He eventually accepted the corpses of 250, of whom twenty-six were young men shot on a rubbish dump in the centre of Amsterdam. The Germans were in a chronically tense, dangerous mood. For years, the Dutch had grown accustomed to Wehrmacht units singing marching songs as they swaggered through the streets. There was no more singing in the winter of 1944.
The courage of the Resisters was extraordinary. One day in January, a Jewish mother and her two sons, desperate for food, went foraging from the house in Zeist where they had lived in precarious obscurity. They were detained by Germans who thought they appeared Jewish, and locked up in the local police station along with seven other Jews, until the SS could remove them. The father of the family sought the aid of the Resistance. Local fighters decided that a rescue attempt could be made, but that it must be carried out by men unknown by sight to the local police. A former policeman named Henny Idenburg enlisted the aid, willing or otherwise, of a Luftwaffe deserter whom the Resistance was hiding. A local garage owner agreed to turn a blind eye while a German truck he was repairing was “borrowed” for an hour. On 23 January, the Luftwaffe corporal in his uniform accompanied Idenburg, in his old Dutch police uniform, to Zeist police station. They produced a forged demand for the prisoners, who were duly handed over and herded out to the truck amid appropriate shouts and abuse. When the truck halted in a forest near Driebergen, the traumatized Jewish prisoners were convinced that they were to be executed. Instead, they found themselves taken into hiding in a church until they could be removed to safe houses. They survived.
“We call out to the free world,” the Resistance signalled to London on 13 February. “An old, civilized nation is threatened with destruction by the German barbarians. Let the free world raise its voice . . . We shall hold out.” Yet with so many peoples across Europe crying out for salvation, just as the Allies were reluctant to acknowledge the unique plight of the Jews, so also they paid scant heed to that of the Dutch. Everything, argued Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, must hinge upon the defeat of Germany, the fount of all these evils. Allied leaders were convinced that to be deflected from their central purpose to succour any special group of Nazi victims would assist only the cause of Hitler. The Allies were probably right. But it was very hard for people dying by inches to acknowledge it.
The liberators seemed so tantalizingly close. Their guns could be heard month after month, firing from positions only a few miles distant from the towns and villages in which many Dutch people lived under savage oppression. Almost daily, British