Armageddon - Max Hastings [307]
Through the very last days before freedom belatedly came to Holland, the Germans continued to kill. Hitler’s servants seemed eager to drag with them into the grave of the Third Reich every innocent who fell into their clutches. On 8 March, 263 Resistance members were executed in reprisal for an attack on General Rauter, a senior SS officer in Holland. On 1 April, Canadians freed the big east Netherlands town of Enschede. The night before they arrived, the Gestapo executed ten people, together with two more just an hour before Canadian tanks appeared. When the liberators entered Zutphen on 6 April, they found the bodies of ten freshly executed civilians, some of whom had been tortured. As late as 7 April von Blaskowitz, commanding the 120,000 German troops remaining in Holland, was still frenziedly preparing demolitions and giving orders for a last stand in the area of Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Utrecht which had been designated Fortress Holland. On 15 April, thirty-four people were executed in Amsterdam. Two days later, the Germans blew up the huge dyke guarding the Wieringer flatlands, flooding 50,000 acres, the granary of western Holland, to add to the 230,000 hectares of the country already under water. A. C. de Graaf, deputy leader of the local Resistance, emerged from hiding to save his wife and children from the inundations. He was caught and shot.
One of the most extraordinary episodes of the war, still scarcely known in the West, began on 4 April 1945 on the Dutch offshore island of Texel. Its garrison, the 882nd Battalion of the Wehrmacht, comprised some 550 Georgians captured on the Eastern Front. They mutinied and ran amok, killing every German they encountered. A local Resistance leader consulted with the Georgians, and set off with three of them in the local lifeboat to seek aid from the British across the North Sea. They landed at Cromer in Norfolk on 6 April. The British, however, received them without enthusiasm. They were subjected to six days of interrogation, at the end of which the Georgians were dispatched to a PoW camp. No action was taken to assist the Texel mutineers, or the local Dutch people.
The Germans, even in these last weeks of the war, addressed the uprising with unstinting ferocity. Hitler signalled personally to demand that “an example should be made of the rebels.” Some 3,600 men of the Wehrmacht were committed, in a battle that lasted more than a fortnight. The C-in-C Netherlands reported to Berlin on 17 April: “Extremely fierce fighting from strongpoint to strongpoint . . . success only possible if all available artillery and other heavy weapons are employed.” Yard by yard, the Germans forced back the mutineers. A German officer who led the way into the local hospital shot five badly wounded Georgians in front of a Dutch nurse. The last fifty-seven mutineers capitulated on 20 April. “We had risen against the Hitler tyranny, we had made great sacrifices,” one of the few survivors wrote bitterly, “but instead of receiving help we were betrayed and abandoned.” The captives were stripped naked, forced to dig their own graves, then shot. The last four were kept alive long enough to fill in the holes. A total of 117 local Dutch people, 550 Georgians and 800 Germans perished in the Texel battle, which went entirely unremarked outside Holland, both then and later. This bloodbath ended barely a week before Hitler’s death.
The agony of Holland was assuaged by the surrender of von Blaskowitz’s forces on 5 May, yet it became the work of months to claw back the nation from the abyss of starvation, aided by enormous Allied air drops of food—Operation Manna. If the Dutch were not confined behind barbed wire, their sufferings were at least as great as those of most Allied prisoners of war. Incredibly, the occupiers continued