In the Fire of the Eastern Front: The Experiences of a Dutch Waffen-SS Volunteer, 1941-45

CHAPTER 21 In the Western Zone

I received the news from Brigitte that my brother Evert had suddenly appeared in Detmold, having escaped from a forced-labour camp in a Dutch coal mine in Limberg. He had gone straight away to Brigitte. The case that was to be made against him, as a Waffen SS officer, was something that he was not going to wait for. The ‘special courts’ of hate, revenge and reprisals was not for him. With help from the civilian coal-workers, he managed to escape, without wire-cutters or a ladder. He was shown the way over the darkened border by Dutch smugglers in return for some ‘hot’ wares, i.e. cigarettes.

Now my decision was to be made, and had to be final. Brigitte was in the West, Evert was in the West, and I? The friends I had on this side of the Elbe were dear to me, but Brigitte and Evert meant far more. My decision was without any doubts. With a determination that was stronger than ever, I knew that it was time and that I must leave. My landlady in Taucha had only the minimum of trouble with my change of abode, for she did not inform the authorities of my leaving or of my true identity. They now knew who I was. Her penalty was the refusal to give her a new coal oven. My instincts had been 100% correct. Had I stayed I would had have been arrested in no time at all. So I escaped that forced-labour camp. I had had a piece of good luck, and left that worker/farmer’s ‘paradise’.

Without map or compass, I arrived in the West, in Detmold. I cannot describe my joy at seeing Evert and Brigitte. I had not seen Evert for several years. He had quarters with a Dutch couple, Mr and Mrs Snuverink. Their two sons, both in the Waffen SS, were both reported missing with our troops in Russia. So they were in the same situation as we, for they feared reprisals against themselves in the absence of their sons. They had left everything that they had owned and escaped to Detmold. Evert and I were now welcomed with open arms and became ‘provisional sons’ for them. We both owed much to this couple. Mr Snuverink had had a large and successful building firm, and it was to be assumed that he would again, one day.

Most important for Evert, was for him to have a new identity, without it he would have no ration card. So as I had more experience in this, I presented myself before the authorities as Evert. He was three years older but this was not noticed. I had explained that my papers were lost upon fleeing from the Russians, but this was not acceptable. “No, Sir, you could be Hitler’s son for all we know!” They were friendly, but a solicitor was more helpful. We found one who believed the story and for a fee gave me the needed documents, attested and sealed. I presented them to an Eton schoolboy-type British officer, who smelled of leather and whisky. “Documents, all correct, goodbye!” Evert and the Snuverinks waited for me with impatience. He had never trusted himself to go out on the street before I returned with his identification. But now he could, with papers declaring that he had been born in Finsterwald and had fled to the West. And I? I did not know who I was anymore, for I was now my brother!

In Holland, Evert’s escape and my non-return would mean our deaths, if we were to go back, for there was now ‘ethnic-cleansing’ at home. Families of those who had kept Communism away from their door were penalised. ‘Ethnic-cleansing of traitors’ was also happening in Western Europe. The families were persecuted and mobbed. I find it difficult to write about the behaviour of my own people, about their crimes, that were similar to those of the Soviets in east Germany, and which I would never have believed of them.

The German people were to feel vengeance. But they knew nothing of the crimes against the non-Germans, the friends of Germany who had fought for a federalised Europe, with autonomy and rights of self-determination at their side. The younger generation had been the driving force behind that ‘voluntary’ sacrifice. The Germans were busy with themselves in the immediate years after the war. So it is not to be expected that they were interested in the personal fates of those beyond their borders. Revenge was now the order of the day. When the sons were not present, then the mob vented their spleen on the family members, not only the male members, but female members and their children too.

This applied not only to ‘the man in the street’, but also to the Prince Consort, Prince Bernhard von Lippe of Biesterfeld. He came under the scrutiny of MI5 and the CIA, even during his asylum in England. His past record, i.e. his position with the IG Farben firm, plus being a member of the SS, gave Eisenhower’s staff differences of opinion. An army in exile was formed by Dutch Government officials in London. Prince Bernhard vonder Lippe of Biesterfeld was its commander.

The principal offenders and agitators were those exiled members of the BS and OD, i.e. Ordnungsdienst administrative authorities or public policy officials. Their orders were carried out by uniformed bands of men, with an orange band around their arm and carrying Sten-guns. There were decent but disapproving Dutch police, reserve-officers and former resistance fighters, Prince Bernhard too. But they did nothing to interfere with the shameful atrocities of those mobs on their own people, the political misfits and others. The conservative members of the exiled government in London, in 1943, had enough forethought to form new laws and resurrect old laws, in case of public unrest. At all costs, they wanted to avoid the workings of Communist and Socialist infiltrators/agitators, in the chaos after a possible defeat of Germany, and the possibility of them taking control, although at that time, one could say that they actually supported Bolshevism. Some laws were backdated, and some were changed. For instance, the law on freedom of action, some actions formerly not being punishable offences before 1940 were now an offence, for instance.

Unqualified judges could now sentence Dutch citizens to ten years in a concentration camp. Other judges were given special jurisdiction to give the death-sentence, which had not taken place for centuries in Holland. Sentences included having one’s nationality taken away, having no right to vote, and one could have property/possessions taken away.

The revenge was planned, and former volunteers and collaborators were the targets of unimaginable and inhuman behaviour. Wives of German soldiers, girls who were engaged to German soldiers, or even if they befriended one, had their heads shaved, had swastikas smeared on their foreheads and were then hunted through the streets. The homes of former NSB members had their homes plundered, as were those of any linked associations.

In comparison with the unending flood of literature on the ‘heroic acts’ of the resistance against the Germans, their crimes against their own countrymen were never written about. Virtually nothing was published, for no one dared. One of those who attacked this theme was the Dutch theologist Dr. H.W. van der Vaart-Smit, who interested himself as early as 1949. He wrote a book Kampteostanden 1944—1947, on the atrocities taking place in prisons on political prisoners, all of which were recorded. It was a horror. The foreword to this book was written by Professor G.M. Russell, who states that “The truth of this black chapter in our post-war history should not stay silent, nor be denied”.

One cannot say that this behaviour was spontaneous. It was a merciless and bloody revenge, practised on defenceless people. The ‘crime’ of these people was having been a member of the NSB, or a German sympathiser. In a free thinking society they were now criminals. They were penalised with methods that surpassed the ecclesiastical torture methods of the Inquisition of 1232, in particular on women (page 22 of Dr. van der Vaart Smit’s book). On the next page one can read of other atrocities. The female jailers of those women were no better, maybe even worse than their male counterparts, for all were jail-bait for them. They beat up the prisoners at will, reverting to medieval methods, or locked them for days in cages in which they could only stand. When one of the jailers lit a cigarette, it was used as a method of torture, one of the ‘harmless’ sort (page 33).

On page 34, there is a report on the transport of amputees and the behaviour of guards upon reaching an internment camp. The guards threw the amputees from the vehicle like a load of ballast. One was an eighteen year old who had lost both his legs, and was severely injured. An accompanying nurse lost her temper. She received a bull et in her thigh. Many of those prisoners were psychological wrecks after such experiences and were sent to the Institution for Psychiatry in Franaker. They were treated as demented, not “demented patients”, but to quote one of the treating doctors, as “demented criminals”.

The jailers were members of the shooting clubs. It was “Schützenfest time” and lasted from July to November of 1945, until Canadian troops stopped the massacre of prisoners. Prisoners were murdered at will, or badly injured and then the necessary medical help was withheld. Even stretcher-bearers when help was available were fired upon. Notorious for its system of torture, was the internment camp in Scheveningen. A total of 45,000 Dutch citizens were accused of collaboration, 170,000 of them being interned. Holland had a population of 8.2 million inhabitants at that time.

One could ask, “Are we talking about the same peace-loving Holland that fiercely clung to and defended its neutrality among the nations, but that was more than ready to wage war in this fashion on their own people?” Thousands of individual fates are not known, have never been recorded. Women and girls stayed silent, in fear of reprisals when the sexual crimes against them became known.

When parents were ‘classified’, their children were torn away from them to be put into homes, and they were interned. Visits to their children were forbidden and their contact completely severed. The children of political prisoners were very badly treated in those homes, where they vegetated. As many as 300,000 children were suddenly without parents, and were continually brainwashed that they were the children of criminals. It should be of no surprise that eventually many were ashamed of their own parents. Psycho logical pressure and ill-treatment of those children resulted in many of them becoming ill and sustaining psychological problems.

For the last fifteen years, an association called the “Herkenning Work-group” has existed in Holland, to help children with this dark chapter of their lives. They were the persecuted political sacrifices of discrimination. It remains in existence today. The association had to fight very strong resistance from the administrative authorities. It is only in the last few years that they have become known as a ‘charitable association’, and deemed worthy of support.

When their own people were subjected to this wave of revenge, then how did the German citizen on Dutch soil fair? In the preoccupation of hunting the ‘fou’ and the ‘volunteers’, from the German citizens still to be found in Holland after 1945, 203 were sentenced. Eighteen were sentenced to death, six were executed, six were sentenced to life imprisonment, others received sentences of between three months and twenty years, but none served more than 13 years of their sentences. The forthcoming economic boom, to be found in Germany, played a very large role in this, for Holland was very much dependent on their neighbour. There was an economic boom to be seen on the horizon, and the legendary business-sense of the Dutch soon came to the fore.

It was in Detmold that I heard from Evert of the martyrdom of my family. It probably would have never happened, nor been so tragic, had they stayed in Germany, to where they had fled in the last few months of the war. They were evacuated, with the wives and children of NSB men or German sympathisers, or as the families of ‘volunteers’. Those measures followed after the French practised the same lynch-law on their own people, after the retreat of the German Wehrmacht in 1944, and as the Armed Forces from northern France neared the Dutch borders. As the Allies marched through France, an aftermath of executions, without a process of law, surged through the countryside. It happened in Belgium too. The Belgians, wanting to see blood, killed around 1,000 of their pro-German people.

The 5 September was a Tuesday in 1944 and three months after ‘D-Day’. “Radio Orange” broadcast from London, that Breda would be the first Dutch city to be liberated by the Allies. It was to be a day of significance for the annals of history and known as ‘Wild Tuesday’, not from the uncountable arrests but from the very loose bullets from the guns of the OD.

In the same month, 65,000 Dutch Nationals, including my parents, in danger of the waves of terror, left Holland for exile in chartered railway wagons. Not all arrived in Germany in one piece. More than once the passengers had to alight from the trains and take cover under the wagons, or find any other sort of shelter. There were low flying aircraft attacks by the Allies, al though it was not military transport. Most of the refugees settled in Lüneburg.

The Verton family however, in Hildesheim, in a former one monastery, joined my sister, who was married to a Dutch ‘volunteer’, an education officer in the SS division ‘Wiking’. I had already visited my sister there, and on that occasion had met British ‘volunteers’ of the Waffen SS. Yes, they were members of the ‘British Freikorps. They had been former members of the bomber-crews, had found themselves in German prison camps, but had declared themselves as ‘volunteers’ to fight against Communism. My family enjoyed the next seven months in Hildesheim, a city of 80,000 inhabitants, until 22 March 1945, a lovely spring day. It was chosen for a bombing raid by 200 four-engined Lancaster Bombers. They destroyed this jewel of a city, with its half-timbered houses, which had been spared up to that time. A 5,000 metre high mushroom of smoke, from fire and high-explosive bombs, could be seen from 300 kilometres away. The city and the monastery were left in ruins. The need for a roof over their heads, and the longing to see their own home again, sent them once more back to Holland, to agony and suffering. There was no military or strategic reason for the bombing of Hildesheim.

Upon their arrival in Holland, all were promptly arrested by the OD. They were responsible for law and order, and wore orange arm-bands. My one year old nephew was torn away from my sister and taken to a special home for NSB children. A notice was at tached to the children’s beds, “Child of the SS” or “Child of the NSB”. They were ‘orphans’, but not orphans. Much later, after my sister was released from internment camp she recorded a tape saying that she had managed to sneak secretly into the home and was devastated at her son’s apathetic and neglected condition.

After two years of internment, she was one of the lucky ones for she could claim her son once more. At three years old she found that he could not walk. Her son was also deaf in one ear. One can assume that he had had painful inflammation of the middle-ear which had not been treated. My sister was lucky that she could collect her son from the home, for many had been adopted. Many of the children were presented for adoption.

Through this sad and sickening time, a thin thread of decency showed itself, from one of the brave. He was one of those brave enough to criticise, to rise above his own experiences of war and take up the sword of decent social behaviour. One such was the Dutch journalist W.L. Brugsma, who had been a resistance fighter and one who had served a spell in a German prison. He criticised the inhumane treatment of these children, and asked, “how clean are those responsible for the Ethnic-Cleansing?” The articles from this man are still suppressed. They belong together with the very sparse literature to be found on this chapter of Dutch history.

On top of the suffering of my family in the internment camps, news reached them of the death of my brother Jan. There are to this day unanswered questions concerning his death. He died on his way to work. He went to work on his motorbike every day, to the German aerodrome where he worked as an electrician. Assassination from the resistance was rife at that time, practised especially on those working for the Germans. It would not have been difficult to acquaint oneself with Jan’s daily routine. In our opinion, he was either the victim of an air raid, from low-flying planes, or the subject of an assassination, from a sniper, just like the father of my friend Robert Reilingh.

For my mother it was a sudden shock. To hear of his death in the circumstances that she was in, was very hard. She was at that time 55 years old. She had fought tooth and nail for the liberation of her family, until she played on the nerves of the camp directors. They then put her into a psychiatric institution in Assen. The Russians too did this with their dissidents. Locked in with the mentally ill, my mother soon became ill, both physically and mentally, as a result of her surroundings, as well as from the separation from her husband and children. She suffered from harassment and very bad nourishment, eating mostly mouldy bread and cooked potato peelings. She had just got to grips with the death of her beloved eldest son, when she then received the news of the death of our father.

My father had had a hernia operation, which was not post-operatively treated during his internment. Instead he was put to work. He had by that time written many letters, optimistic letters, with plans for the future, for when they were released. Some weeks later an obituary circulated amongst the prisoners. It was of my father, an obituary of 59 lines describing his heart felt longing to be re-united with his dear wife and children. His funeral could not have been simpler. We were thankful that one member of the family was present, Evert. An exception was made and Evert, under armed guard, attended the funeral of our father.

Evert had been captured in the area of Arnhem, by the Canadians. They then delivered him to the Dutch, who delivered him into the notorious Harskamp prison. Before he could be sentenced he was put to work in the coal mine. With his escape he avoided the torture that was on the daily agenda. Allied war correspondents took many photos of the war. They took one of Evert, marching at the front of his men as company-leader, upright and marching into the POW camp.

My family were finally released, one after the other in 1947, after two years of internment. Nothing but skin and bone, covered in lice, and careworn, my mother was also released from the Institution in the same year. She spoke unwillingly of her time there. She had a very strong, iron will and this helped her recover, helped her on to her feet and back to her place as head of the family. The youngest of my brothers who was just twelve at this time had spent the two years in different homes, not knowing where any of his family were. He had no news and no visits, which were forbidden. One is duty-bound to mention those who kept to good social behaviour during this misery. One was a doctor who secretly helped my mother. Another was a Jewish jailer, who was sympathetic to one of my brothers and was humane in his behaviour towards him.

Robbed of house, home and possessions, the family found a new abode in Woudenberg, in the province of Utrecht. In the countryside, they were surrounded by straightforward and helpful people. They had a very friendly farmer as a next-door neighbour, who even hid my letters to my family. Gradually the family almost returned to normal. Very soon the local police started to pay visits. They wanted to catch either Evert or me on our visits, particularly on public holidays, when they were sure that we would be foolish enough to return. One official would simply have loved to catch us. He accused the family of spying, having found a photo of our model aerodrome that we had built as children in the garden, complete with model planes. We were supposed to be spying on military establishments!

The pressure on the civilian population gradually decreased which cannot be said for the ‘volunteers’. A further 5,000 were arrested and interned, without ‘due process’, for all the difference that would have made. Five years later, in 1950, Dutch soldiers who returned to Holland, having been released from Russian POW camps were immediately arrested and sentenced! The final insult came for those men, when they were visited in their cells by officers collecting information and experiences of the Russian-front soldiers, because of the ‘Cold War’ with the Communists. An anachronism of history? Upon being released from prison, those men lost their nationality. Holland made displaced persons out of their own countrymen.

It was no better in other countries. The Norwegians too sentenced 7,000 of their ‘volunteers’ with a sentence of up to four years’ imprisonment. In Denmark it was more, with 7,717 men sentenced. The Belgians sentenced 3,193 ‘colt aborators’ to death. Even when the death sentences were not carried out, for the ‘volunteers’ it meant years of imprisonment. Switzerland was no better, with 1,300 men brought before courts martial. The sentences were harder than for the fighters in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

As late as 1952, 2,400 French ‘volunteers’ were interned for their part in fighting Bolshevism, which they could avoid by then fighting in Indochina, or serving in the French Foreign Legion. From the ‘volunteers’ from the Balkans and the Soviet Union 11,000 Slovenian ‘volunteers’ were liquidated by Tito’s partisans in May of 1945. Then a further 90,000 Croatian soldiers of the Ustascha Army were sentenced. The British delivered 35,000 Cossacks, without consideration of asylum, or of international laws, to the Russians. They were either shot on sight, sent to forced-labour camps, or into mines. The same applied to neutral Sweden that had profited so much from German trade. They gave their German prisoners, and those from the Baltic divisions, to the Russians.

The hate-laden atmosphere of this European ethnic-cleansing did not allow for objective argument or explanation of motives. Only years later were approaches made to repair the association, without condemnation, between the Russian front-fighters and their accusers.

Hans Werner Neulen, in his book An Deutscher Seite, asked the question, “Were they the best that prevailed at that time, or captive slaves in Prussian straight-jackets? When, between the Communists with their universal aims of remedial teaching, and the National Socialists with their expectations of Germanic control, the ideals of liberation did not materialise, then the foreign ‘volunteers’ chose the side of the German Reich”.

Till today in the Netherlands, no one will accept that there were far more ‘volunteers’ wearing field-grey than those of the Allies wearing khaki.