ON THE EVENING of May 9, 1940, Netherlanders heard Hitler give a speech over Dutch radio saying that they had nothing to fear from the impending rumors of war. As a reward for the Netherlands’ neutrality during World War I, Hitler promised that he would not invade the country.
But several hours later, in the early morning of May 10, they realized that Hitler’s promise was a lie: his troops simultaneously invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Dutch defenses were thrown into confusion when Germans parachuted in, disguised as Dutch soldiers. Rumors about German disguises grew wilder and wilder and distracted the Dutch troops. Dutch police stopped as many people as possible at certain checkpoints, asking them to pronounce certain words that would identify them as either Dutch or German.
But no matter how many imposters the Dutch police caught, the Germans kept coming. The Dutch army put up a strong defense for a small country that had not been well prepared for war. For five days they fought the Nazi blitzkrieg until Hitler, surprised and impatient with the delay, ordered the entire city of Rotterdam to be destroyed with massive bombing in the middle of the day. Hundreds were killed (many of them schoolchildren) and thousands left homeless. When the Germans threatened to destroy other Dutch cities in a similar manner, the Dutch army finally surrendered.
Many Dutch people initially felt betrayed when they discovered that Queen Wilhelmina had escaped to Great Britain during the invasion. But then they realized that she had taken the royal treasury with her, which the Germans had hoped to use to fund the Nazi war machine. From England, Queen Wilhelmina was able to send regular radio broadcasts to the Dutch people—at least to those who had not turned in their now-illegal radios to the Germans—telling them the truth about the war, giving them direction, and encouraging them not to give up hope.
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Getty Images
Many German Jews had fled to the Netherlands during the 1930s because there was very little anti-Semitism there. But when Hitler invaded the Netherlands, many of these German Jews immediately committed suicide. Laws against Jews, stripping them of their rights, were enacted several months into the occupation.
Dutch men were promised good wages if they would work in German munitions factories. Some did, only to discover that the promise of high wages was a lie and that working conditions were horrible. Many Dutch men soon became onderduikers (literally “under-divers”), those who went into hiding or changed their identities. When Dutch men refused to volunteer for work in munitions factories, the Germans began conducting frequent and random roundups with help from members of the NSB.
The German occupiers made all Dutch political parties illegal except for the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (Dutch Nationalist Socialist party), or the NSB. The members of the NSB openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Anxious to prove their loyalty to the Nazi party, they were often more cruel and violent than the Germans were.
In February 1941, NSB members began to commit acts of violence against the Jews living in Amsterdam. Street fighting broke out between Jewish defense groups and the NSB that culminated in hundreds of Jewish men being arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Angry about the treatment of the Jews in Amsterdam, Dutch workers and the Dutch Communist Party organized a general strike in Amsterdam on February 25, 1941, which became known as the February Strike. Public transportation shut down, as did factories, shops, businesses, and schools. Workers stormed into the streets shouting, “Strike! Strike! Strike!” The surprised Germans quickly stopped the February Strike, but not before it had spread to several other areas. Many of those who had participated were arrested and deported to Germany, but those who remained wanted to do more to fight the Germans.
Many Dutch Resistance workers hid Jews, onderduikers, and Allied airmen whose planes had gone down. Others joined espionage groups that collected information important to the Allies regarding German activity in the Netherlands. Some worked on newspapers that published lists of traitors, transcripts of the Queen’s radio addresses, and photographs of the royal family, all illegal possessions in Nazi-occupied Holland. Others worked with groups engaged in sabotage against the Nazi occupiers and the members of the NSB. And others stole extra ration cards for those hiding refugees and created false identification cards for anyone whose real identity was in trouble with the Germans (Hannie Schaft and Diet Eman both used different identities during the occupation, see pages 102 and 94).
The Resistance gained more workers after the Germans tried to force all Dutch university students to sign a loyalty pledge to Nazi Germany in the spring of 1943. Students who refused to sign the pledge were not allowed to continue their studies and were ordered to work in German munitions factories. Eighty percent of Dutch university students refused to sign, and many of them joined the Resistance.
During the autumn of 1944, the Germans were being pushed out of the Netherlands by the Allies, but they maintained their grip on the western section. During the occupation, the Germans had shipped much of the Netherlands’ plentiful stores of food and fuel to Germany. A railroad strike had been ordered earlier by the Dutch government in England because Dutch leaders thought the Allies were going to liberate all of the Netherlands sooner than they actually did. The Germans responded to the strike by forbidding food transports to the western part of the country for many months. As a result, the winter of 1944–45—a particularly cold one—became known as hongerwinter (the hunger winter) in this area. Dutch people there spent most of their time in a desperate search for food and fuel. The Germans also shut off electricity and running water. Before the Allies were finally able to drop food supplies in April 1945, at least 20,000 Dutch people had starved to death.
By May 5, 1945, all of the Netherlands had been liberated, mostly by Canadian troops. May 5 is annually celebrated in the Netherlands as Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day) to commemorate the official end of the German occupation.