(narrator) Anne Frank, in her diary, June 6 1944:
"Would the long-awaited liberation, which still seems too wonderful,
too much like a fairy tale, ever come true?"
"Could we be granted victory this year, 1944?"
"We don't know yet, but hope is revived within us."
"Now more than ever we must clench our teeth and not cry out."
The people of Holland had lived under Nazi occupation for four long years.
(narrator) On May 10, 1940, without a declaration of war,
Germany struck against neutral Holland.
Paratroopers and panzers overpowered the Dutch peacetime army,
with its obsolete weapons.
Using Holland's excellent roads,
Hitler's columns raced across the flat countryside
before the Allies could come to the rescue.
At lunch time on May 14, 50 Heinkels attacked the port of Rotterdam.
ln 15 minutes they started fires which destroyed the city centre
and struck terror into the population.
Rotterdam capitulated, and only a few hours later
Holland decided to surrender to save other cities from a similar fate.
That night, as Rotterdam blazed, the Dutch people were leaderless.
The queen, with her cabinet, had escaped to Britain
to carry on the government in exile.
Faced with the prospect of Nazi rule, more than 300 Dutchmen, mainly Jews,
preferred to commit suicide.
People were stunned, bewildered, fearful.
(speaks Dutch)
(translator) Holland hadn't been involved in a war since Napoleon.
We were completely stunned,
and psychologically broken.
We had read what Hitler said, and...
As to the Jews, l had a firm belief in what he prophesied.
l actually believed that, yes.
He would do away with us. Yes, l believed that.
We were not so very alarmed. We didn't believe all the things they said, no.
My brother - Eddy, the oldest one -
came to our house
in the days the war started,
and he said, "Come with me. Let's try to escape."
And l remember that my mother said, "Escape? Why?"
"l must wait for the man who brings the laundry."
"What do you want me to escape from?"
Maybe they were the enemy to us, but, really, true,
they didn't see us an enemy at that moment at least,
you see, because we were just hotel employees,
and so long as we didn't bother them,
they accept everything, you see.
Like, the doorman opened the door for anybody,
like he'd do today, like he'd done years before.
l mean, and the bellboys did the things they had to do,
the porter did the things that he has to do.
Anybody, from the highest to the smallest, did his job what he did.
(narrator) Germany imposed a new administration
headed by a Reich commissioner
personally responsible to Hitler and empowered to rule by decree.
The new supreme ruler of Holland was Dr Arthur Seyss-lnquart,
a Viennese lawyer.
He had helped organise Austria's absorption by Germany in 1938.
ln the Hall of Knights at The Hague, he addressed German ofticials.
The 12 most senior Dutch civil serVants were also present.
(speaks German)
(narrator) He tried to reassure the Dutch
by declaring that Nazi ideology would not be imposed.
Germany had no imperialistic designs on Holland.
Dutch laws would remain in force until further notice.
Seyss-lnquart made it clear
that the country would still be administered by Dutch civil serVants.
Anyone who wished might resign.
Few were to do so.
He called for cooperation between two Germanic peoples of the same blood.
- Sieg... - (audience) Heil!
(orchestra plays "Deutschland über alles")
(narrator) As a conciliatory gesture,
Hitler ordered the release of all Dutch prisoners of war.
People started to relax.
The Germans promised to maintain living standards
and to cure unemployment.
The occupation might not be so bad after all.
The Reich commissioner Seyss-lnquart himself
saw oft a trainload of children on a free holiday to his native Austria.
For the Dutch Nazi movement, the NSB,
this was a moment of jubilation as they gathered to welcome the invaders.
The NSB had been holding rallies here in Lunteren for years,
but now, for the first time, instead of protesting against the regime,
they were its champions.
The NSB membership quadrupled to 80,000,
although still only 1% of the population belonged.
Like Hitler's Nazi Party, the NSB was born of the economic depression,
fear of Bolshevism, and the promise of a revived Europe.
lt stood for order, discipline and an authoritarian state.
(crowd sings)
Patriotic in their fashion,
the Dutch Nazis extolled ancient traditions,
glorified the fatherland and promised national self-respect.
(song continues)
(crowd sings Dutch national anthem)
Saluting the Dutch flag
and singing the national anthem were part of the ritual.
All references to the royal family, the House of Orange,
were, however, omitted.
(anthem ends)
(crowd chants)
Anton Mussert, the NSB's leader,
was an engineer with an outstanding record in the civil serVice.
He saw this as the moment
for the rebirth of the Netherlands as a great power.
Mussert moulded himself on Mussolini.
Hitler was the Messiah sent to save Europe.
(Mussert speaks Dutch)
(narrator) A German bomber flew low over the crowd in salute.
lt was just six weeks
since the Luftwafte had spread fire and death in Rotterdam.
(Mussert speaks Dutch)
(crowd sings)
(narrator) But there was another Holland.
Astonishingly, on Prince Bernhard's birthday,
only one week after France had fallen, thousands of ordinary Dutchmen
spontaneously demonstrated their defiance.
Soldiers saluted as people sang the Orange anthem
and placed white carnations, Bernhard's favourite flower, on national monuments.
Some saw no point in open opposition.
A new German-approved political organisation,
the Netherlands Union, was formed
to unite patriots in loyalty to the occupying power.
With most other parties gagged,
it seemed to be a respectable alternative to the NSB.
15% of the population joined.
Holland was a religious country.
Despite Hitler's claim to be the saviour of the Christian West,
the churches were hostile to Nazism because it placed man above God.
ln some churches, Dutch Nazis were denied communion.
Everyone had to be fingerprinted and photographed and registered.
The Dutch government had left instructions
for civil serVants to stay at work
as long as they thought it was in the best interests of the people.
Now they were systematically issuing identity cards to the entire population.
The Germans introduced a racial questionnaire.
(speaks Dutch)
(translator) Very shortly after the occupation,
two men from the German security police came to me and asked,
"Are there any Jews in your municipality?"
l told them it was true there are no Jews in my municipality.
But that was my first mistake.
Because by answering that question you accept racial discrimination.
And you had to fill in a form.
One passage was if you had any Jewish grandparents.
l had none, so l said no.
Then you went home and didn't realise
that you'd helped in cornering the Jews
and making them vulnerable
and bringing them in a position
where they could later on be transported and gassed.
You didn't realise.
After a year of being politicised a little bit better,
you got more agitations on what such a declaration really meant.
But the first impression is: your age, your address,
grandparents of Jewish origin? No. OK.
You see? lt is so... lt was a process.
Step by step the process of infiltration of this Nazism in the society was there.
(narrator) All Jews were dismissed from public oftice.
The Germans began to segregate Jews from other Dutchmen.
They were banned from cafés and parks.
ln Amsterdam, black-shirted NSB men marched into a working-class area,
pulled Jews out of pubs and beat them up in the streets.
Jewish self-defence groups fought back.
A Dutch Nazi was killed, a Gestapo man injured.
As a reprisal, the Germans snatched 400 young Jews
at random oft the street, beat them up,
and sent them oft to Mauthausen, already known to be a death camp.
A Communist street cleaner, Piet Nak, following his party's instructions,
stood up in the street and urged Amsterdammers to protest.
(speaks Dutch)
(translator) What drove me personally, but l think the other people too,
we were filled with an overwhelming hate.
We'd never seen anything like that in Amsterdam.
Lots of people, just because they were Jewish,
men, women and children - there were no exceptions.
People just arrested and beaten up.
You see... Well, what would you do if you saw someone in the water?
Of course you'd dive in and get him out.
You don't ask if the water's clean or dirty. You are filled with anger.
There was nothing we could do but go on strike.
l wouldn't have known what else we could do. There was no other way.
(speaks Dutch)
(translator) Thousands in a tightly packed column
marched through the streets in Amsterdam,
while the Germans circled round them in tanks.
Of course the demonstrators weren't armed,
yet they found a weapon in marching and singing.
So they marched along the Rozengracht singing the internationaie.
(Nak speaks Dutch)
(translator) The second day of the strike
we held a meeting at the cleansing department.
The boss there wanted us to start work in the afternoon of the second day,
but we had already decided we would only go back on the third day.
(narrator) The trams,
which had signalled the start of the strike, signalled its end.
The Germans had shot down nine people. To continue would mean a bloodbath.
For 48 hours, workmen, shopkeepers and businessmen
had staged a unique strike in defence of the Jews.
(Nak speaks Dutch)
(translator) My personal opinion is,
put yourself in the place of the Jewish people of Amsterdam.
They felt they'd been deserted, left on their own,
but because of this strike there must have been many Jews,
well, you can't really say many,
but if you ask if it did any good, l say this:
if just one Jew in the gas chamber
felt that the workers of Amsterdam had not deserted him,
then it wasn't for nothing.
(narrator) Faced with such bold opposition,
the Germans now abandoned what was left of conciliation.
The mayors of three towns who had been lenient with strikers
were replaced by Dutch Nazis.
NSB leaders, though not allowed to form a government,
were installed in positions of power.
The head of the Netherlands Bank was Rost van Tonningen.
(woman) My husband joined the NSB in 1936.
He was very interested in the work of Hitler,
what he was doing in Germany.
ln Holland, the situation was quite difterent from Germany.
We have big poorness here in Holland,
we have no buildings,
three-quarters of the population had no work,
and they had bad clothes,
so it was really not a very good situation in Holland.
Before l joined the NSB, l was in the youth movement.
The only difterence between the NSB and the youth movement
was that it was not a political movement.
The Jeugdstorm was to bring the children who came from poor parents together,
to give them ideals, to work in teamwork for another person.
Of course, we looked to the youth movement in Germany.
lt was quite difterent, because a German has a German character
and a Dutchman has a Dutch character.
So we tried in the movement of the NSB,
because we saw the ideal,
we saw the danger of the Bolshevism,
and our thinking was to work there, to make them a big movement,
to try to help Europe,
as a big united Europe from several kinds of countries who work together.
(man speaks Dutch)
(narrator) Another Dutch Nazi, Woudenberg,
was put in charge of the trade unions.
My father, l think, worked and he lived from a religious base,
without calling it God
or some other religion's name.
My father was a well-known man. He was a hated man.
There was a possibility for me to go to Germany,
to this National Socialistic educating institute.
lt was a school, like Eton school or something like that.
We wore uniforms, and we had the feeling
that we were a selected group, better than the others.
And, you know, you feel happy when you have that feeling.
And in a very short time l was educated in this SS thinking,
a great Germanistic empire, and there was no reason
for me to think about Holland and the Netherlands in school.
l knew there should be one thing done - this war had to be won.
When l had the age, l had to be a soldier,
to fight so that we could leave behind that little small country
and we come to new situations, this great Germanistic empire.
- (man) Heil der Führer! - (crowd) Heil!
(narrator) June 1941 .
The NSB called for support for Germany's attack on Russia.
Mussert urged Dutchmen to unite for Hitler,
against Stalin, against Churchill.
(Mussert speaks Dutch)
(crowd chants)
(repeated drumbeat of "V" in Morse code)
(man) Beep beep beep beep.
(conversation in Dutch)
(translator) First it would start, "Beep beep beep" and "Radio Orange".
There you were, sitting in the dark.
You could only have a little light, a candle or something,
and we would listen.
(radio crackles)
(narrator) Hundreds of thousands risked arrest
to listen to Dutch broadcasts from London,
their only trusted source of news.
The radio urged patriots to daub up signs "OZO" - "Orange will win",
and "V" for "victory".
Goebbels started a not very convincing countercampaign -
"V" stood for "German victory on all fronts".
(man) Early in '41 , we decided to start a political cabaret.
We looked in all the gramophone shops
in London for old Dutch records.
We used the tunes of these records
and put new words to the tunes,
so that every Dutchman could whistle the tune
and then every other Dutchman knew he had heard that from Radio Orange.
(piano plays song intro)
(woman sings "Lied van de watergeus")
(woman) There were two boys who came over to England in a canoe.
They were introduced to me,
and they realised all of a sudden who l was.
They looked at me in such a strange way,
and they said, "ls that you, this girl, this voice?"
And l said, "Yes." And they said, "May l touch you?"
And l said, "Certainly." They were...
Something happened, something strange,
and all of a sudden l realised what l meant.
Not l, but what this voice,
the whole thing we meant to do with it, what happened in an occupied country.
(narrator) On the surface, life in Holland seemed to go on as usual.
Under the patronage of Seyss-lnquart,
Holland's most famous conductor, Willem Mengelberg,
still gave dazzling performances with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
(♪ "Egmont Overture" - Beethoven)
(narrator) But all the time the Germans were steadily tightening their grip.
By 1942, the invaders began to fortify the coast.
They evacuated resorts where people had holidayed only two years before.
The Germans conscripted more and more workers for forced labour.
Those who resisted, they imprisoned and shot.
There was no sign of an Allied victory,
no sign of when Holland would again be free.
(♪ "Egmont Overture" - Beethoven)
German promises not to impose their ideology were now forgotten.
All performing artists, writers and painters
had to join Nazi-controlled cultural guilds.
Only music approved by the censors could be played.
Jewish composers were banned and players of Jewish origin sacked.
Slowly, resistance was organised -
weapons and explosives for sabotage,
an underground press, printed and distributed at terrible risk.
The few thousand men in resistance groups
became Holland's conscience.
(man sings "Kleine Greetje uit de polder")
(narrator) The illegal papers urged people not to attend
German-sponsored all-Aryan sports meetings.
But attendances rose - people wanted to escape the war.
(song continues)
The Resistance also urged people not to listen to German-controlled radio
which poured out pop songs and propaganda.
Popular entertainers like Eddy Christiani
walked a tightrope between collaboration and resistance.
You must live. So to listen to music,
l know it's maybe collaboration,
but then the whole Dutch people have collaborated.
You couldn't listen to another station than the German station.
See what l mean? And you can say maybe,
"l don't like the German music. l never listened during the war to music,"
but if for one week you're at home and it is in absolute silence,
you don't hear nothing at all,
then in one weak moment you put on your radio and you hear music
and you don't care if it's German or Chinese.
lt's much better than to hear still the bombing or the aeroplanes
or the shouting of the Germans.
(band plays marching tune)
lt was allowed for the Dutch people to sit down
and just listen to music, but no dancing.
lt was also forbidden to make show with your orchestra.
lt was not allowed for a trumpet player to play a muted trumpet,
you see, like, let's say, Duke Ellington, to crow.
lt was forbidden for a trumpet player or for a saxophone player
to make a movement with his instrument, like swaying.
lt was forbidden to play a higher note than a C, a written C,
because that was all Negro music,
and they say in Germany Negro music was music of the devil,
and we are now a cultivated people, and so were the Germans,
so we have to play proper, cultivated music.
At that time, of course, you had some ofticers
who were looking for nice girls.
Today you have customers in the hotel all looking for nice girls.
lf they want some nice girl, you could find some nice girl.
l still can find some nice girls today for them if they ask for it, you know?
But l must say, there was...
He was... How do you call it?
He had his oftice at the Museum Square
and he was, you may say, town commander of Amsterdam,
and he was a guy, you know...
l mean, today they would say a playboy, you know?
He was a German playboy in uniform.
He had his own two seats in one of the cinemas and the City Theatre.
And later on, l have been many times to the City Theatre with his card,
because those seats was not allowed for anybody to sit down.
But two employees, like me, youngsters, you know,
sat down there at the invitation of the commander.
So we had fun about it.
(narrator) One film which had to be shown in every Dutch town
was The Eternal Jew.
(Dutch newsreel) They have always moved over the Earth like parasites.
Their journey started in Asia.
From there they moved via Russia and the Balkans into Europe.
Halfway through the 18th century, they were spread across Europe.
Towards the end of the 19th century,
they used ships to take over America too.
Where rats appear, they bring death and depravity.
They destroy human property and food.
They spread pests, leprosy, typhus and cholera.
They're vicious, cruel cowards, who prefer to move in big groups.
(narrator) Made in Germany,
the film was part of the carefully prepared campaign
to foster fear and loathing of the Jews.
(Dutch newsreel) The assimilation has reached its maximum
here in the second and third generations.
They try to imitate the host people in their appearance.
The host people sometimes let themselves be fooled
and consider the Jews to be their equals.
That's where the danger lies.
(narrator) ln each occupied country,
the film's message was sharpened by inserting local material.
(Dutch newsreel) These assimilated Dutch Jews
are and always will be strange elements
in the organism of the host people, no matter how hard they try.
(narrator) The Germans were now putting into eftect
their plan to destroy all the Jews in Europe.
The local population had first to be won over to cooperation,
or at least to acquiescence.
There were 140,000 Jews in Holland.
ln May 1942, they were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David.
By that autumn, they were being rounded up
and on their way to concentration camps.
lt was forbidden for Jewish people to go to the movies,
to go to the park, to go to anything.
But my brother discovered it was for a long time possible
to rent a boat and do some sailing on the Amstel.
One Saturday a little boy fell in the water
and immediately my brother jumped after the boy and brought him out,
and it was the son of a Fascist living in our street.
The mother of that little boy
was very, very thankful to that Jewish boy who saved her only son,
and she said to him, "lf l ever can do something for you,
then come to my house."
And he went away but...
He was not yet downstairs, immediately he went back, and he said,
"You said something maybe l can use."
"Please write me a note that l saved your son."
"That's the only thing l ask." She said, "l'll do that for you."
And l remember her letter,
in which she wrote that that boy saved her only child,
with German greetings, Heil Hitier, she wrote under that letter.
And l remember my mother, she was so mad at him.
She hit him. She said, "You are crazy."
"Why did you do that for? Now they know your address."
"Maybe they are coming tomorrow."
She didn't realise they had all the addresses.
And...
Well, one day we were actually hauled, all of us,
and were brought to the theatre.
There were tables and there were people writing things,
and there were sacks, and there was...
lt was terrible. But anyhow...
There was a man looking at us, looking...
"ls that your family?"
"All right. You can go home, all of you."
And this was really unbelievable,
to walk on the street again at six o'clock in the morning,
to be free again.
But for the first time, now we were absolutely safe.
We were in their hands and they sent us home.
We were tired, but we never go to bed. No, my mother made coftee.
We felt so safe, yes.
They hauled us from our house, you know how many times?
1 1 times they played that game of cat and mouse with us.
We knew exactly how it went. Then the man came, he sent us home.
The last time he said it was now long enough,
that game ten times, 1 1 times, for only one child.
The whole family Koopman must go to Vught now.
(narrator) Loads of Jews in goods wagons
arrived at transit camps at Vught and Westerbork.
Their names and papers were checked by clerks,
some of them themselves Jews.
Then they were sent east, supposedly to be resettled.
ln fact, to be gassed and cremated in Sobibór and Auschwitz.
The Resistance called for strikes and sabotage.
Railwaymen and police, under German control, did not respond.
The trains ran on time.
Of Holland's 140,000 Jews, 105,000 perished.
(Van Der Deen) l came there on the platform and there were 24 people -
young and old, ladies, children, men -
chained together in an iron chain.
And they were, of course, transported to Germany to be gassed.
Four Germans were there - three at one side with Tommy guns,
and one on the other side of the group.
l was alone, it was 12 o'clock,
you were in the midst of a city on a railway platform.
What could you do? lf l could, by surprise,
shoot down the three, the other man was there.
With my pistol, l was helpless.
But even when you got all four,
what can you do with 24 people who are all linked together
in the midst of the day after a shooting party
in a place that's crowded with Germans?
So you walk away.
And that is absolutely terrible,
and if you have that experience,
you have a new stimulus to risk yourself for the few possibilities we had.
l stayed for a long time in Vught.
Till the last Jewish prisoners, l stay in Vught.
And...
Well, you see, Maurice, the boy who tried to save us,
must leave me, which was terrible.
My parents after four weeks, but he after...
Nine months, we stayed together.
And he took care of me like my father should have done, or my husband.
l had not a husband at that time.
lt was touching, the way he tried to take care of his sister.
He worked in the night. He was very left-handed.
He tried to sew things for other prisoners
just to get a little bit more food - that dreadful food - for his sister.
And after nine months he had to go, and l should have gone with him,
but it was not allowed because l had roodvonk.
l don't know... scarlet fever, l had that.
And that was one of the dirty things of the Germans -
when you were sick you couldn't go to the gas chamber.
No. First you had to recover.
They gave you the illusion nothing happened
because they don't send you on a transport
when you are sick. So l had to...
My brother, he came to say goodbye to me.
l was looking at him and l was thinking,
"For heaven's sake, he can't go, not in these poor clothes."
He was small, you see, and l gave him one of my jackets,
and l was thinking, "lt's closing the other way around, but who cares?"
And l gave him a pair of my boots. And...
l looked at him when he walked away from the barrack, at his back,
and from the back he looked like me,
and l was sure l'd never see him again.
l was sure.
We failed as a nation.
We didn't make one milieu with the Jews.
We did it, a part of the group did it, of the Netherlands, far too late.
We had been neutral in the First World War,
we thought we should be neutral in the Second World War -
all this stupid nonsense.
And then, having a sense of protest
isn't the same thing as translating it to relevant action.
(marching music)
(narrator) As the war went on,
the Germans stepped up appeals
for recruits to fight with them in Russia.
ln all, 25,000 Dutchmen volunteered -
in proportion to its size, the biggest contingent from any occupied country.
Only half returned.
At the same time, German decrees forced able-bodied men
to report as conscript labour to work in German war factories.
Rather than be separated from their families,
tens of thousands now tried to go into hiding.
Police spot checks on papers made draft-dodging difticult.
Another problem was the ration-card system
administered by Dutch civil serVants.
One of their tasks was to keep a vigilant lookout for irregularities.
This was because the Resistance, now bigger and better organised,
forged stamps and stole ration books to feed the growing numbers in hiding.
(woman) We had special organisations providing people with hiding places,
and they knew our address.
So when they had somebody who had to be hidden at once,
they knew they could always bring them to us
because we always had two sleeping places
reserVed for such urgent cases, you see?
And most of the time they were people who didn't stay long,
sometimes for a weekend, and then, in the meantime,
they tried to find another safer place for them where they could stay.
(man) ln a small room, l think...
Well, some... four yards, five yards,
there were nine people, l think, sometimes 1 1 ,
and people from other surroundings.
We hadn't to do a single thing.
Peeling potatoes, that kind of thing, you could do.
Reading books from the Christian library.
l played chess with my wife.
l studied chess with the books my friends sent from Amsterdam.
But it was horribly like hell itself,
as Sartre puts it in Huis Cios,
sitting together with people who you get to dislike more and more
every minute of the day,
with all tensions.
And the only one way of escape was going to sleep.
Early in the morning you went to the bureau.
We had a Bible institute at the bureau.
lt was very good because we were hiding all our explosives and weapons
behind the library of the Bible institute.
And then at nine or nine-thirty, you had to be there, and not later,
for that would already be...
well, uncertainty in the group - "Where is he?"
And then we tried to do what was the programme of the week.
The RAF dropped plastics.
So we got such a plastic bomb,
and found a beautiful German lorry and put it in.
You have to destroy something inside that bomb,
and then in half an hour's time it will explode.
Now, we had no training in that, and we didn't press too fast,
and after nearly an hour, it still didn't explode.
So we went back to the bureau we had and made another bomb,
and pressed that a little bit better.
lt was a little bit risky to put it in
because if the other one would trigger oft just by a little movement,
well, l couldn't tell you the story then. But it didn't.
And half an hour later the two of them went together, and it was a real fire.
You need some joy to go on
because we had other days also
when some of the friends would never come back.
(Bruin Slot speaks Dutch)
(translator) There were several illegal newspapers in Holland.
(speaks Dutch)
(translator) Once, the Germans had taken 40 of our people prisoner,
they'd been put in Vught concentration camp.
They interrogated one of them and then released him
and sent him to us with this message:
"lf you close down the paper..." -
this was near the end of the war, probably 1944 -
"lf you stop producing your paper, then we won't shoot these people."
(continues in Dutch)
(translator) We called a meeting and talked it over very carefully.
We reached the conclusion that we had to go on.
(Van Der Veen) As soon as some of your friends are shot,
you take things more serious.
lf you know that this man is penetrating into the underground forces
and you can shoot him and save so many lives,
it is terribly difticult and a terrible responsibility.
We had the orders to kill a couple,
a dangerous couple.
We were asked to shoot them on the streets -
when they crossed a bridge, to shoot them there and run away.
But we had a school very near to that place,
and there were so many people on the streets,
that we thought, "Let us bring them in that school
and kill them in the cellar."
And as soon as they came in that cellar and the light was on,
we saw that the wife was pregnant.
And then we couldn't do that.
So we arranged - the commander of our group and l -
that we should threaten them.
And we did so. The man first.
We gave him a hell of a time, l promise you.
But just threatening.
And then his wife also, but in relationship to her situation.
We took the risk of their promises,
of stepping out of that practice and waiting till after the war
when people could do with them what was necessary.
(narrator) Spring 1944.
The second front, leading to the longed-for liberation.
The Germans put up posters warning that Allied invasion
would mean death and destruction.
"Mother, is this the second front Father was always talking about?"
But the invasion came,
and by the autumn of 1944 the Allies were racing north.
On September 13, the first Dutch city,
Maastricht, in the extreme south, was liberated.
Resistance fighters arrested Nazis and punished women collaborators.
But while the southern tip of Holland rejoiced,
the rest of the country impatiently waited for their liberation.
Days later, their hopes were dashed -
the Allies were beaten severely at Arnhem.
The Dutch government in exile called for a railway strike
to deny supplies to German armies.
Railwaymen, who had hesitated before, now came out in force,
bringing all transport to a standstill.
The Germans retaliated by cutting oft
all supplies of fuel and food to cities in western Holland.
Soon people were scavenging
along silent and deserted railway tracks for bits of coal.
Shops ran out of food. Prices soared on the black market.
People kept alive by eating tulip bulbs.
Despite the privations, the strikers held firm.
Using forged securities, their wages were repaid by the Resistance,
which was by now also hiding 300,000 men
wanted by the Germans for forced labour.
There was no electricity or gas.
Houses left vacant by Jews were stripped of wood for use as fuel.
As the winter got worse,
the Germans relented and allowed emergency soup kitchens.
Still, it was clear that many would starVe
unless Holland was liberated.
(man) l did ask my friend Bedell Smith to ask General Eisenhower
could they not start a separate action
to liberate the rest of Holland,
where we had got up to the Maas
and then up to Nijmegen, and that was it,
and the rest was really getting in worse and worse trouble this winter.
Well, at that time, pretty soon,
almost simultaneously, the German counterattack came in the Ardennes,
which upset almost everything one had hoped for.
(narrator) Hitler now stripped Holland bare.
From Rotterdam alone in two days in November 1944,
50,000 able-bodied men were rounded up and removed to Germany.
(speaks Dutch)
(translator) When the doorbell rang there were two Germans.
They both came upstairs.
One stayed at the top of the stairs and the other one came into the room.
He looked round the room,
and the two men who were there had to get dressed and go with them.
And we, being women, were crying of course, both of us -
one woman with a baby in her arms, another hanging on her skirt.
And l can still remember vividly the one German
who was inside the room, he was crying.
Tears were streaming down his face and he said,
"l am so terribly sorry that l'm not alone."
"l'd love to be able to help you, but l can't do anything
because there's someone with me and l don't know him."
He couldn't do it. He'd have tried very hard to leave those two men there
because he thought it was terrible.
That was the first time l'd ever seen a German cry.
He really cried, big tears rolling down his face.
(narrator) That winter, 16,000 Dutch men, women and children
died of cold and hunger.
Still the liberators did not come.