The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (17 page)

Young ladies, so sure of yourselves, do you not fear that your example will lead others into weakness?…Do you not know that the road along which Victory has trav- eled passed through North Africa, from which these unfortunate diseases have come?…Do you know that the [Army] rest camp in our area has attracted women by the hundreds who are the waste of the great cit- ies, and who by avoiding any medical surveillance are spreading these diseases? Do you know that in Verviers, many of your peers, after having strayed just once, have already been obliged to submit to emergency treat- ments, which are as horrible as they are indispensable? Remember, young girls, the essential mission for the future of our race which you bear: the mission to repre- sent our people proudly before our allies! For one hour of abandon, do not stain your conscience with painful and often hereditary “stigmata”…The time of national recovery is at hand. No nation can revive unless it has a

youth that is healthy in its body and its soul.
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The notion that American soldiers were vectors of “North African” diseases stirred up vigorous and out- raged protests from SHAEF officials, who remonstrated with the local mayors.
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Yet the truth was that VD, along with prostitution, crime, smuggling, violence, and may- hem, closely accompanied the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in Belgium; civilian leaders believed their behavior placed the moral and physical health of the country in jeopardy. It is no accident that the ap- peal of the mayors explicitly linked the recovery of the nation with the physical health of young girls: these bearers of national virtue would have to be protected, perhaps liberated, from promiscuous, drunken, profli- gate, demanding liberators.

This is quite different from saying that Belgians were ungrateful for their liberation, or that they preferred the Germans to the Americans—a charge that some American soldiers leveled at them. Rather, Belgian complaints remind us how unsettling, violent, and dy-

namic the entire process of liberation was at the close of World War II. Liberation in Belgium had brought death and destruction, the annihilation of cities, the creation of refugees, the bombing of small rural villag- es and their occupants; and it had opened the way to a social threat from the weary, sex-starved, and perhaps emotionally scarred Allied soldiers. Given the trauma of war and liberation in Belgium, it is not surprising that the people of this now war-shattered country sim- ply wanted to be left alone. Belgium had been invaded in 1940 by the Germans, in 1944 by the Americans and British, and again in 1944 by the Germans. Thirty thou- sand Belgian civilians died as a result of these events. The war over, Belgians wished to heal, to recover some sense of national independence and dignity. It is all too easy to understand why a local police commissioner in September 1945 found that in his part of the country, the common phrase on the lips of all the citizens was simply, “O Lord, deliver us from our liberators.”
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3: Hunger: The Netherlands and the Politics of Food

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N THE LATE winter of 1944, rifleman Roscoe Blunt of the 84th Infantry Division was warming C-ra- tions on a fire in his mud-soaked campsite in the Dutch town of Heerlen. A young girl wandered into the GI’s compound “and then matter-of-factly asked me if I wanted to ‘ficken’ or just ‘kuszen.’ It took me a few moments for my brain to click into gear and realize what she was asking.” Blunt asked the girl how old she

was. “’ Zwolf,’ she whispered passionately.”
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It was not uncommon in the winter of 1944 to see Dutch children like this twelve-year-old girl fighting over the trash pails where the GIs threw their uneaten rations, or offering sex in exchange for food. And in the spring of 1945, the picture in the Netherlands only worsened. The Allied armies that had dashed through northern France and Belgium in August arrived on Holland’s doorstep in early September, but then failed to drive the Germans out of the country. Only a small slice of southern Holland was freed from German control, and the rest of the country, including the main cities of Am- sterdam, the Hague, and Rotterdam, remained under occupation until the end of the war. Although the Al- lied armies periodically launched attacks on the Ger-

man lines in Holland—the First Canadian Army fought bitterly there—the ugly truth is that the liberation of northwestern Holland was simply not a strategic pri- ority for the Allies. The Anglo-American armies hit the Germans along the Siegfried Line in Belgium and France, and in spring 1945 pushed eastward into Ger- many proper. This left a large contingent of German soldiers effectively cut off in Holland, though still in command of much of the country. A gruesome side- show ensued: the doomed German occupiers pursued a policy of vengeance against the citizens of the Neth- erlands, and deliberately allowed them to starve.

During the late winter and early spring of 1945, when life had revived in liberated Brussels and Paris, north- west Holland was a lifeless zone of darkness and hun- ger, a pitiful encampment of skeletal children and ca- daverous people, surviving on tulip bulbs and beets. The Dutch people’s deliverance did not come until the collapse of the Third Reich itself, by which time some 16,000 people had died of starvation in what had been one of the richest, most intensively cultivated countries in Europe. When the Canadian and British troops did finally enter the main cities in early May, they were of course greeted warmly, and many soldiers thought at first glance that the Dutch people seemed to have sur- vived on their meager rations. But that was because the

desperately ill were not among the crowds. As Major- General J. G. W. Clark, the head of the SHAEF mission in the Netherlands, put it tartly in a memo to London, “men and women who are slowly dying in their beds of starvation unfortunately cannot walk gaily about the streets waving flags.”
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HE GERMANS OCCUPIED the country on May 10, 1940; but they never decided precisely what to do with the Dutch. After the conquest of the country,

Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government removed to London and established a Dutch government-in- exile—one of the many castaway cabinets then crowd- ing into Britain. Despite ongoing surrender talks with the remaining Dutch military authorities, the Germans bombed Rotterdam on May 14, gutting the city center and killing 900 people. There could be no doubt of the brutality the Germans intended to visit upon the Dutch if they did not yield immediately. They did so, and a curtain of suffering was drawn over the country for the next five years. The country presented the Germans with a tricky problem: how to treat a people so racially, linguistically, and culturally similar to the Aryan ide- al. Hitler, typically, let his deputies fight the issue out among themselves. The Reichskommissariat Nieder-

lande (Netherlands Reich Commissariat) was headed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who was, like Hitler, an Aus- trian. He had been a central figure in manipulating Austrian affairs to allow for Hitler to seize that country in the 1938 Anschluss and incorporate Austria into the German Reich. Hitler later appointed Seyss-Inquart as deputy governor general in occupied Poland, where he gladly engaged in the ghettoization of Jews. In May 1940, he was sent to run the defeated Netherlands. Sey- ss-Inquart wished to preserve some degree of autono- my for Holland while squeezing it for every last bit of materiel it could provide to the insatiable German war effort. He approved the delegation of certain powers to the collaborationist Nationaal- Socialistische Beweg- ing der Nederlanden (Dutch National Socialist Move- ment), headed by the Dutchman Anton Mussert, and which claimed a membership of 50,000 by 1940. Seyss- Inquart would have been content to govern the Neth- erlands essentially as a colonized fiefdom of the Ger- man Reich. By contrast, the SS commander and police chief in Holland, Hanns Albin Rauter, another Austrian Nazi, envisioned a direct form of rule that annexed and incorporated Holland into Germany, removing any vestiges of Dutch identity and independence. The two rivals never came to a common understanding, and in fact worked at cross purposes for much of the war.
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As a practical matter, these doctrinal differences at the top had little meaning for the Dutch people, who suf- fered under an increasingly burdensome and interfer- ing German occupation. Virtually all aspects of life in the country fell under German control. Access to food was controlled through rationing cards; the radio, press, political parties, and labor unions were all given over to collaborationists. The country was ransacked: factories were dismantled and shipped into Germany. Metals, clothing, textiles, bicycles, food and produce, cattle and livestock, all were sucked into the German war machine. Curfews governed civilian freedom of movement; tens of thousands of people were forcibly moved from coastal towns where the Germans erected massive fortifications. Four hundred thousand people were shipped into Germany, where they were com- pelled to work for the German war effort. And of course the Germans targeted Jews. In June 1942, the Germans began a systematic deportation of Dutch Jews, man- aging in the end to find and murder 105,000 of the 140,000 Jews in Holland at the start of the war: a higher percentage than any western European country.
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A significant number of Dutch people participated in some form of resistance to German rule, though this was rarely militant, armed resistance. The Order Ser- vice grouped former army officers together and had

the favor of the government in exile; the Council of Resistance directed sabotage and espionage in close cooperation with the British secret service; and a na- tional association for assistance to the many onderdu- ikers—those who “dived under,” or went into hiding— served as a way station for false documents, transport, and funds. Unfortunately, the Dutch resistance was totally penetrated by German counterintelligence, which was able to stymie all major sabotage activities between 1942 and 1944. Yet a much broader, national resistance did develop in daily life, which manifested itself through a vigorous underground press, an active counterfeiting of ration cards and identity papers, a network of aid to those in hiding, and periodic strikes. These strikes in particular could be a serious nuisance to the occupation authorities and tended to provoke the ire of the Germans. A nationwide strike in February 1941 in response to initial roundups of Jews in Amster- dam led to the execution of seventeen Dutch people. In April 1943, another nationwide strike was called in response to German arrests of former Dutch POWs who had already been released; 150 Dutch people were killed by the Germans in savage reprisals.

By the start of 1944, living conditions in Holland had become nearly intolerable. The Dutch economy had been stripped bare and the only available food were

potatoes, mealy bread, and beets. Children were be- ginning to show signs of malnutrition while diseases like diphtheria and typhus had begun to break out. The Germans flooded large swaths of the country in an- ticipation of an Allied invasion, and Allied bombing of dykes also devastated thousands of acres, taking still more land out of cultivation. The resistance occasion- ally carried out successful operations against the oc- cupiers, and badly wounded Hanns Rauter himself in a March 1945 assassination attempt; but the reprisals for such acts took a ghastly toll. The Germans killed 250 Dutch prisoners in response to the attack on Ra- uter, and constantly shot hostages in reply to Dutch sabotage. Death also came from the skies, inevitably. One report from within occupied Holland in June 1944 said that the people were “becoming increasingly anti-American and anti-British because of the reck- less air bombardment.”
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The Netherlands Red Cross begged the British to reconsider their air assaults on cities. A report in April 1944 gave a grim tally of dam- age and destruction, including the attack on Nijmegen on February 22 that “left one-third of the centre of the town in ruins,” killed 500 civilians and injured several hundred. “One school was completely wiped out, and all the children and those in charge of them perished. Several churches and historic buildings were reduced to rubble and ashes,” the Red Cross reported. To this,

British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden laconically re- plied, “I fear loss of life and damage to property and cultural monuments are inevitable. It is part of the price of liberation.”
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But liberation seemed a long way off: in May 1944, one source concluded a gloomy re- port on conditions in Holland with these words: “If the British could see how things are in Holland, they would hurry up. It simply cannot last much longer.”
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In early September, the Allies were strung out along the Dutch-Belgian border and it seemed a matter of days before the country would be liberated. On September 17, the day that the Allies launched Operation Market Garden, flooding the skies over Nijmegen and Arnhem with paratroopers, liberation appeared at hand. The Dutch government in London ordered a nationwide railway strike on the same day in an effort to snarl German military movements and cut off rail traffic. But the airborne invasion failed to achieve the Rhine crossing that had been hoped for, and only a small patch of southern Holland was in Allied hands. The Al- lied armies turned their attention eastward, away from Holland and into Germany proper. It would be months before the Allies fought their way northward, across the watery fingers of the Maas, Waal, and Rhine rivers. In retaliation for the Dutch strikes, Seyss-Inquart placed an embargo on all food imports into the German-held