Bridge Too Far (2 page)

The most frantic and confused among the escapees were the civilians, German, Dutch, Belgian and French Nazis.  They got no sympathy from the Dutch.  To farmer Johannes Hulsen at St.  Oedenrode, they looked “scared stiff”; and they had reason to be, he thought with satisfaction, forwiththe Allies “snapping at their heels these traitors knew it was Bijltjesdag [”Hatchet Day”].”

The frantic flight of Dutch Nazis and German civilians had been triggered by the Reichskommissar in Holland, the notorious fifty-two-year-old Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and by the ambitious

and brutal Dutch Nazi Party leader, Anton Mussert.  Nervously watching the fate of the Germans in France and Belgium, Seyss-Inquart on September 1 ordered the evacuation of German civilians to the east of Holland, closer to the Reich border.  The fifty-year-old Mussert followed suit, alerting members of his Dutch Nazi Party.  Seyss-Inquart and Mussert were themselves among the first to leave: they moved from The Hague east to Apeldoorn, fifteen miles north of Arnhem.  * Mussert rushed his family even closer to the Reich, moving them into the frontier region at Twente, in the province of Overijssel.  At first most of the German and Dutch civilians moved at a leisurely pace.  Then a sequence of events produced bedlam.  On September 3 the British captured Brussels.  The next day Antwerp fell.  Now, British tanks and troops were only miles from the Dutch border.  * Seyss-Inquart was terrified.  At Apeldoorn, he took to his underground headquarters—a massive concrete and brick bunker constructed at a cost of more than $250,000—complete with conference rooms, communications and personal suites.  It still exists.  Scratched on the concrete exterior near the entrance are the figures “6 ¼,” the nickname for the hated commissioner.  The Netherlanders couldn’t resist it; in Dutch, Seyss-Inquart and “6 ¼” sound almost the same—zes en een kwart.

On the heels of these stunning victories, the aged Queen of the Netherlands, Wilhelmina, told her people in a radio broadcast from London that liberation was at hand.  She announced that her son-in-law, His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, had been named Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Forces and would also assume leadership of all underground resistance groups.  These factions, comprising three distinct organizations ranging politically from the left to the extreme right, would now be grouped together and officially known as Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (forces of the Interior).  The thirty-three-year-old Prince Bernhard, husband of Princess Juliana, heir to the throne, followed the Queen’s announcement with one of his own.  He asked the underground to have armlets ready “displaying in distinct letters the word “Orange,”” but not to use them “without my order.”  He warned them to “refrain in the enthusiasm of the moment from premature and independent actions, for these would compromise yourselves and the military operations underway.”

Next, a special message was broadcast from General Dwight D.  Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, confirming that freedom was imminent.  “The hour of liberation the Netherlands have awaited so long is now very near,” he promised.  And within a few hours these broadcasts were followed by the most optimistic statement of all, from the prime minister of the Dutch government in exile, Pieter S.  Gerbrandy.  He told his listeners, “Now that the Allied armies, in their irresistible advance, have crossed the Netherlands frontier … I want all of you to bid our Allies a hearty welcome to our native soil.

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The Dutch were hysterical with joy, and the Dutch Nazis fled for their lives.  Anton Mussert had long boasted that his party had more than 50,000 Nazis.  If so, it seemed to the Dutch that they all took to the roads at the same time.  In scores of towns and villages all over Holland, Nazi-appointed mayors and officials suddenly bolted—but often not before demanding back pay.  The mayor of Eindhoven and some of his officials insisted on their salaries.  The town clerk, Gerardus Legius, thought their posture ridiculous, but he didn’t even feel badly about paying them off.  Watching them scurry out of town “on everything with wheels” he wondered: “How far can they get?  Where can they go?”  There was also a run on the banks.  When Nicolaas van de Weerd, twenty-four-year-old bank clerk, got to work in the town of Wageningen on Monday, September 4, he saw a queue of Dutch Nazis waiting outside the bank.  Once the doors were opened they hurriedly closed accounts and emptied safety deposit boxes.

Railway stations were overrun by terrified civilians.  Trains leaving

for Germany were crammed to capacity.  Stepping off a train on its

arrival in Arnhem, young Frans Wiessing was engulfed by a sea of people

fighting to get aboard.  So great was the rush that after the train

left, Wiessing saw a mountain of luggage lying abandoned on the

platform.  In the village of Zetten, west of Nijmegen, student Paul van

Wely watched as Dutch Nazis crowding the railroad station waited all

day for a Germany-bound train, which never arrived.  Women and children

were crying and to Van Wely “the waiting room looked like a junk

store full of tramps.”  In every town there were similar incidents.  Dutch collaborators fled on anything that would move.  Municipal architect Willem Tiemans, from his office window near the great Arnhem bridge, watched as Dutch Nazis “scrambled like mad” to get onto a barge heading up the Rhine for the Reich.

Hour after hour the traffic mounted, and even during darkness it went on.  So desperate were the Germans to reach safety that on the nights of September 3 and 4, in total disregard of Allied air attacks, soldiers set up searchlights at some crossroads and many overloaded vehicles crawled by, headlights blazing.  German officers seemed to have lost control.  Dr.  Anton Laterveer, a general practitioner in Arnhem, saw soldiers throwing away rifles—some even tried to sell their weapons to the Dutch.  Joop Muselaars, a teen-ager, watched a lieutenant attempt to stop a virtually empty army vehicle, but the driver, ignoring the command, drove on through.  Furious, the officer fired his pistol irrationally into the cobblestones.

Everywhere soldiers tried to desert.  In the village of Eerde, Adrianus Marinus, an eighteen-year-old clerk, noticed a soldier jumping off a truck.  He ran toward a farm and disappeared.  Later Marinus learned that the soldier was a Russian prisoner of war who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht.  Two miles from Nijmegen, in the village of Lent on the northern bank of the Waal, Dr.  Frans Huygen, while making his rounds, saw troops begging for civilian clothing, which the villagers refused.  In Nijmegen deserters were not so abject.  In many cases they demanded clothing at gunpoint.  The Reverend Wilhelmus Peterse, forty-year-old Carmelite, saw soldiers hurriedly remove uniforms, change to suits and set off on foot for the German border.  “The Germans were totally fed up with the war,” recalls Garrit Memelink, Arnhem’s Chief Forestry Inspector.  “They were doing their damnedest to evade the military police.”

With officers losing control, discipline broke down.  Unruly gangs of

soldiers stole horses, wagons, cars and bicycles.  Some ordered farmers

at gunpoint to haul them in their wagons toward Germany.  All through

the convoys the Dutch saw trucks, farm

wagons, hand carts—even perambulators pushed by fleeing troops—piled high with loot filched from France, Belgium and Luxembourg.  It ranged from statuary and furniture to lingerie.  In Nijmegen soldiers tried to sell sewing machines, rolls of cloth, paintings, typewriters—and one soldier even offered a parrot in a large cage.

Among the retreating Germans there was no shortage of alcohol.  Barely five miles from the German border in the town of Groesbeek, Father Herman Hoek watched horse-drawn carts loaded down with large quantities of wines and liquors.  In Arnhem, the Reverend Reinhold Dijker spotted boisterous Wehrmacht troops on a truck drinking from a huge vat of wine which they had apparently brought all the way from France.  Sixteen-year-old Agatha Schulte, daughter of the chief pharmacist of Arnhem’s municipal hospital, was convinced that most of the soldiers she saw were drunk.  They were throwing handfuls of French and Belgian coins to the youngsters and trying to sell bottles of wine, champagne and cognac to the adults.  Her mother, Hendrina Schulte, vividly recalls seeing a German truck carrying another kind of booty.  It was a large double bed—and in the bed was a woman.  * * “Scenes were witnessed which nobody would ever have deemed possible in the German army,” writes Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his History of the German General Staff.  “Naval troops marched northward without weapons, selling their spare uniforms … They told people that the war was over and they were going home.  Lorries loaded with officers, their mistresses and large quantities of champagne and brandy contrived to get get back as far as the Rhineland, and it was necessary to set up special courts-martial to deal with such cases.”

Besides the columns straggling up from the south, heavy German and civilian traffic was coming in from western Holland and the coast.  It flooded through Arnhem and headed east for Germany.  In the prosperous Arnhem suburb of Oosterbeek, Jan Voskuil, a thirty-eight-year-old chemical engineer, was hiding out at the home of his father-in-law.

Learning that he was on a list of Dutch hostages to be arrested by the

Germans, he had fled from his home in the town of Geldermalsen, twenty

miles away, bringing his wife, Bertha, and their nine-year-old son.  He

had arrived in Oosterbeek just in time to see the evacuation.  Jan’s

father-in-law told him not to “worry anymore about the Germans; you won’t have to “dive” now.”  Looking down the main street of Oosterbeek, Voskuil saw “utter confusion.”  There were dozens of German-filled trucks, nose-to-tail, “all dangerously overloaded.”  He saw soldiers “on bicycles, pedaling furiously, with suitcases and grips looped over their handlebars.”  Voskuil was sure that the war would be over in a matter of days.

In Arnhem itself, Jan Mijnhart, sexton of the Grote Kerk—the massive fifteenth-century Church of St.  Eusebius with a famed 305-foot-high tower—saw the Moffen (a Dutch nickname for the Germans, equivalent to the English “Jerry”) filing through the town “four abreast in the direction of Germany.”  Some looked old and sick.  In the nearby village of Ede an aged German begged young Rudolph van der Aa to notify his family in Germany that they had met.  “I have a bad heart,” he added, “and probably won’t live much longer.”  Lucianus Vroemen, a teen-ager in Arnhem, noticed the Germans were exhausted and had “no fighting spirit or pride left.”  He saw officers trying, with little or no success, to restore order among the disorganized soldiers.  They did not even react to the Dutch, who were yelling, “Go home!  The British and Americans will be here in a few hours.”

Watching the Germans moving east from Arnhem, Dr.  Pieter de Graaff, forty-four-year-old surgeon, was sure he was seeing “the end, the apparent collapse of the German army.”  And Suze van Zweden, high-school mathematics teacher, had a special reason to remember this day.  Her husband, Johan, a respected and well-known sculptor, had been in Dachau concentration camp since 1942 for hiding Dutch Jews.  Now he might soon be freed, for obviously the war was nearly over.  Suze was determined to witness this historic moment—the departure of the Germans and the arrival of the Allied liberators.  Her son Robert was too young to realize what was happening but she decided to take her daughter Sonja, aged nine, into town.  As she dressed Sonja, Suze said, “This is something you have to see.  I want you to try and remember it all your life.”

Everywhere the Dutch rejoiced.  Dutch flags made their ap-

pearance.  Enterprising merchants sold orange buttons and large stocks of ribbon to the eager crowds.  In the village of Renkum there was a run on the local drapery shop, where manager Johannes Snoek sold orange ribbon as fast as he could cut it.  To his amazement, villagers fashioned bows then and there and proudly pinned them on.  Johannes, who was a member of the underground, thought “this was going a bit too far.”  To protect the villagers from their own excesses, he stopped selling the ribbon.  His sister Maria, caught up in the excitement, noted happily in her diary that there was “a mood in the streets almost as though it was Koninginnedag, the Queen’s birthday.”  Cheering crowds stood on sidewalks yelling, “Long live the Queen!”  People sang the “Wilhelmus” (the Dutch national anthem) and “Oranje Boven!”  (“Orange Above All!”).  Cloaks flying, Sisters Antonia Stranzky and Christine van Dijk from St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital in Arnhem cycled down to the main square, the Velperplein, where they joined crowds on the terraces of caf‘es who were sipping coffee and eating potato pancakes as the Germans and Dutch Nazis streamed by.

At St.  Canisius Hospital in Nijmegen, Sister M. [email protected] Symons saw nurses dance with joy in the convent corridors.  People brought out long-hidden radios and, while watching the retreat flood by their windows, listened openly for the first time in long months to the special Dutch service, Radio Orange, from London’s BBC.  So excited by the broadcasts was fruit grower Joannes Hurkx, in St.  Oedenrode, that he failed to spot a group of Germans back of his house stealing the family bicycles.

In scores of places schools closed and work came to a halt.  Employees at the cigar factories in Valkenswaard promptly left their machines and crowded into the streets.  Streetcars stopped running in The Hague, the seat of government.  In the capital, Amsterdam, the atmosphere was tense and unreal.  Offices closed, and trading ceased on the stock exchange.  Military units suddenly disappeared from the main thoroughfares, and the central station was mobbed by Germans and Dutch Nazis.  On the outskirts of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, crowds carrying flags and flowers stood along main roads leading into the cities—hoping to be the first to see British tanks coming from the south.

Rumors grew with every hour.  Many in Amsterdam believed that British troops had already freed The Hague, near the coast about thirty miles to the southwest.  In The Hague people thought the great port of Rotterdam, fifteen miles away, had been liberated.  Rail travelers got a different story every time their trains stopped.  One of them, Henri Peijnenburg, a twenty-five-year-old resistance leader traveling from The Hague to his home in Nijmegen, a distance of less than eighty miles, heard at the beginning of his journey that the British had entered the ancient border city of Maastricht.  In Utrecht he was told they had reached Roermond.  Then, in Arnhem he was assured that the British had taken Venlo, a few miles from the German border.  “When I finally got home,” he recalls, “I expected to see the Allies in the streets, but all I saw were the retreating Germans.”  Peijnenburg felt confused and uneasy.