Raid on Rotterdam

Rotterdam after the 1940 bombing

Removal of the men on November 10, 1944

Memorial plaque in the Rotterdam City Hall

The raid on Rotterdam on November 10 and 11, 1944 was the largest raid carried out by the German occupiers in the Netherlands during World War II . Around 54,000 men between the ages of 17 and 40 were arrested in Rotterdam and its suburb, Schiedam, and deported to the east of the Netherlands and Germany for forced labor .

background

Even before the raid in November 1944, as the historian Ben A. Sijes wrote in 1951, Rotterdam was a “battered city”. During the occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, it was bombed by the German Air Force on May 10th . The city center was almost completely destroyed, and around 900 people died. Since the port city played an important strategic role for the German occupiers, the city was also attacked 21 times by the Allies in the following years. 748 people lost their lives and nearly 100,000 Rotterdamers became homeless.

Before 1944, around 50,000 Rotterdam residents had been obliged to work in Germany. As of July 1942, around 12,000 Jewish people were also deported from Rotterdam . The bombings, the deportations, the shooting of hostages after acts of sabotage by the resistance, the absence of many men and a constant atmosphere of fear destroyed social relations in the city, and the city center was devastated: “When the wind was strong, it was blown up in the city Dust barely bearable. ”By September 1944, almost every man who remained in Rotterdam had been obliged to work on the coast at least once in order to build defensive structures after the destruction of the localities there. The Dutch called this "Spitten voor de moffen" ("Digging for the Moffen ").

On September 4, 1944, the Dutch Prime Minister Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy announced on Radio Oranje that the Allies had reached the Dutch border and that the hour of liberation had come. Rumor has it that the invasion would take place the next day. Rotterdam was expected to be captured on the same day and Utrecht and Amsterdam on September 6th; the rest of the country would soon follow suit. This was followed by the Dolle Dinsdag on September 5th, on which the Dutch celebrated the supposedly imminent liberation and NSB members and collaborators fled to Germany.

On September 17, 1944, the British airborne troops attacked the Battle of Arnhem as part of Operation Market Garden . The operation ended with a loss-making retreat of the Allies. At the same time, the German occupiers began to partially demolish the port of Rotterdam by means of explosions so that, in the event of a German defeat, it would not fall into the hands of the Allies and be used by them - like the port of Antwerp before. Another 5,000 Rotterdam residents lost their homes. In addition, there was a strike by the Dutch railroad workers in September 1944 to indirectly support the Allied advance, which the occupiers responded to by stopping food transports to the Netherlands, which ultimately resulted in the Hongerwinter of 1944/45.

At the same actions took by resistance groups who liberated among other prisoners of the Germans from prison in raids ration cards captured, lists of names of men in Arbeidsbureaus destroyed and collaborators killed. The German occupiers, in turn, started fires in some parts of Rotterdam. While the south of the Netherlands had already been liberated from the Allies, Rotterdam continued to be occupied by the Germans, and living conditions there became "increasingly harder".

"Rosenstock campaign"

Earlier measures with the aim that Dutch people should volunteer to work in Germany had not shown the success desired by the Germans. Fritz Sauckel , the German General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment , stated on May 7, 1942: “However, where in occupied areas the appeal of voluntariness is insufficient, service obligations and evictions must be carried out under all circumstances. This is an indisputable requirement of our work situation. ”As a result, Dutch men were increasingly conscripted, but many were able to evade this, also with the support of the Dutch authorities. In August 1943, the SD reported that with a desired target of 34,000 workers, only 9,000 workers could be hired: "The number of those in hiding is estimated in German specialist circles at around 60,000".

On August 30, 1944, Adolf Hitler issued a decree to “make available” additional workers for the “defense readiness” of the West Wall . The Chief of Staff at Commander- in -Chief West , Siegfried Westphal , reported in a telegram to Heinrich Himmler on November 2 that there were around 600,000 men capable of military service in the Netherlands. They are urgently needed as workers in the Reich, and it is also to be feared that they will “soon be facing us as an enemy”. The plan was to carry out raids in the large Dutch cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam , The Hague and Utrecht , one after the other, in order to remove the men fit for military service from the militarily threatened west of the country. The raid in Rotterdam, where around 70,000 able-bodied men lived, was to be the first because the front was only a few kilometers away.

From October 11th, the Rotterdam raid was prepared from Berlin under strict secrecy. The Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands Seyss-Inquart , the Reichsamtsleiter for the forced recruitment Hermann Liese , the General Commissioner for Security Hanns Albin Rauter and Admiral Gustav Kleikamp took part in a meeting on October 15th . In further discussions it was planned which military forces should be involved in the action. Liese received a power of attorney from Goebbels with which he could request from Wehrmacht commander Friedrich Christiansen all the soldiers he needed to carry out the raid.

On the evening of November 9, 1944, 8,000 German soldiers were gathered in Rotterdam under the code name Aktion Rosenstock , including members of the 5th Paratrooper Division . They occupied all important bridges and squares, telephone traffic was cut off and the trams stopped running. In some parts of the city the following notice was posted:

“By order of the German Wehrmacht, all men between the ages of 17 and 40 must register for work. For this purpose, all men of this age must stand on the street with the prescribed equipment immediately after receiving this order. All other residents, including women and children, have to stay in the houses until this action is over. The men of the named age groups who are found in a house search in the house will be punished by accessing their private property. Evidence of exemptions from civil or military authorities must be provided for control. Even those who have such evidence are obliged to take to the streets. You have to bring: warm clothes, sturdy shoes, blankets, rain protection, eating utensils, knife, fork, spoon, drinking cup and sandwiches for a day. Bicycles brought along remain the property of the owner. The daily allowance consists of good food, tobacco products and five guilders . The relatives who remain behind are taken care of. All residents of the municipality are prohibited from leaving their place of residence. Those who try to flee or resist will be shot. "

Plan of the cordoning off of the city and the places where the men were gathered

The raid was carried out street by street and house by house from 5 a.m. on November 10, making it almost impossible to escape. The men were gathered in several locations around the city, including the Feijenoord Stadium . In Schiedam the men were brought together at the central Koemarkt , from where they were directed to Rotterdam. Around 20,000 men had to march towards Utrecht on foot , 20,000 were transported away by large Rhine ships and another 10,000 by rail. Those numbers included around 80 percent of the men to whom the order applied. Liese reported to Berlin that the population of Rotterdam reacted “calmly and composed”, some even with “a certain satisfaction”: “These people were probably happy that they got rid of some eaters […].” At the Haarlem train station , they succeeded some more men to flee with the help of the local residents. At least one Rotterdam native was shot as a warning to the others. In Weesp , too , five men who tried to escape were killed.

Around 10,000 of the deported men came to work in the east of the Netherlands, the rest were transported to Germany, mainly to the Ruhr area and to places along the Rhine . There the men were housed in barracks; around a third of them escaped in the course of the following months. A total of between 24,000 and 29,000 Dutch forced laborers were killed in Germany, 410 of them from Rotterdam. After their return from German captivity, many men continued to suffer for years from the health consequences of being in a camp and hard labor; many of them had tuberculosis or were severely traumatized .

This raid was the last major German operation in the Netherlands. The number of men arrested in the following cities, including Delft , was limited because the population had heard of the raid in Rotterdam and many men were able to hide in time. Thus, a few months before the end of the war, the German occupiers' plan to transport all Dutch men still present in the cities to Germany failed.

literature

• Daniel Barnouw: The Netherlands in World War II. An introduction . agenda, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-89688-427-5 .
• Dagmar Gutheil: ... that you wish it were all over ... traces of the Second World War in Düsseldorf-Pempelfort. A documentation . Klartext, Essen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8375-2042-2 .
• Albert Oosthoek: De Rotterdamse arbeidsinzet 1940-1945 . Aspect, Soesterberg 2009, ISBN 978-90-5911-825-6 .
• Albert Oosthoek: Rotterdam workers in Kassel 1940–1945 . In: Rimco Spanjer, Diete Oudesluijs, Johan Meijer (eds.): Forced to work. Forced labor in Germany 1940–1945 . Edition Temmen, Bremen 1999, ISBN 3-86108-735-9 , pp. 209-216 .
• Lourens Reedijk: De Rotterdamse Razzia van 1944. Dagboek van een Scholier . Uitgeverij LJ Veen, Amsterdam et al. 1999, ISBN 90-204-5878-7 .
• Ben A. Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam 10–11 November 1944 . Ed .: Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie . Sijthoff, Amsterdam 1951.
• Friso Wielenga : The Netherlands. Politics and Political Culture in the 20th Century . Waxmann, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8309-1844-8 .

Web links

Commons : Raid of Rotterdam  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Het project Reis van de Razzia. stichtingreisvanderazzia.nl, November 10, 1944 (Dutch).
• De Razzia van Rotterdam. niod.nl (Dutch).
• Heenreis - de Razzia van Rotterdam. derazziavanrotterdam.nl (Dutch).
• Documentaire Razzia 1944 on YouTube , November 10, 2016, documentary by Tonko Dop.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 27.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 29.
3. ^ Wielenga: The Netherlands. P. 221; Sijes, De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 33.
4. ^ Wielenga: The Netherlands. P. 234 f.
5. ^ Wielenga: The Netherlands. P. 238 f.
6. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 34 f.
7. ↑ Harald Fühner: The history of the Netherlands 1940-1945. Retrieved September 2, 2019 . 
8. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 35 f.
9. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 37.
10. ^ Barnouw: The Netherlands in the Second World War. P. 93 f.
11. ↑ Document 3352-PS printed by IMT: The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals ... fotomech. Emphasis. Munich 1989, Volume 32, ISBN 3-7735-2524-9 , p. 202.
12. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 48.
13. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 250.
14. ^ Razzia van Rotterdam (1944). In: Stadsarchief Rotterdam. Retrieved September 3, 2019 (Dutch). 
15. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 63.
16. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 10.
17. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 257.
18. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 187.
19. ^ Albert Oosthoek: De Rotterdamse arbeidsinzet 1940-1945 . Aspect, Soesterberg 2009, ISBN 978-90-5911-825-6 , p. 116-117 .
20. ↑ Sijes: De razzia van Rotterdam. P. 213.