Armistice of Achterveld

The Achterveld armistice for West Holland was negotiated between the Allies and the German occupying forces in the Netherlands from April 28 to April 30, 1945 and signed in Wageningen on May 2 . He made it possible to start food aid for the starving population of West Holland by air through Operations Manna and Chowhound and by land with trucks near Rhenen ( Operation Faust ) before Germany's surrender. The fighting between the 1st Canadian Army and the 25th Army of the Wehrmacht , which was enclosed in the fortress of Holland , was stopped.

Starting position

Background hunger winter

Starving baby, four months old, Breda, January 1, 1945

Military situation, North Holland, April 1945

In September 1944, the Allies attempted a quick advance to the Rhine as part of Operation Market Garden , which failed. On the orders of Prince Bernhard and the Dutch government-in-exile in London, the Dutch railroad workers started a strike and went underground to paralyze the German supply. Thereupon the German Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, Seyß-Inquart , issued a transport stop for food. When the early onset and particularly cold winter also brought shipping to a standstill, the predominantly urban population of West Holland suffered from it in particular, which was dependent on food and fuel supplies and remained occupied by German troops until Germany surrendered . Electricity, gas and telephone connections were mostly interrupted, dikes partially destroyed by the Dutch resistance , the German occupiers and bombs. The so-called Hongerwinter came about , the last Western European famine , to which more than 20,000 people fell victim to malnutrition and the cold. Led by Sweden and Switzerland , the neutral states organized some aid deliveries through the Red Cross , but they were not enough to stop the catastrophe.

negotiations

When the supply situation became more and more desperate for the approximately three million Dutch people in early 1945, the Dutch government in exile and Prince Bernhard tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Allies to take relief measures. Finally, he asked the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Dwight D. Eisenhower , for help on April 15, 1945, who was initially unable to provide it, as humanitarian aid supplies would require a local armistice , which he was not authorized to make. However, on April 17, 1945, he already commissioned Air Commodore Andrew Geddes to plan supply flights and work out a draft agreement for the German side ( no negotiations, only instructions ). Seyss-Inquart had already signaled that under certain conditions he could agree to an armistice, but also threatened to ruthlessly devastate the fortress of Holland on Hitler's orders if the Allies continued to advance in the Netherlands. After the Dutch government-in-exile had obtained the approval of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt , Eisenhower received permission on April 23 to agree a local ceasefire with the German side. The Canadian 1st Army , scheduled for the liberation of North Holland , received orders to cease fire on the morning of April 28th.

Armistice negotiations

On April 28, the Allies met with German representatives in Achterveld and announced an ultimatum to the start of the air supply for the following day, but only on April 30, agreed Seyss-Inquart at the meeting with Walter Bedell Smith , Prince Bernhard and General Ivan Susloparov a Armistice too. On May 2nd, the contract with the technical details was signed in Wageningen with the following points:

Truck convoy with groceries, May 2, 1945

Approach lanes, entry times and ten drop zones for air supply, whereby the dropped goods would be controlled by the German side in order to prevent the Dutch resistance from being secretly supplied with military goods. (Operation Manna began on April 29 with Royal Air Force flights .)
Rhenen and the surrounding area were declared a neutral zone and the handover modalities for truck transports of food to the occupied zone were regulated. ( Operation Faust started on May 3rd).
The Nieuwe Waterweg to Rotterdam should be cleared by the German side for relief supplies from mines and should be available from May 4th.

literature

Nicolas Best: Five Days that Shocked the World , Osprey Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-1-78200-624-4 , pp. 201 ff.
Stephen Dando-Collins: Operation Chowhound: The Most Risky, Most Glorious US Bomber Mission of WWII , Macmillan, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4668-7915-7 .
William I. Hitchcock : Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom , Simon and Schuster, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7432-7381-7 , pp. 98 ff.
Henri A. Van der Zee: The Hunger Winter - Occupied Holland 1944-1945 , University of Nebraska Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8032-9618-5 .

Web links

Armistice negotiations on youtube , Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie (engl.)

Notes and individual references

↑ Stephen Dando-Collins: Operation Chowhound: The Most Risky, Most Glorious US Bomber Mission of WWII , p. 115.
^ William I. Hitchcock: The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, pp. 116 ff.
^ Mark Zuehlke: On to Victory: The Canadian Liberation of the Netherlands, March 23-May 5, 1945 , Douglas & McIntyre, 2010, ISBN 978-1-55365-430-8 , p. 419 ff.

[1] Stephen Dando-Collins: Operation Chowhound: The Most Risky, Most Glorious US Bomber Mission of WWII , p. 115.

[2] William I. Hitchcock: The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, pp. 116 ff.

[3] Mark Zuehlke: On to Victory: The Canadian Liberation of the Netherlands, March 23-May 5, 1945 , Douglas & McIntyre, 2010, ISBN 978-1-55365-430-8 , p. 419 ff.