Woeste Hoeve
Woeste Hoeve ( German literally "desolate homestead"; also " Einödhof " ) is a homestead near Apeldoorn . Shortly before the end of World War II , during the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940–1945), this place gained notoriety.
history
It was the time of the Hongerwinter ( German "Hungerwinter" 1944/45). In the last months of the war there was great hardship and many people starved to death. Dutch resistance fighters tried to help the population and to get food. On March 6, 1945, they found out that the next morning the Wehrmacht would collect three tons of meat in a slaughterhouse in Epe , about 15 kilometers north of Apeldoorn . Some fighters were assigned to " organize " food from this . They camouflaged themselves with German uniforms and decided to capture the truck necessary for the transport from the Wehrmacht beforehand .
To do this, they hid near the lonely farmstead Woeste Hoeve on the road ( Rijksweg 50 ) that connects Apeldoorn and Arnhem and waited for the next Wehrmacht truck . Shortly afterwards, they heard a motor vehicle with a heavy engine approach, positioned themselves in the middle of the road and stopped it. Surprisingly, it turned out that it was not the truck that was longed for, but a heavy car with three people. A firefight broke out in which a German officer and the driver of the car were killed. Another officer who had been sitting next to the driver was lying lifeless on the floor.
In the dark, the resistance fighters overlooked the fact that he was lying there covered in blood, but was still alive and pretending to be dead. They also failed to recognize that it was SS-Obergruppenführer Hanns Albin Rauter (1895-1949), General of the Police and Waffen-SS and Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of the occupied Netherlands . Rauter was later found and taken to a hospital. An attempted assassination on his person was mistakenly suspected. His deputy, SS Brigade Leader Karl Eberhard Schöngarth , ordered the immediate execution of 300 “death row inmates” as a “ retaliatory measure ”.
There were rounded up prisoners from different prisons and at several locations for shooting out. At Woeste Hoeve there were 117 people who were executed in groups of twenty by a fifty-man firing squad with an interval of five minutes.
memorial
At the site of the shooting, only a good hundred meters south of the homestead, there is now a memorial .
Web links
- Monument Woeste Hoeve Foundation (Dutch)
- Drenthe in de oorlog “The province of Drenthe at war.” Background reports (Dutch) and photos.
- Notice of the shooting
- Photo of the car
Individual evidence
- ^ Stiftung Monument Woeste Hoeve (Dutch), accessed on March 22, 2019.
- ↑ Woeste Hoeve at Spannendegeschichte.com , accessed on March 22, 2019.
Coordinates: 52 ° 6 ′ 18 ″ N , 5 ° 57 ′ 5 ″ E