History of Sorts

As I sat doing research on the days before the Germans invaded the Netherlands, I came across a newspaper article about the murder of Gretha Melaard.

Gretha Melaard was a 26-year-old student nurse who was killed on Friday, May 3rd, 1940. She had left Rotterdam that day at 8:30 pm to go to work in Delft on her bicycle. She never arrived at work. Instead, she was found beaten to death. Her body was found the following day, Saturday, May 4th, 1940, by some laborers who were passing by on the A13 motorway between Delft and Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Her bicycle was found a few days later, on May 8th, just a few kilometers down the road, by a group of soldiers.

Initially, the Police envisaged it would be an easy crime to solve because they had found a leave pass belonging to a soldier next to her bike. But it emerged the soldier had nothing to do with the murder, and neither did another soldier who was seen at the scene of the crime on the day of the murder.

May 9th—the next day, the Police appealed for anyone who had information to come forward.

On May 10th, the Germans invaded the Netherlands. Because of this, the murder of Gretha Melaard was never solved, making her, I suppose, an indirect victim of World War II.

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