the Netherlands

  • 41 Months and 6 Days

    41 Months and 6 Days was all I was allowed to live. After 41 Months and 6 Days I was given a death sentence. No, I was not a criminal. No, I harmed no one. In fact I wasn’t even of a school going age as of yet. What did I do in those 41…

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  • Operation Market Garden, launched on September 17,1944 during World War II, was an ambitious Allied military operation aimed at ending the war by securing key bridges in the Netherlands and enabling a rapid advance into Germany. The operation combined airborne assaults with a ground offensive, making it one of the largest airborne operations in history.…

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  • I am not going to say too much about Margareta Maria Gallinat. Suffice it to say she sought employment abroad to terrorize innocent citizens. She was born in Ragnitz on 16 October 1894 in Rotsche Bach, Hamar. In April 1940, Gallinat read a newspaper ad for Aufseherin and decided to apply. Two months later, she…

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  • Words can kill

    The Nazis not only imposed their will by military force, but also through the Dutch Civil Service. A typewriter could be just as deadly as a bullet. Until the end of 1944 this typewriter was used in the Scholtenhuis on the Grote Markt, the main square in Groningen, in the north east of Netherlands. In…

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  • The one thing that always baffled me is the vehement hate the Nazis had for Jazz music. It was considered “Entartete Musik”—degenerate music, a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazis to Jazz and also other forms of music. I wrote a piece about Johnny & Jones before, this is not so much a…

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  • I sincerely believe that some people are just born evil. If it hadn’t been for the war, their evil ways—would probably have been displayed in other ways. Dr. Ernst Knorr was born Heiligenbeil, Germany on October 13, 1899. He died in Scheveningen, the Netherlands on 7 July 1945. He was an SS officer in the…

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  • Maastricht Liberated.

    Maastricht is one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands and one of the first settlements. It was also the first city to be liberated in World War 2. On 13 and 14 September 1944 it was the first Dutch city to be liberated by Allied forces of the US Old Hickory Division.. These are…

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  • Ankie Stork was a Dutch resistance fighter during the German occupation of the Netherlands. She saved thirty-five Jewish children from the Nazis by hiding them in several locations in the town of Nijverdal during World War II. She acted as part of Utrecht’s Kindercomité (Utrecht Children Committee), a Dutch resistance group based in Utrecht. Louis…

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  • In the past, I had written a few posts about Kasteel (castle) Hoensbroek in the Netherlands and its young inhabitants. However, the photographs are so heartwarming that I thought it would be nice to do one more post. The photos were taken on 2 March 1945. Dutch children entertained GIs in the famous castle. The…

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  • The story of Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker (1897–1940) unfolds like a World War II drama—complete with a daring escape from the Nazis, a tragic accident, an opera singer, and the plundering of a world-class art collection. Goudstikker was one of Amsterdam’s leading Jewish art dealers, renowned for his connoisseurship and scholarly expertise, and his…

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