Testimonies of “wrong Dutch” from World War II have emerged from newly created public files from the National Archives. This shows that they were severely abused in Dutch POW camps. Among them there would also be women and children.
The testimonies are contained in the documents of A. van Tuyll van Serooskerken, chairman of the committee that investigated the abuses in the prison camps after the war. There were people accused of collaborating with the German occupier.
The stacks of documents include many statements by these “political thugs”. A man born in 1910 tells of his arrival in a field at Zweeloo: “The five of us were then taken into the field with the five of us, under constant beatings and bangs with pieces of iron, and chased through the field.”
The man says he was later also mistreated in Westerbork. He indicates that people often had to pay for their stay there with their death. “In this camp, an average of one prisoner died a day, especially in the early days.”
A fellow sufferer from 1892 tells of Westerbork: “There was such hunger that the prisoners ate grass, ants and weeds.” According to him, a seventeen-year-old boy “died of exhaustion.”
Clean clogged toilets by hand
Another witness, born in 1906, told of his stay in the barracks of the cells of Scheveningen who had to help clean up the barbed wire. He had to do it with his hands and socks.
Later he had to clean the clogged toilets with his hands. He was also beaten twelve times with a rubber club on the butt in his cell by three men three times a day for ten days.
Female prisoners were also beaten, sometimes in the presence of their daughters. A woman from 1922 who was in a camp in Sellingerbeetse said that the children who were housed there with her mother also died there.
A doctor born in 1892 ended up in the barracks of the Naarden orphanage. The medical conditions were, according to the doctor, “disgraceful”. “I’ve seen five or six people die,” he wrote in a statement.
File no longer available under strict conditions
After the start of the new year, the National Archives always publish various files. These are all kinds of documents that previously could not be viewed or only under strict conditions.
This time the files vary from the minutes of the Council of Ministers to documents on the Second World War. About twelve hundred pages of information will be published this year.
