Dutch Resistance - Activities

Activities

On 25 February 1941, the Communist Party of the Netherlands called for a general strike, the February strike, in response to the first Nazi raid on Amsterdam's Jewish population. The old Jewish quarter in Amsterdam had been cordoned off into a ghettos and as retaliation for a number of violent incidents that followed 425 Jewish men were taken hostage by the Germans and eventually deported to extermination camps, just 2 surviving. Many citizens of Amsterdam, regardless of their political affiliation, joined in a mass protest against the deportation of Jewish Dutch citizens. The next day, factories in Zaandam, Haarlem, IJmuiden, Weesp, Bussum, Hilversum and Utrecht joined in. The strike was largely put down within a day with German troops firing on unarmed crowds, killing 9 people and wounding 24, as well as taking many prisoners. It was significant because opposition to the German occupation intensified as a result. The only other general strike in Nazi-occupied Europe was the general strike in occupied Luxembourg in 1942. The Dutch struck four more times against the Germans: the students' strike in November 1940, the doctors' strike in 1942, the April–May strike in 1943 and the railway strike in 1944. No other country showed such overt refusal to cooperate with the occupiers.

The February strike was also unusual for the Dutch resistance, which was more covert. Resistance in the Netherlands initially took the form of small-scale, decentralized cells engaged in independent activities, mostly small-scale sabotage (cutting phone lines, distributing anti-German leaflets, tearing down posters). Some small groups had no links with others. They produced forged ration cards and counterfeit money, collected intelligence, published underground papers such as De Waarheid, Trouw, Vrij Nederland, and Het Parool, sabotaged phone lines and railways, produced maps, and distributed food and goods.

One of the most popular activities was hiding and sheltering refugees and enemies of the Nazi regime, Jewish families like the family of Anne Frank, underground operatives, draft-age Dutch, allied pilots and crew-members. Collectively these people were known as onderduikers ('people in hiding' or literally: 'under-divers'). Later in the war this system of hiding people was also used to protect downed Allied airmen. Corrie ten Boom and her family are among those who successfully hid several Jews and resistance workers from the Nazis. The total amounted to over 300,000 people per September 1944, tended to by some 60,000 to 200,000 landlords and carers.

In February 1943, two operatives of a Dutch resistance cell called CS-6 (for their address, 6 Corelli Street, in Amsterdam) rang the doorbell of a 70-year-old Dutch collaborator, retired Lieutenant-General Hendrik A. Seyffardt, in The Hague. After he answered and identified himself, they shot him twice in the abdomen. He died a day later. This assassination of a lower-level official triggered a cruel reprisal from SS General Hanns Albin Rauter, the murder of 50 Dutch hostages and a series of raids on Dutch universities. By accident the Dutch resistance attacked Rauter's car on 6 March 1945, which in turn led to the killings at De Woeste Hoeve, where 117 men were rounded up and executed at the site of the ambush and another 147 Gestapo prisoners executed elsewhere. A similar war crime occurred on 1–2 October 1944, in the village of Putten, where over 600 men were deported to camps to be killed in retaliation for resistance activity in the Putten raid.