The Greatest Traitor by Roger Hermiston Read Free Book Online Page B

collect the groceries and then wait for further instructions. The boy with a taste for adventure was about to take his first steps in a clandestine world that would become his life. He did so with some trepidation, but also with a sense of mission.
    Geographically, topographically and demographically the Netherlands was utterly ill-suited to a war of resistance. The country is small (little more than 30,000 square kilometres), flat (no mountains and very little forest to provide cover for partisans) and densely populated (nine million people at that time, the highest recorded population density in the world). Even the excellent transport links militated against any effective underground movement: Holland had an extensive and efficient railway system and roads of excellent quality, which enabled the German garrison of three infantry divisions and several regiments of the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) to move around the country swiftly and maintain maximum control.
    Then, of course, there was the sheer isolation of the country in 1940. To all intents and purposes, Holland did not share a border with a neutral country. It was blocked off on its eastern border by Germany,faced occupied Belgium to the south, and had no links to the north, either, where Hitler’s troops stood vigilant in his Scandinavian satellites. On its western border, Holland faced England across the North Sea, but this coastal area – mainly dunes and beaches – was closely guarded by the Germans, both on land and by patrol boats in the waters.
    As a result, the organisation of any lasting resistance group along the lines of the French Maquis was a practical impossibility, even if the Dutch Resistance had possessed a stock of working weapons, which they did not until well into 1942.
    Instead little acts of defiance marked the opening months of the occupation, mainly centred around the Queen, with the Dutch showing renewed nationalist spirit. This symbolic opposition was demonstrated through growing flowers in the national colours, naming newborn babies after living members of the Royal Family, and wearing pins made of coins bearing the picture of Queen Wilhelmina. On 29 June 1940, the birthday of Prince Bernhard, people all across the country flew the national flag in defiance of a German ban. They also stopped work and took to the streets wearing carnations, the Prince’s favourite flower, in their buttonholes. The occasion would be remembered as Anjerdag (Carnation Day).
    All this was merely irksome for the invaders. What was more serious, and brought the ‘honeymoon’ period well and truly to an end, was the nationwide strike in February 1941. The Communist Party of Holland (by now illegal) printed leaflets and put the word out for the capital’s citizens and the rest of the nation to down tools in protest. Not only did Amsterdam workers join the strike, but also whole factories in Zaandam, Haarlem, Ijmuiden, Weesp, Bussum, Hilversum and Utrecht, with some 250,000 people taking part. It lasted a couple of days, during which occupying troops fired on unarmed crowds, killing nine people and wounding many more. Around 200 of the leading activists were arrested and locked up in Scheveningen prison, which came to be known popularly as the ‘Orange Hotel’. They were the first of several thousand resistance fighters who would find themselvesincarcerated there in the next five years. Most were tortured and twenty-two were sentenced to death.
    As a result of the events of February 1941, attitudes hardened on both sides. In particular, the Germans intensified their campaign against the Jews, banning them from parks, cafés, swimming pools, stopping them from using public transport and even preventing them from riding their bikes.
    On the other side, the Dutch resistance started to marshal itself more efficiently. It was still, ten months into the war, a very fragmented and ideologically diverse movement. But having witnessed the events of February, and