WHEN THE NAZIS CAME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 101, 30 May 1941, Page 10

WHEN THE NAZIS CAME

Visiting Dutch Official’s Eye=-Witness Account of Invasion of the Netherland¢

W. Peeketma, head of the Legal Division of the Dutch Colonial Office, is a member of the Dutch Ministerial party which has been visiting New Zealand. Prior to 1939, he was for 15 years attached to the colonial administration in Java, and is an authority on Netherlands East Indian affairs, The Dutch system of Sovernment, he points out, has carefully presetved to the natives theit ancient ctafts, customs and religion. As the Dutch Foreign Minister, E. N. Van Kleffens has put it, they have acted as elderly brothers to the natives rather than as arbitrary rulers. The natives had also been jealously guarded from the evil effects of publicity and adulation by tourists. Even in Bali, five miles away from the towns life went on just as it had for generations. In this interview with "The Listener,’ Mr. Peekema recounts his personal experiences during the German invasion of the Netherlands last year. :

of Friday, May 10, 1940, W. Peekema, Head of the Legal Division of the Dutch Colonial Office, was awakened at his home in a pleasant suburb of The Hague by the sound of heavy gunfire. At first he thought it was merely an anti-aircraft battery warning off a belligerent ‘plane which had trespassed over Dutch territory, but when the firing continued, he yawned, turned over in bed, opened his window, and looked out. His home overlooked a golf course on the far side of which were a number of military barracks. In the grey light of early dawn he was in time to see three efficient-looking single-engined bombers hurtling down perpendicularly at the barracks. A few hundred feet above the ground they pulled out, and simultaneously came an explosion that broke évety window in the house. More dive bombers followed, and from then on, wave after wave. The hideous racket of the anti-aircraft batteries rose to a crescendo. And then Mr. Peekema realised that the threatened German invasion of the Low Countries had started. | "Ideal Invasion Weather" His wife and daughter had been wakened By the same gunfire, and together they hurried, still in night attire, with bathing wraps and dressing gowns hastily flung over them, to the nearest air-raid shelter, They came out after an hour and a-half to a beautiful spring morningideal invasion weather, he heard some cynical Hollander call it-and the first evidence he had of the reaction of the common people was when his milkman turned up punctually at his back door with the morning’s milk. "Well," the milkman observed, cheerfully, "we are in it now, but we have good weather for it, haven’t we?" And his milkman’s philosophic a¢ceptance of the fact that the Dutch were "in it now" was entirely typical, says Mr. Peekema. He went to work as usual, the only variation from routine being that he had to walk, because all buses had \ four o’clock, on the morning

been commandeered by the military authorities, and were even then speeding troops up to the front line, German Thoroughness Tt was on that morning that Ma. Peekema got his first glimpse of the thoroughness with which the German plans were being put into action, Within a few minutes of an early alarm, the sky was thick with German ’planes, and suddenly there came fluttering down what Mr. Peekema at first thought were thousands of pamphlets. One glance through his field glasses, however, revealed that they were parachutists, descending on several important airfields neat The Hague, This was the tactical surprise which won the Germans control of most of Holland’s airfields on that first invasion morning, though by nightfall of the same day most of the parachutists had been rounded up and the airfields recaptured. Holland’s air force soon paid a heavy price for numerical inferiority. When the first alarm came, Mr. Peekema learned afterwards, every available Dutch ’plane was put in the air, many of the pilots going up in their pyjamas to do battle, They were shot down almost fo a *plane, though not before they had taken heavy toll of the Luftwaffe. Arriving at his office, Mr. Peekema found that following an emergency meeting of the Cabinet, his Minister, C. J. I. M. Welter, had already been sent to London with E, N. Van Kleffens, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to plead for the most urgent British help. Everywhere there was an air of calm, even of optimism. The inundations would surely prove impregnable; help would surely arrive swiftly from Britain and France; the enemy might advance for a while, but they would be thrown back just as in 1914, The Fifth Column But they had reckoned without the Luftwaffe, without the shrewd strategic blows dealt by parachute and air-borne troops, without the swift thrusts of the German mechanised divisions, without the panic and disorganisation created by fifth columnists. The work done by fifth. columnists in Holland has not béen over-estimated, says Mr. Peeketna. German tourists, Germans who had been naturalised Hollanders for many years, even the sons of

naturalised Hollanders, all contributed to the disrupting of communication, the sabotage of vital work, and the spreading of alarm and confusion. To such an extent did one building in a main street of The Hague become the centre of fifth column activity, that the civil authorities sent for two armoured cars and a light field gun and had the building and its occupants razed to the ground. Air raids continued, and at 11 o’clock on the morning of the first day came a particularly heavy one — wave after wave they came, black evil beetles with a cargo of death, flying through the most intense anti-aifcraft fire, at times so low that people in the streets could distinguish the markings on the wings. In a large square near the centre of the town, Mr. Peekema could watch from his office window the gun ctews sweating at their work. Then he noticed a single bomber break formation, turn over lazily and come diving down at the anti-aircraft battery. Then the bomb, a "screamer," came with a sickening, highpitched screech which Mr. Peekenia mistook for the sound -of a motor-car skidding violently in the street below. It missed the battery, made a direct hit on a maternity hospital. Mr. Peekema concedes that the antiaitcraft battery was a legitimate military objective, but the killed and wounded in the maternity hospital drove home to the people of The Hague the horror inseparable from total warfare, Night Tableau He returned home to find that his wife and daughter, far from being terrified, had been too excited to realise their danger, atid had even refused to take shelter. Alarms continued that night, with frequent demonstrations of the efficiency of the Dutch anti-aircraft fire, It was a tableau he will never forgetthe white beam of a searchlight picking up and flooding the black shape of a "plane; then the bark of the guns, a burst of orange smoke high up in the searchlight, and every now and then a ’plane plunging to earth like a stricken moth. Air raids continued 15 or 16 times a day for the next five days. There was nothing the people of The Hague could do about it, so they went about their daily business as best they could. The milkman delivered his milk punctually every morning. "I was almost too tired to care what happetied," says Mr. Peekema. "I walked to my office and I walked back, and at night I was tired like a dog." "That Was The End" As the invasion progressed, with each day bringing more serious news, it became apparent that Holland’s days were numbeted. And one night came an announcement over the radio that Queen Wilhelmina had left for England. "That was the end," said Mr. Peekema. "The Queen was the nucleus of all national life, all social life, It was like the queen bee leaving the hive, We 8 our shoulders and accepted it as the end." (Continued on next page)

EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNT (Continued from previous page) Later the same night came an urgent telephone call from the permanent secretary of his department. His minister, Mr. Welter, had ordered Mr. Peekema and three of his colleagues to join him in London. He could refuse to leave if he liked, but it was felt that whatever the fate of Holland, the administration of the Dutch colonial empire must go on. And so the following morning he said good-bye to his family, joined his colleagues, and contacted the British legation, with whom he was to travel to England. They made three attempts to leave The Hague, being fired on by several parties of Germans, but eventually they arrived at Ijmuiden, their port of embarkation. There, by sheer luck, they found the British destroyer Havoc, the same Havoc which had played a brave part in the Narvik episode. Landing parties were even then engaged in blowing up harbour installations and generally making the port unusable for the Germans. At night, when the work had been completed, they picked up the demolition party, and set sail for England. Next day, on May 16, Mr. Peekema landed at Harwich.

In London, an organisation of Dutch women is coping with the refugee problem. Clothes have been pouring in from all parts of the world, but at the present time these are being stored to be distributed to Dutch children at the end of the war. There is, of course, no point in sending to Holland material which would be used for Germany. Mrs. Van Kleffens has had no direct communication with Holland since the invasion, but occasionally hears word of her relatives through friends in some neutral country. She spoke of Holland as she remembered it. The women of Holland took fuller advantage of their political rights than do the women of New Zealand, and the proportion of women members of Parliament was considerably higher. The traditional Dutch dress was now worn only by a few of the | older women in the fishing villages. Windmills are rapidly giving way to more modern pumping equipment (though there is a society for their preservation), and tulip-fields have been ploughed to make way for root-crops. Mrs. Van Kleffens is now on her way back to England, where she will make her home for the duration of the war. "I’ve come all the way out here with only two and a-half suitcases and one hat-box," she said. "After two months of living in ’planes and in hotel rooms, I’m looking forward to being somewhere where I can have all my possessions round me."

In the last five and a-half weeks Mrs. Van Kleffens has flown three-quarters of the way round the world, She went from London to Portugal, by Clipper to New York, then across America by ’plane and across the Pacific to the Dutch East Indies, and so to Australia and New Zealand.