Remembrance Day 2020

At 8pm tonight, the Netherlands will fall silent in remembrance of the Dead of the Second World War. Whether as a result of the Nazi German occupation, or the belligerent actions of the Empire of Japan. The worst losses, 105,000, comprised people professing the Jewish faith. They were carted off to extermination camps like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen - and so many more names of infamy. The below photographs were taken by myself in the vicinity of Arnhem in Holland, most of them to do with summary and indiscriminate executions, reprisals. The Dutch word, represaille, is of course of French origin but sounds appropriately harsh and sounds like a burst of machine gun fire. I have annotated each picture with the story that lies behind it.


A cold afternoon in 2017. A Lord Mayor and an Alderman standing to attenetion at the memorial to the crew of a Lancaster bomber, brought down 7 miles north of Arnhem. They lie buried in a village cemetery nearby.


Stay for a while at this place. In the night of 15 June 1943, a Lancaster bomber crashed, in which 7 young aircrew were killed. Victims of other nearby aircrashes lie buried in the village cemetery.


Listing the names of ten men summarily executed in December 1944. Some came from near The Hague, 70 miles to the west, killed in reprisal for acts of resistance enacted here, near Arnhem.


An innocuous bench in the woods, commemorating the transfer of this area of woodlands to the Common Good Fund of the town of Velp, just northeast of Arnhem. Why list it here? Check the close-up in the next photograph.


See the white blotches in the stone inscription? That's where bullets hit when three men were mowed down in machine gun fire. They had been betrayed by a collaborating policeman for engaging in acts of resistance.


Mr Klaver, Mr Kuyper and Mr Mozes were executed on 26 October 1944 as active resistance fighters.


A memorial in the woods just north of Arnhem, listing the names of 19 factory workers. They had gone on strike in their steel works at Rheden, 8 miles away - and paid with their lives.


Along the south bank of the River Rhine, across from Oosterbeek. Here is where the remnants of the forces landed, who had just lost the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944. It would be another 7 months before Arnhem, or what was left of it, was liberated.


Further afield in 's-Heerenberg, 3 miles north of Emmerich in Germany. A monument to two clergymen from 's-Heerenberg, who were executed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

A shepherd will give his life for his flock.

We remember them all