Five Brothers and a War

Den Haag City-wide Razzias

There were three major razzias in Den Haag. The first was on June 11, 1941 where Jews were the target. The second, on May 16, 1944 was specifically to find Gypsies. The Jews and the Gypsies were sent to the “processing” facility/concentration camp in Westerbork, where few were ever seen again The last major razzia was six months after the Gypsy raid and was intended to catch able bodied males for slave labor. It was by far the largest of the three.

nazi germany

News of the Rotterdam razzias quickly reached the rest of Holland, and certainly within the van Pelt household. The tactics used became known. As usual, the electricity was turned off for all citizens at 9:00 pm each evening. Of course, this was done to preserve fuel needed to generate the power, but also to totally darken all cities to hide, as much as possible, from Allied bombers. On November 20, electricity was permanently shut off across the province of Zuid Holland—about ten days after the same thing had been done in the neighboring province, Noord Holland. The natural gas was shut off on October 12. Very early on the morning of November 21, the second of the huge city-wide roundup raids occurred. Den Haag was closed to all traffic, after which each neighborhood was successfully sealed off. When they were ready to search that neighborhood the electricity for that neighborhood was turned on, flyers were distributed ordering all males between

Five Brothers and a War

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