Haaren 1940-1945 Memorial Site

Gedenkplaats Haaren 1940-1945

A memorial plaque and an exhibition at the former seminary in the Haaren municipality in the southern Netherlands commemorate the hostage and police prison which existed here between 1942 and 1944.

History

In response to the increasing number of sabotage operations in Western Europe, the German occupying authorities began taking prominent citizens hostage. In May 1942, they took 450 civilians hostage in the Netherlands, warning the public that they would be shot as a consequence of further acts of resistance. The first group of hostages was interned at Sint-Michielsgestel. A second group comprising 800 people was seized in July 1942 and incarcerated at the Catholic seminary in Haaren. Previously, 238 hostages from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) had been interned at the site. Following an attack on a Wehrmacht train, the occupiers shot five hostages, members of the Dutch elite, in August 1942. In October, more hostages were shot - this time, 15 communists and socialists were executed. Three of them had been held at hostage camps, twelve had been held at the Amersfoort »police transit camp«. Dutch citizens were outraged by the executions; at the same time, the occupying regime deemed the policy of shooting hostages for the most part ineffective. Already in December 1942, the policy was abandoned and many hostages released.
A police prison was established at the Haaren seminary by Security Police and Security Service parallel to the hostage camp. Resistance fighters were held here from May 1942 on; they were subsequently either executed nearby or deported to concentration camps in Germany. The conditions at the prison were incomparably worse than at the hostage camp. On September 5, 1944, the camp was dismantled and the remaining prisoners deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Haaren, 1941/42, Former seminary building complex, Image bank WW2 – NIOD

Haaren, 2006, Relief at the main entrance, Andreas Pflock

Victims

A total of about 1,050 civilians were held at the Haaren hostage camp; 450 were held at Sint-Michielsgestel. Eight hostages were shot by German Security Police as »reprisal measures«. About 3,100 inmates passed through the police prison. Many of them were shot nearby, others were deported to concentration camps in Germany. Among others, 47 agents of the British secret service SOE (»Special Operations Executive«) were transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp and shot there in September 1944.

When the Germans invaded the Kingdom of the Netherlands in May 1940 there were around 120,000 Jews living in the country, 75,000 of whom were in Amsterdam. An SS-led civil administration quickly began to implement anti-Jewish measures and organised acts of violence. A »Central Office for Jewish Emigration« was established by the SS in Amsterdam by the end of March 1941. On June 22 the following year Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962), head of the department for Jewish affairs in the SS Reich Security Main Office, informed the Foreign Office in Berlin that an agreement had been concluded with the German Reich Railways (Reichsbahn), one of the provisions of which was the deportation of 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands. These Jews were firstly detained in the Westerbork transit camp, where lists of names for deportation were produced. The first trains left here for Eastern Europe in the middle of July 1942. There were repeated raids to get hold of the Jews earmarked for deportation. By September 1944 around one hundred deportation transports had left Westerbork for the Auschwitz and Sobibor extermination camps, the Theresienstadt ghetto or the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The SS deported over 100,000 people; mainly Jews but also Roma. Jews with Dutch nationality were also deported to their deaths from France and Belgium. The total number of Dutch Jews murdered between May 1940 and the end of 1944 lies at around 102,000, or 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of the country. Over 110,000 Jewish civilians also died during the war and occupation. There are countless monuments, museums, memorial sites, plaques and small sites of memory related to the Second World War in the Netherlands, along with research institutes and archives. The 22 metre high »Nationaal Monument op de Dam« (National Monument on Dam Square) was inaugurated in Amsterdam as early as 1947. Dedicated to all Dutch »victims of the Second World War«, the monument’s current design dates from 1956. The Anne Frank House was opened in 1960. There are national sites of memory at the former National Socialist concentration or transit camps. For example, a memorial site was established in Westerbork in 1983 comprising the historic grounds, a national monument and a modern museum. In 1987, the »Joods Historisch Museum« (Jewish Historical Museum) was inaugurated in the Great Synagogue in Amsterdam. This museum also charts the persecution and murder of the Jews. In 2021, the Durch Holocaust Memorial of Names was inaugurated in Amsterdam that lists the names of 102.000 murdered Jews and Sinti and Roma on its walls. After the war, the Dutch culture of memory was characterised above all by its emphasis on the resistance against the German occupation. From the 1980s, increasing attention was paid to the question of how the majority of the population adapted themselves to the occupation, as opposed to those who consciously collaborated. A further feature of Dutch memory is its focus on the present. This approach is especially clear in memorials to the persecuted Sinti and Roma as well as in one of the best known monuments in the world to the homosexual victims of National Socialism, located in Amsterdam.

Remembrance

Following liberation on October 27, 1944, Canadian troops set up headquarters in the buildings of the former seminary in Haaren. Between 1946 and 1968, the buildings were once again used by seminary students, after that they served as a home for the mentally disabled.
Already in 1947, a memorial plaque and a relief by Cephas Stauthamer were affixed at the main gate of the building complex in Haaren. On May 13, 2000, on a survivors' initiative, the Haaren memorial site was extended by a permanent exhibition on the history of the hostage camp and the police prison. It is located at the chapel entrance and in the chapel antechamber.
On August 14, 1948, a memorial plaque was dedicated in the foyer of the seminary building at Sint Michielsgestel.

Haaren, 1941, Hostages from the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies during a meal, Image bank WW2 – NIOD

Haaren, 2006, Former seminary building, Andreas Pflock

Possibilities

Guided tours by appointment.

Open

Exhibition at the municipal museum: every first Wednesday of the month 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Guided tour on the site every Wednesday in July and August, 10 a.m.

Contact

http://www.gedenkplaats-haaren.nl

ceesvanroessel@planet.nl

+31 411 628 100

Raamse Akkers 15
5076 PC Haaren

Haaren, 2006, Exhibition on the history of the camp 1941-1944, Andreas Pflock

Haaren, 2006, Memorial plaque and relief by Cephas Stauthamer at the main entrance to the building complex in Haaren, Andreas Pflock

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