"The Hell of Rees"

Forced Labourers in the Lower Rhine Region

In the autumn of 1944, the situation on the Western Front appeared increasingly threatening for the Nazi regime and the German army. After the Allied airborne landings near Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and Arnhem ("Operation Market Garden"), enemy troops had come very close to the German-Dutch border. Confronted with this situation, the Germans decided to strengthen their defensive positions in the Lower Rhine border region. Here, the so-called "Westwall" (also known as the „Siegfried Line“) consisted mainly of improvised earthworks rather than concrete bunkers, as was the case further south in the Eifel region and along the German-French border. In the Lower Rhine region further "entrenchment" works were now called for.

Deportation of Men from the Netherlands

Despite the mobilization of local civilians, the Hitler Youth and paramilitary construction units—such as the „Reichsarbeitsdienst“ and the "Organization Todt“—the available work force was still insufficient. Thus, at the end of September 1944, the Nazi leadership decided to take a drastic step: In the occupied Netherlands they called up almost every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 and 40 for "labour deployment." Since very few Dutch men followed this order, the Wehrmacht and the German „Ordnungspolizei“, a police force subordinate to the SS, carried out numerous raids in November and December 1944. Cities such as Rotterdam, The Hague, Apeldoorn, Harlem, and Delft were cordoned off in surprise operations. All men between the ages of 17 and 40 were arrested and deported to Germany. Those abducted were civilians who were henceforth forced to work for the Germans. Of the Dutch men deported to Germany, around 3,500 were sent to the „Ausländerlager Groin“ - a labour camp for foreigners near the city of Rees. Here, the Dutch civilians were placed under guard and ordered to do "entrenchment" work in the surrounding area. They shared this fate with 1,500 inmates of other nationalities – Italians, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and French. Most of these men were prisoners of war; the Italians were categorized as so-called "military internees.“ Additionally, there were also young men deported from Eastern Europe who were forced to work in the German war economy.

Hellish Conditions in the Camp

All inmates at the Groin camp had to toil seven days a week – they were poorly nourished and worked in harsh winter weather. They were ordered to dig anti-tank ditches and emplacements in the area around Bienen and Haldern. The "camp" where they were housed was located in Groin on the grounds of a brickyard. There, the majority of the men had to sleep in so-called drying sheds. At that time, there were numerous brickworks in the Lower Rhine region, mainly producing roof tiles from the local clay deposits. Before firing, the roof tiles were stored to dry in large, covered sheds without side walls. The airflow was ideal for pre-drying, but when people were forced to sleep on straw in these sheds in the winter of 1944/45, they found little protection from the cold and wind. Each man was given a wool blanket, but most wore completely inadequate clothing – they had been torn from their civilian lives in the Netherlands in the clothing they had worn on the day of their abduction. In the camp at Groin there was no heating, no lighting, only one water pump and, initially, the latrines were completely inadequate. The brickyard quickly became a muddy area, contaminated by faeces. Because of the cold, the men could not wash or remove or change their clothes. Soon they suffered from extreme infestation with lice; infections, especially diarrhoea, also spread throughout the camp. There also were many cases of pneumonia. Because some men went to work barefoot in wooden shoes, they suffered frostbite, which in some cases led to amputations. Those who became unfit for work or ill could be transferred—at the discretion of the ruthless camp physician, Dr Hans Brunner—to a primitive "infirmary" in the nearby villages of Empel or Millingen. There, too, the men lay on the floor in cramped and appallingly unsanitary conditions. Numerous patients suffering from dysentery received no adequate help and died of dehydration.

Vicious Camp Guards

The catastrophic conditions were exacerbated by a reign of terror established by camp leaders Arnold Heinze and Peter Röhrig. Both were unanimously described by the inmates as sadistic thugs. The other guards were primarily members of the  SA (paramilitary stormtroopers of the Nazi party) from the Ruhr industrial region. They, too, beat with such brutality that several of their victims died. For minor reasons, the guards imposed cruel punishments with beatings. The number of deaths in the camp and in the infirmaries rose rapidly. Disease, hunger, hard labour, inadequate winter clothing and the terror of the guards claimed ever more victims. These horrors did not go unnoticed in the villages near Rees. In Millingen and Bienen there were outposts of the camp – several hundred Dutch men were crammed into the dance halls of various pubs used as accommodation. The civilian population witnessed day after day what was being done to the victims. Numerous German locals helped by providing food and clothing to the forced labourers. Since the border with the Netherlands was only ten kilometres away, some inmates managed to escape at the end of December 1944. They reported to their fellow countrymen in the border region – known as the Achterhoek - what was happening to the workers in the hellish camp near Rees.

Rescue Operations and Escape Routes

Private aid committees, numerous individuals and in particular medical doctors from the Netherlands began to take action in January 1945 to alleviate the suffering. On the one hand, their goal was to save as many lives as possible in the infirmaries by delivering medicines, bandages, and food packages from the Netherlands. In Dutch towns near the border, such as Megchelen, Gendringen, Aalten, and Dinxperlo in the Achterhoek region, improvised emergency hospitals and reception centres for sick camp inmates were set up with the help of the local Red Cross, as the Germans apparently allowed serious cases to be evacuated. On the other hand, a network of escape helpers was established, which – led by Dutch people – also worked with some German intermediaries. Among other things, they succeeded in forging discharge papers and documents that could be used to deceive guards at the border crossing. Of the approximately 3,500 Dutch men initially forced to do forced labour in Groin and the surrounding area, many were able to escape or were evacuated to emergency hospitals in the Netherlands. Numerous coordinated relief efforts and the setting up of escape routes were surprisingly successful. On March 23rd, 1945, there were only 260 Dutch inmates remaining in the camp at Groin. The following day – when British troops had already crossed the Rhine near Rees – the SA guards evacuated the camp and marched most of the remaining forced labourers towards Bocholt.

Fatalities

At least 247 Dutch people died in the camp at Groin and its neighbouring branches in Bienen, Praest, Millingen, and Empel – this was the number that could be established as early as 1945. However, this figure does not include all the deaths which occurred among the inmates. Today, estimates of the number of Dutch fatalities range between 350 and 650. As to the number of deaths among other nationalities, there are no reliable statistics yet. For example, on March 2nd, 1945, 33 men died when a fire broke out in one of the drying sheds. Only six of these victims were Dutch. It may be assumed that, in addition to the Dutch, other groups also suffered many deaths in the brutal camp in Groin. They too were exposed to disease and were victims of the beatings by German guards. In addition, in February and March 1945, when the frontline reached the Rhine, Allied shelling of the eastern bank claimed numerous victims among the forced labourers. Shortly before the camp was occupied by Scottish troops on March 25th, 1945, several Ukrainians, Russians, and Italians who had hidden in the camp during the fighting were killed by British artillery fire.

After the War

The fate of the forced labourers in the Groin camp received little attention in the Netherlands in the decades after the war. Accordingly, a book written by the Apeldoorn local historian Arend Disberg in 2005 is titled "De verzwegen deportatie" (The Unacknowledged Deportation). The survivors were not officially recognized as war victims and were not entitled to material or financial compensation from the Dutch gouvernment. The German main perpetrators – camp directors Heinze and Röhrig, as well as the notorious camp doctor Dr. Brunner – were tried in the Netherlands and sentenced to long prison terms in 1950. However, they were deported to Germany in the mid-1950s - at that time, they had not even served half of their sentences.