Forced Labor Monument
Designer: Marcel Prins (1958-)
Revealed on: November 1, 1999
The monument to forced labourers can be found in the courtyard of the Provincial House of South Holland at the Zuid-Hollandplein in The Hague. During the Second World War, the Hague Zoo was located on the site of the Provincial House. This was one of the locations where forced labourers from The Hague were brought together for transport to Germany. The memorial is an initiative of Mr. P.M. Kool, who worked as a forced labourer in Stuttgart during the war. As a former forced labourer, Kool noticed that there was little understanding for the experiences of former forced labourers after the war. The arrival of the monument was intended to change this.
The monument was designed by Marcel Prins. This sculptor from The Hague made the monument on behalf of the municipality of The Hague.
The monument consists of a tree, surrounded by a mound of bricks on which a stainless steel ring is attached. On the inside of the ring a row of human figures is depicted. On the outside of the ring the following text can be read:
Because that’s the bitter thing: being a victim, being violated and having to fight for recognition of this yourself…
A plaque has been placed on the brick edge with the text:
During the Second World War, the occupying forces forced more than half a million Dutch people to work in Germany. Men from The Hague and the surrounding area were also taken away for forced labor. This happened on a large scale during a raid on November 21, 1944.
Around 15,000 residents of The Hague and the surrounding area were herded together at several locations. One of those locations was the former zoo, where the Provincial House now stands. Most of them were taken away from the Laakhaven by< wpml_nbsp >Rijnaak, not knowing what awaited them. The relatives Those who remained were faced with difficult times full of uncertainty about the fate of the men.
Countless forced laborers lost their lives. May the memory of war and terror inspire peace among all.
Forced laborers in the war
Germany was struggling with a huge shortage of workers during the Second World War. This was already the case to some extent before the war, but the outbreak of the war made the shortage acute. The war industry increased production, German workers were deployed at the front and Hitler refused to employ women in factories. The solution to the German shortage of workers was to bring in manpower from the occupied territories.
Even before the war, the Dutch authorities sent unemployed people to Germany to work there. After all, there was work for these people in Germany. This practice came to an end when the war broke out in 1939, but was resumed immediately after the occupation of the Netherlands. This meant that in February 1942, 165,000 Dutch people were working in German industry. The majority of these workers had been sent to Germany as unemployed.
However, these workers were not enough for Germany. More workers had to be added to keep up with production. This meant that from the spring of 1942, not only unemployed people were sent to Germany, but also people with a job in Germany were put to work. Various actions followed one another to gather as many Dutch workers as possible and send them to Germany, such as the ‘year class action’ in which all men born in a certain year had to report to the employment offices. There it was checked whether they were eligible for work in Germany.
These actions yielded fewer workers than the occupier had hoped. Many Dutch workers managed to obtain an Ausweis (exemption) or a false medical certificate because of their work. Moreover, from 1943 onwards more and more men began to go into hiding. In order to gather even more workers, the occupier began to carry out raids from the summer of 1943. In The Hague, among other places, in August and October 1943, the German police in collaboration with the Hague police carried out several surprise raids. These raids were held in places where many people gathered, such as cinemas, theatres and football fields.
On Tuesday 21 November 1944, the large raid took place in The Hague. This raid is known as “Operation Snowflake.” The aim of this raid was not only to obtain more labour. The occupying forces wanted to transport as many able-bodied men between the ages of seventeen and forty to Germany as possible to prevent them from helping the Allies. On 10 and 11 November, a large raid had already taken place in Rotterdam. A total of 50,000 men were transported here. Ten days later, The Hague, Voorburg and Rijswijk were next.
The streets were cordoned off and all men between the ages of seventeen and forty were ordered to appear on the streets with cutlery, blankets, warm clothing, good footwear and sandwiches for a day, before being taken to Germany. Men who tried to escape or offered resistance would be shot. In contrast to the raid in Rotterdam, only a few men appeared on the streets, resulting in house searches. Many men from The Hague were prepared for a possible raid in The Hague by the raid in Rotterdam and managed to go into hiding in time. In total, the raid on 21 November yielded approximately 15,000 men, three to four times fewer than the Germans had hoped for.
About half of the arrested men had to walk to Utrecht. Others were gathered in the building for Arts and Sciences, the Gymnasium Haganum and in the Zoo and were eventually transported to Kampen by overcrowded Rhine barge. A large number of the men were deployed in the eastern Netherlands to dig defences, others were sent to the Rees labour camp in the Rhineland, among other places.
During the occupation, a total of between 600,000 and 700,000 Dutch people worked in Germany. 27,000 of these men came from The Hague. The majority of the forced laborers worked in the arms industry, but they were also deployed in agriculture, other industries and in the service sector. The work they had to do was often very hard: 12-hour days, little food, little sleep, cold and strict supervision by SS men. This caused many ex-forced laborers to return with permanent physical and psychological injuries. According to estimates by the Red Cross, some 30,000 Dutch forced laborers died, partly due to poor housing, health problems, industrial accidents and bombings.
After the liberation, the forced laborers had great difficulty returning home. Until June 1945, train travel from Germany to the west was impossible, which meant that many men crossed the border on foot. On June 2, the first train with forced laborers arrived in The Hague. Once back in the Netherlands, many forced laborers were confronted with a great deal of incomprehension. The idea that the forced laborers had left for Germany voluntarily was persistent among many people. The former forced laborers were often blamed for not having gone into hiding.
The Remembrance
Every year on May 4 at 11:00 a.m. a commemoration takes place at the Forced Laborers Monument.
Sources:
Boom, Bart van der. The Hague in the Second World War. The Hague: SeaPress, 1995.
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