For the first time since World War II, a book has been published about 45 reprisal murders carried out by Nazi sympathisers in Operation Silbertanne during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Forty-five innocent Dutch citizens were murdered in cold blood between 1943 and 1945. Eleven others survived the summary executions.

Historian Inge Schaap presented her book Assassins to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) in Amsterdam on Thursday.

Ms Schaap compiled the stories behind Operation Silbertanne between September 1943 and September 1944. “My objective was to uncover all the murders,” says Ms Schaap, cum laude graduate of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. She says the exact number of victims, 56, was not known up until now because other murders were lumped together with the Silbertanne murders.

Dutch resistance
The objective of the operation was revenge and disruption of the Dutch resistance. The murders were usually carried out by members of the Dutch SS. Former SS officer Heinrich Boere was recently sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Achen, after escaping justice for decades in Germany. One of the best known victims is Dutch author A.M. de Jong.

Ms Schaap’s work is based on extensive archive research and interviews with relatives of the victims. “This way I was able to give both the perpetrators and the victims a face.” She believes the stories had almost been forgotten until media interest was aroused by the trial of war criminal Heinrich Boere last March. The former SS officer has appealed.

The list of victims was carefully prepared by the murderers beforehand. Mr De Jong, for example, had been arrested by the Germans for his socialist sympathies and later released because of poor health. For every attack on a German soldier, three to six opponents had to be eliminated.

Reprisals
The historian reveals that the order for the reprisals did not come from Berlin, writes Dutch daily Trouw. Hanns Albin Rauter who was head of the German police in occupied Netherlands had claimed that Heinrich Himmler had given direct orders. However in a letter dating from November 1943, he writes that he “agrees with the operation”. Himmler committed suicide in 1945 and Rauter was executed by firing squad in 1949.

The murders were top secret, hardly anyone within Nazi circles knew about them. The relatives of the victims were left with a lot of unanswered questions as the perpetrators imitated the resistance, wearing civilian clothing and using British weapons.