The Dutch railway strike

In the autumn of 1944 the Dutch railways came to a standstill for more than seven months. Some 30,000 employees of the state operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) walked out at the call of the government-in-exile and went into hiding, and the trains did not run again until liberation in May 1945. The strike was meant to help an Allied offensive that, it was believed, would liberate the whole country within days. The offensive stalled at Arnhem, and the Germans retaliated by halting food supplies to the western provinces. Together with an exceptionally harsh winter and the general collapse of the economy of the occupied Netherlands, this led to a famine known as the Hunger Winter (Dutch Hongerwinter), in which some 20,000 people died.

Some chronologies place the strike under 10 September 1944. Dutch sources and historical studies agree on this point: the call to strike was broadcast by Radio Oranje only on the evening of 17 September, the day the Allied airborne operation Market Garden began, and the trains stopped from the following day. In the first half of September the strike was still being prepared.

The railways in the occupier’s service

From the capitulation in May 1940, after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Netherlands was ruled by the German Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, while Queen Wilhelmina and the cabinet had gone to London. From 1940 the government-in-exile was led by Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy. The railways – a dense network linking the ports, the cities of the west and the farming provinces of the north and east – remained in the hands of Dutch staff, but under close military supervision by the occupier. They worked for it: they carried German troops, weapons and goods, forced labourers to the Reich and, from 1942, Jews as well – to the Westerbork transit camp and on to the German border, from where the transports went on to the extermination camps. This last matter weighed on NS for decades after the war.

The railwaymen had not joined the earlier great protests – neither the February strike of 1941 in Amsterdam nor the April–May strike of 1943. NS director Willem Hupkes later explained that a strike without government backing and without certainty about the attitude of the workforce would have ended in defeat and bloody reprisals; striking was punishable by death.

A September of hope

At the turn of August and September 1944 the front was approaching the Netherlands at a dizzying pace. The Allies entered Brussels on 3 September and took Antwerp two days later. That same day, 5 September, rumours spread in the Netherlands – fuelled by premature radio announcements – that Allied troops were already in Breda. The day went down in history as Dolle Dinsdag (“Mad Tuesday”): the Dutch came out onto the streets with orange flags, and thousands of Dutch Nazis of the NSB fled in panic with their families eastwards into the Reich. But the Allies did not come. The first American units crossed the Dutch border near Maastricht only on 12 September, and the front came to a halt in the south of the country.

In these weeks the government in London, in agreement with the Allied command, was preparing a railway strike that was to paralyse German transport at the moment of the decisive blow. Contacts with the NS management and the resistance ensured that the company’s directors did not stand in the way. The main problem was financial: the strikers and their families had to live on something. The money was provided by the Nationaal Steunfonds, a secret fund of the Dutch resistance, backed by the government-in-exile with guarantees of repayment after the war.

The call from London

On 17 September 1944 the Allies launched Operation Market Garden – the dropping of three airborne divisions on the bridges at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, with a corridor along which the British XXX Corps was to break through to beyond the Rhine. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery hoped in this way to cut off the Germans in the western Netherlands and open the road to the Ruhr. That evening Radio Oranje, the Dutch station broadcasting from London through the BBC, relayed the government’s call to the railwaymen, together with the agreed code phrase: “De kinderen van Versteeg moeten onder de wol” (“Versteeg’s children must go to bed”).

The response was almost universal. From 18 September some 30,000 railwaymen stopped work. Most of them went into hiding – as onderduikers – with relatives, in the countryside or in resistance networks, because the occupier was hunting for strikers and threatening them with reprisals. Passenger and goods trains stopped throughout the country. The Germans, who needed the railways above all to move troops against the landing Allies, brought in railwaymen from the Reich, who in time got some military traffic running. For the civilian supply of the country, however, the Dutch railways had ceased to exist.

Retaliation: the food blockade

The Germans had warned that a strike would hit the population’s food supply, and they carried out the threat. After the Allied defeat at Arnhem, when it became clear on 25 September that the northern and western Netherlands would remain in their hands, the occupier halted the transport of food from the eastern and northern farming provinces to the west. The decision is usually attributed to Seyss-Inquart; according to some accounts the embargo was announced on 27 September by the Wehrmacht commander in the Netherlands, General der Flieger Friedrich Christiansen. With the railways at a standstill, inland shipping remained the most important supply route, and this was blocked at the Afsluitdijk, at the bridges over the IJssel and in the ports on the IJsselmeer, while transport permits also ceased to be issued.

The blockade lasted about six weeks. The occupier, fearing chaos and growing resistance, eased it in the second half of October and lifted it in early November – on 8 November, according to some sources. According to Dutch accounts, during this time the government in London rejected proposals for an arrangement in which ending the strike would be the price of food deliveries, and the railwaymen did not return to work until liberation. By the time the barges could sail again, time was short: there was a shortage of vessels and fuel, many boats had been requisitioned by the Germans, and at the end of December the canals and the IJsselmeer froze over. The front cut the country along the great rivers, so coal from the mines of Limburg, liberated in September, did not reach the west either.

The Hunger Winter

The country’s largest cities – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Leiden and Haarlem – lie in the densely populated belt of the western provinces, which had never been able to feed itself. Some 4.3–4.5 million people lived there. In September 1944 the ration gave them about 1,400 kilocalories a day, by the end of November only about 750, and in the winter and spring of 1945 usually between 500 and 900; in April it fell to about 400. For lack of coal, electricity and gas were cut off. The frost lasted from 23 December to the end of January 1945, and January was one of the coldest in years.

People burned their furniture, cut down trees in the parks, prised the wooden blocks from between the tram rails and dismantled empty houses – in Amsterdam including the houses of deported Jews. They ate tulip bulbs and sugar beet. Tens of thousands of city dwellers set off on “hunger trips” to the countryside, pushing prams and bicycles without tyres, to exchange jewellery, bed linen or watches for a few potatoes. Among the starving was the teenage Audrey Hepburn, then living near Arnhem. In April 1945 soup kitchens were feeding some 1.8 million people. There were neither coffins nor places to bury the dead; in Amsterdam the bodies were laid out in the Zuiderkerk.

The number of victims remains a matter of estimates. It is most often stated that between about 18,000 and 22,000 people died of hunger and its direct consequences; the Dutch historian Ingrid de Zwarte estimates the number of famine-related deaths at around 20,000, with total excess mortality in the western provinces of some 35,000 between September 1944 and July 1945. Most of the dead were elderly men. The health effects of the famine on children born or conceived that winter later became one of the best-studied examples of the impact of maternal malnutrition on the health of offspring.

Help from outside

Help came late. The government-in-exile sounded the alarm in London and Washington, but the Allies feared that the food would end up with German soldiers, and their military priorities almost always took precedence over Dutch appeals. Prime Minister Winston Churchill long opposed deliveries to occupied countries; more receptive was the Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, to whom the Dutch wrote that their government “cannot accept the liberation of corpses”. In December 1944 the Dutch food official Hans Max Hirschfeld opened talks with Seyss-Inquart on the terms under which relief could be let through.

The first supplies from abroad – flour from Sweden, shipped by the Swedish Red Cross – reached Delfzijl at the turn of January and February 1945; Dutch bakeries used it to bake “Swedish bread”, distributed from the end of February. Further shipments from Sweden, Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross provided some 14,000 tonnes of food by April – far less than was needed. The breakthrough came only with the talks of April 1945: Seyss-Inquart agreed to a local truce, and from 29 April to 8 May British and American bombers dropped nearly 8,000 tonnes of food over the western Netherlands in Operations Manna and Chowhound. From 2 May Canadian lorries carried relief through the German lines in Operation Faust. On 5 May 1945 the German forces in the Netherlands capitulated, and by the end of May food rations exceeded 2,000 kilocalories a day.

Place in the history of the war

The railway strike was one of the largest acts of resistance in occupied Western Europe. Militarily it achieved less than had been hoped: Operation Market Garden ended in failure on 25 September, and the Germans kept military transport going with their own personnel. Its most tragic consequence was the Hunger Winter – a punishment inflicted by the occupier on the civilian population, whose victims were above all the oldest and the weakest. After the war Seyss-Inquart cited his efforts to alleviate the famine; he was convicted at Nuremberg of other crimes and executed in October 1946. The debate over whether the government in London had correctly judged the price of the strike went on in the Netherlands for decades, as did the reckoning over the role of NS in the deportation of the Jews – the company officially apologised for it only in 2005.

September 1944 raised Dutch hopes of an early liberation, which for the west of the country in the end came only eight months later. The Netherlands north of the great rivers was the last large area of Western Europe to remain under occupation until the very end of the war, and the Hongerwinter became one of the most enduring marks the occupation left on the collective memory of the Dutch.