The liberation of Schiermonnikoog

On Monday 11 June 1945 the last German soldiers sailed from the harbour of Schiermonnikoog, a small island on the edge of the Wadden Sea – about 600 men who for five years had manned the island’s bunkers and radar station. They were ferried to the mainland under Canadian supervision and taken from there to Germany as prisoners. From that day no armed occupation garrison remained on Dutch soil. More than five weeks had passed since the surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands.

Popular chronicles of the war state that Schiermonnikoog was “the last piece of Europe to be liberated by Allied troops”. All that is certain is that it was the last part of the Netherlands from which the Germans departed – this is how the island’s tradition and Dutch remembrance institutions present it. The claim about the whole of Europe is an exaggeration: German garrisons in Norway were still being disarmed and sent home for many months, and no one could point to a single “last” place on the continent. Moreover, there was no fighting on the island itself – its “liberation” consisted of the negotiated removal of a garrison that had formally surrendered at the beginning of May.

Count Bernstorff’s island

Schiermonnikoog is the smallest inhabited and the easternmost Dutch island in the chain of the West Frisian Islands, lying between Ameland and the German island of Borkum, a few kilometres off the coast of the provinces of Friesland and Groningen. Its only village had a few hundred permanent residents before the war – sources give between about 600 and 800 – who lived from fishing, farming and, increasingly, tourism. From the 17th century the island was private property. In 1892 it was bought by a German nobleman, Count Berthold von Bernstorff, and in 1940 it passed to his grandson, Count Bechtold Eugen von Bernstorff. This circumstance was to weigh on the island’s post-war fate.

German troops landed on Schiermonnikoog on 15 May 1940 (some studies give 16 May), the day after the Dutch army capitulated. The first detachment, about 30 naval and army personnel, came over from neighbouring Borkum. According to surviving accounts, the island’s owner made sure that the inhabitants were left in peace as far as possible, and relations between the garrison and the islanders are described as correct for most of the occupation.

Bunkers in the dunes

The island lay on the approaches to the mouth of the Ems and to the German North Sea ports, on the route taken by British and American bombers flying to the Reich. The Germans therefore incorporated it into the Atlantic Wall. North-east of the village a “bunker village” arose – the Schleistellung, which the islanders called “Schleidorp” – with barracks, anti-aircraft gun positions and a radar station, and a narrow-gauge railway was laid to move the building materials brought in by ship. The most impressive structure was the bunker of a Wassermann long-range radar. According to studies by Dutch fortification enthusiasts, the planned 60-metre antenna mast was never installed and was replaced by a smaller version of the equipment.

The garrison – men of the Kriegsmarine, the army and the Luftwaffe – numbered, according to different sources, from about 600 to more than 700 men, roughly as many as the island had inhabitants. Most of the island was declared a restricted zone (Sperrgebiet), civilians were confined to the village, and tourism ceased as early as the summer of 1940. Some local men worked on building the fortifications, which – as local accounts stress – protected them from deportation for labour in Germany. Yet the war touched this island too: according to Dutch sources, bombs destroyed three houses in the village in 1941 and killed five people, and in 1943 another raid killed seven people, including the mayor and his wife. In 1944 the occupation authorities banished the Groningen pastor Jan Derk Domela Nieuwenhuis Nyegaard to the island, where he remained until the end of the war.

Fugitives from the Scholtenhuis

The garrison’s quiet ended in April 1945. As the First Canadian Army was liberating the north-eastern Netherlands and the Canadians were fighting for the city of Groningen, a group of about 120 members of the Sicherheitsdienst and the SS from the Groningen SD headquarters in the so-called Scholtenhuis – Germans and Dutch collaborators, among them the head of the post, Robert Lehnhoff, and the notorious Pieter Schaap – fled in requisitioned boats via Zoutkamp to Schiermonnikoog. During the crossing they were fired on from the shore by fighters of the Dutch Interior Forces (Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten). The fugitives hoped to get from there to the German island of Borkum and on into the Reich.

The island commandant, named in the sources as Wittko, received the newcomers with suspicion. His garrison had lived on settled terms with the inhabitants for five years, and a group of men facing responsibility for torture and executions in Groningen could only do harm. He quartered them in farmsteads on the edge of the island, away from the village and the Schleistellung, and had them guarded. At the same time, however, according to some accounts, on 16 April, in retaliation for the firing on the boats, he had his guns shell the village of Oostmahorn on the Frisian shore and tried to land a raiding party there; a Canadian detachment rushed to the spot prevented the Germans from getting ashore, losing two soldiers in the skirmish. The promised torpedo boat that was to take the SD men to Borkum never came.

The garrison after the surrender

On 4 May 1945, on Lüneburg Heath, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed the surrender of German forces in north-western Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, and on 5 May at Wageningen General Johannes Blaskowitz accepted from the Canadians the terms for carrying it out. The surrender also covered the islands, but the Allies were in no hurry to occupy them. The Canadians had more urgent tasks – supplying the cities of the western Netherlands, starving after the Hunger Winter, disarming more than a hundred thousand German soldiers on the mainland and mastering the chaos of the first days of peace, of which the Dam Square shooting in Amsterdam was a grim example. The isolated island garrisons, which could not escape anyway, were left for later.

The islands were therefore taken over one by one. On Texel, where Georgian soldiers in German service had been in revolt since April, the Canadians completed the disarming of the Germans on 20 May. According to the Dutch National Military Museum, a small British detachment, Jaffa Force, sent out from Den Helder on 26 May, took over Terschelling on 30 May, Vlieland on 31 May and Ameland on 3 June. The first Canadians reached Schiermonnikoog on 25 May, but the garrison was unsure to whom and on what terms it should give itself up, and the presence of the SD men complicated matters.

The problem was solved by a ruse. A Dutch resistance activist, Herman Kloppenburg (also given in sources as Kloppenborg), acting in agreement with the Canadians, sailed to the island under a white flag in the uniform of a Canadian major and began negotiating with the fugitives. He promised them prisoner-of-war status and captivity in Germany. On 31 May the SD group crossed to the mainland, where it was immediately arrested – in the years that followed its members were tried in the Netherlands for crimes committed in Groningen. A day later, on 1 June, the islanders held their first liberation celebrations, although armed Germans were still sitting in the bunkers in the dunes.

11 June

Talks between the Canadian command and Commandant Wittko on the removal of the garrison went on for more than another week. On 11 June about 600 German soldiers were loaded onto ships and taken via Oostmahorn to the mainland, where the Canadians took them over as prisoners; according to some sources, they were then sent to Wilhelmshaven. The islanders, who for a month had seen Dutch flags on the other side of the Wadden Sea, could at last walk freely on the dunes and beaches that had been closed as a military zone for five years. Not a single shot was fired on the island that day.

The last scrap of Europe?

Schiermonnikoog is sometimes called the last place to be liberated in the Netherlands, and in English-language chronicles even in Europe. The first description is justified; the second needs qualifying. The island was not the only place where German garrisons outlasted the surrender of the Reich. In the Channel Islands the British took over Guernsey and Jersey on 9 May, but fortified Alderney only on 16 May; the garrisons on Crete and in the Dodecanese surrendered on 8–9 May but waited weeks to be shipped out. In Norway, where between 350,000 and 400,000 German soldiers surrendered according to various tallies, disarming them and sending them back to Germany lasted until the autumn, and a small, forgotten German weather station on Svalbard surrendered to Norwegian seal hunters only in September 1945. In all these places the garrisons had already formally surrendered, as on Schiermonnikoog – they differed only in when the victors came to collect their prisoners. “The last place liberated in Europe” is thus a local tradition rather than a precise finding of historians.

After the war

For the islanders the end of the occupation brought one more change. On 27 December 1945 the Dutch state, under the enemy property regulations, confiscated Schiermonnikoog from Count Bechtold Eugen von Bernstorff as a German citizen, even though – as local sources agree – he was well liked by the inhabitants. From 1951 the count tried in vain to recover the island; in 1983 he received compensation of 80,000 marks from the West German government. In 1949 Schiermonnikoog became a separate municipality in the province of Friesland.

The removal of the garrison on 11 June 1945 closed the occupation of the Netherlands, which had begun in May 1940 and, according to the most frequently cited estimates, cost the country more than 200,000 lives, including more than 100,000 murdered Dutch Jews. It was not a military event – rather a symbolic closing of the war in Europe, in which the surrender of the Reich still required weeks of laborious disarming of scattered garrisons. The remains of the Schleistellung and the Wassermann radar bunker still stand in the dunes today, and every year on 11 June the island celebrates the anniversary of its liberation.